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Washington - Everybody is talking about Anthony Weiner’s high-octane rant on the House floor last night, in which he fulminated over Republican opposition to a bill that would have spent billions on health care for people sickened by the smoke and debris from 9/11:

Dems pursued a procedural tack that required two thirds of the House to prevail, enabling Republicans to defeat it, and obviously opposing this bill was a morally questionable thing to do. But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Weiner’s rant doesn’t do anyone any good—least of all Dems. Republicans want Dems to respond this way—to fulminate and rant about procedure and about their inability to pass legislation, even though they enjoy comfortable majorities.

Whatever their substantive objections to each piece of legislation Republicans oppose, their larger game plan is to render government ineffective in order to deny Dems victores, create a sense that government is broken and has failed to deliver, stoke anti-incumbent fervor, and ensure that Dems bear the brunt of blame for government dysfunction.

Thats’s hardly a groundbreaking point, obviously, but Dems need to stop responding superficially to Republican opposition, and tailor their response to the GOP’s underlying strategy. Weiner repeatedly yelled about the GOP’s “shame,” but this misses the point. Republicans are not going to be shamed into doing what Dems want them to do. Republicans are pursuing a concerted game plan here that Dems need to reckon with more directly.

Indeed, Dems would be far better served if they kept calmly repeating that Republicans want government to fail, in order to breed cynicism and to get voters to give up on the idea that government works for them.

By the way, there’s precedent for this. Remember when former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle erupted on the Senate floor in 2002 in response to Bush’s rank politicization of national security in the runup to the midterm elections? That didn’t work, either.

To be clear, I’m all for the kind of passion Weiner is showing here, but let’s direct it properly. Don’t get into a shouting match about procedure. As emotionally satisfying as it may be to watch, raging against the GOP opposition machine’s successful efforts to tie Dems in knots just makes Dems look whiny, weak and impotent.

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