Dark days for Democrats. (The Word from Washington).

How could it happen that the same day SEC chairman Harvey Pitt resigned in disgrace the Administration that put Pitt and the other corporate foxes in charge of the chicken coop scored their greatest political victory?

Interpreting the House and Senate sweep in the midterm elections as a "mandate," the Republicans are now emboldened to continue selling out the public interest, unencumbered by worries that voters might get fed up and throw them out.

It is truly remarkable that the Democrats managed to lose seats in the House and control of the Senate in a year when such flagrant outrages as Enron, WorldCom, Harken, and Halliburton were hitting the front pages and personally implicating Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Add to that an economic slump, a drive to war that so far has thin public support, and a general sense of unease and vulnerability to terrorism, and you had a recipe for a powerful Democratic opposition. Instead, for the first time in living memory, the party that doesn't control the White House lost Congressional seats in the midterm after a Presidential election.

What gives?

The short answer is that the Dems failed to distinguish themselves. As opportunity after opportunity presented itself to clearly define a political opposition, the Democratic leadership in Congress talked about the need for compromise. The Democratic Leadership Council fretted about appeasing suburban white male voters. Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle promoted a tax plan that was a little less unfair than the Bush giveaway to the rich. Democratic candidates across the nation used B-school phrases like "corporate mismanagement" instead of the Naderesque "corporate crime." In recent weeks, Democrats in Congress gave the President carte blanche to wage war on Iraq, while voicing a few concerns that Bush had not really made a case that Baghdad was directly connected to terrorism, and that the President really ought to try to develop a dear plan and justification for a preemptive strike before dropping the bombs.

A lot of blame for the mid-term massacre goes to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who mapped out a strategy of supporting the war with Iraq in order to make it possible to brush the whole issue aside and focus on other matters. This was a doomed effort. The White House successfully kept the focus on its endless run-up to war. Nor did the Democrats feel any more confident focusing on the issues they could have used to bludgeon the Republicans. (Harvey Pitt fell on his sword without so much as a shove from the left after it emerged that he knew his top regulator of the accounting industry, William Webster, headed the audit board of a company that was being investigated for accounting fraud.) By not finding a firm place to take a stand, the Democrats left voters to listlessly drag themselves to the polls to support a series of lesser evil candidates. Many didn't bother.

Now the teeth-gnashing and finger-pointing begin.

"Isn't that just what you'd expect The Progressive magazine to say?" a radio host demanded of me on election night, when I suggested that the Dems lost by abandoning principle. After all, the host pointed out, President Clinton won two terms when he moved the party to the right. But this year represents the reductio ad absurdum of the Clinton strategy. Sooner or later, voters were bound to abandon a Democratic Party that has become less and less distinguishable from the other political option.

Everybody loves Paul Wellstone now. People who dismissed the liberal Senator while he was alive are writing stirring eulogies. In a sad tribute that seems even sadder now, Daschle called Wellstone "the soul of the Senate." Op-ed writers in The New York Times and The Washington Post discovered the heroism in Wellstone's unabashed liberalism, after years of blowing him off. And a piece entitled "Wellstone Was Right" by Michelle Goldberg in Salon magazine just before the election pointed out that the Wellstone campaign--and the campaigns of other Democrats who resisted giving the President a blank check to use force against Iraq--actually benefited in the polls.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the election-day wipe-out, it is clear that the go-along-to-get-along Democrats like Max Cleland of Georgia and Jean Carnahan of Missouri, who took politically "safe" conservative positions in line with the President, went down to defeat.

It's one thing to bash the lily-livered liberals in Washington. They deserve it. But the harder task is to figure out how to nurture the country's best progressive impulses. Maybe the magnitude of this year's losses, with Wellstone's tragic death and the rightwing takeover in Washington, will prompt some deep rethinking. Can the Democrats find their soul again?

In life, Wellstone was always an outsider, from the time he arrived in the Senate and refused to shake Jesse Helms's hand to the day he voted against George W.'s Iraq war resolution. For better and worse, he was no Washington player. He was too folksy, too self-deprecating, too liberal, and too connected to the scruffy grassroots to be accorded much deference. Yet the outpouring at his death shows just how hungry even the cynics are for a genuinely humane person in politics.

I remember following Wellstone through Appalachia in 1997, when he was retracing Robert Kennedy's poverty tour. The tour garnered mild interest from the mainstream press because it was seen as a feeler for a possible Wellstone Presidential run. But Wellstone frustrated the reporters who tagged along with him by refusing to talk about his Presidential ambitions. He wasn't just being coy, like every other candidate in the electoral pre-season. He seemed to feel unsenatorially self-conscious about exploiting the circumstances of his visit to impoverished mountain hollers. So he dragged his entourage to visit sick coal miners, soup kitchens, Head Start centers, and the shacks and barnyards of dire poverty, without spelling out what he was doing from a political horse-race perspective. It annoyed the media, but it was genuinely respectful to the people Wellstone visited. He just thought their situation was more important than his. Needless to say, he didn't generate a lot of national media attention. At that time, America was officially experiencing a great economic boom. The only political story seemed to be that Wellstone was off the reservation. No news flash there.

I bumped along with the rest of the press. It just so happened that I was driving a U-Haul van, moving most of my possessions from the Midwest to Washington, D.C. Following the Senator's entourage in this vehicle didn't add much gravitas to his endeavor, but Wellstone didn't mind. He had a warm spot for The Progressive, and gave me and the other small-fry, alternative journalists just as much time as the big-timers who stopped by to try to figure out what he was doing. If Wellstone lacked Presidential aura, he wasn't helped any when my moving truck accidentally crashed into the low overhang at a rural health care clinic he was visiting, peeling off a section of the clinic's roof. Wellstone himself ran over to see if I was OK. I'll never forget the sight of him hanging from the passenger side window, peering into the truck. He didn't care about the ruined choreography of his visit. He was worried my future husband and I might be hurt. Wellstone paid for his soft-heartedness. The Jack Anderson column the next day turned our low-speed crash into a metaphor for Wellstone's haplessness, and made it sound as if Wellstone himself were driving.

It was easy to take those sorts of jabs at Wellstone. Now he is gone. He was a rare phenomenon: a real progressive and a real human being in Washington. He is an example to disaffected Democrats, progressives, and plain folks everywhere.

His colleagues now have so little to lose. They may as well listen to their own eulogies and think about what he stood for. What's the use of being timid? Why not reach out to the scruffy grassroots that propelled such an unlikely Senator into office? Life is so short. Why waste it just standing by?

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.