If we win, let's not be wimps

Krugman (HT: Digby) makes an important point:

Now that the Democrats are strongly favored to capture at least one house of Congress, they’re getting a lot of unsolicited advice, with many people urging them to walk and talk softly if they win.

I hope the Democrats don’t follow this advice — because it’s bad for their party and, more important, bad for the country. In the long run, it’s even bad for the cause of bipartisanship.

There are those who say that a confrontational stance will backfire politically on the Democrats. These are by and large the same people who told Democrats that attacking the Bush administration over Iraq would backfire in the midterm elections. Enough said.

[emphasis added] Damn straight. Republicans have been acting like bullys and thugs for years and now that it looks like they might lose power, there's all this talk about making nice and letting bygones be bygones. Forget it. The Republicans deserve a good working over, and our country needs it to recover from the disasters of the past 6 years and to prevent the remaining 2 from making things even worse. The American people are fed up with the Bush andministratioin, and want to see the Democrats really oppose the Republicans. Digby adds:

The chattering classes are all abuzz with the notion that now is the time to bind up the nation's wounds and work across the aisle. (I can't help but wonder why they didn't see the need for such rapproachment during the last decade of slash and burn GOP partisanship.) This pattern is well documented. They will continue to drain the treasury and play our their "movement" experiments and then have the democrats step up and clean up the messes they make until this is stopped. The conservative movment is a failure and it must not be allowed to govern this country anymore with its lies, debts and dangerous foreign policy.

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The Democrats have to be the "grown-ups" yes. And one of the unpleasant tasks will be figuring out what went wrong, putting safeguards in place so the same things don't happen again and making people take responsibility for their actions. That is what adults do. Letting bygones be bygones and simply blathering on about how we all need to put the unpleasantness behind us and get along will not win the respect of the American people nor will it fix the problems this nation faces. (That, after all, is the indulgent mommy model that the Republicans have been using as a club to beat us over the head with for the last 30 years. No more.)

A while back, I had an analogous post on the subject of whether Democrats should retaliate against negative, personal ads with similar ads of their own. Needless to say

Those who want Democrats to be all concilliatory are essentially asking the party to castrate itself. Forget it. Should the Democrats win, Sock it to 'em, Pelosi!