Off track: both parties bet on the other's flaws.

IN 2004, Democratic strategists assumed that the presidential race would be a referendum on the incumbent. All previous presidential elections featuring an incumbent had turned on public attitudes toward him. That assumption made Democrats optimistic: Polls showed that most people felt that the country was "on the wrong track." Dissatisfaction would naturally translate into opposition to President Bush.

The Democrats were wrong. Early on, Bush's strategists had concluded that in a country as evenly divided as ours, the election would be as much about the opposition as about the incumbent. That's why they started criticizing John Kerry in the spring. President Bush was reelected with the highest overall vote percentage for any presidential candidate in 16 years--even though, on Election Day, polls still showed that a majority of Americans felt we were on the wrong track. Bush won because a decisive number of them believed that electing Kerry would take us further down that track.

Even more Americans fear we are on the wrong track now. As Democrats look ahead to the 2006 elections, they think that this sentiment will work to their advantage--this time. Republicans, once again, are counting on the unloveliness of the Democrats to see them through. The Democrats' flaws could indeed keep them from taking the House or making large gains in the Senate. But it would be risky for Republicans to count on it.

Democrats largely have Republican mistakes and mishaps to thank for their relatively happy prospects this fall. The Democrats didn't cause the Abramoff scandal, or the oil-price spike, or Hurricane Katrina, or the troubles in Iraq. The one big thing that Democrats did to help themselves was to maintain a solid wall of opposition to Bush's proposal to reform Social Security. The failure of that proposal deprived Republicans of a major accomplishment, stalled their legislative agenda, and created a sour mood within the party while emboldening the Democrats. Hanging tough against Bush was not, however, particularly hard, since there wasn't a state in the country where voters were demanding that the Democrats work with him on Social Security.

Having been handed several opportunities, Democrats have done a good job of squandering them. Mid-January, for example, saw a series of headlines about Republican scandal. Rather than exploit them, Democrats switched the subject to the president's wiretaps and Samuel Alito's ethics--two fights they were unlikely to win. Their behavior at that time illustrated five central problems lacing the party.

The first is that no one is in charge. No one is making sure both that Democrats sing in tune and that the tune is one that the public wants to hear. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid knew that a filibuster of Alito would backfire. The Democratic blogs had started to lower left-wing expectations of a filibuster. But then John Kerry decided to win some left-wing support for himself by staging one. The blogs could hardly stand aside given their vociferous opposition to Alito. It was a chain reaction. The result: The center was dismayed by the attempt at a filibuster, the Left by its failure.

The party that doesn't hold the White House always has several competing power centers. But Reid's inability to make Senate Democrats put the party's interests above individual ones is symptomatic of a deeper disunity. The House Democrats are led by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, who have different ideologies and rival ambitions. Democrats in both chambers rightly distrust the ability of the party chairman, Howard Dean, to craft the party's message or agenda.

The rise of the blogosphere has caused further decentralization. If some partisan blogger says something nasty and indefensible about the news of the day, bloggers on the other side will publicize the remark: "Can you believe what they're saying? Those people have no shame!" Moderate members of the offending blogger's party then either have to distance themselves from the blogger or allow the remark to be associated with the whole party. As a result, the party has less control of its message.

The second problem is that the party's partisanship is often self-defeating. That's one reason the rise of the blogosphere has been especially difficult for the Democrats: Their leading blogs are consumed with hatred for the president and, much of the time, for Democratic leaders who are judged not to hate Bush enough. The party as a whole has become more aggressively partisan.

Democrats have not, in general, moved left. (They have moved left on a few specific issues, such as trade.) What has changed is the practical action Democrats are willing to take to see their views prevail. Alito would not have laced nearly unanimous Democratic opposition, or any calls for a filibuster, had he been nominated in 1990. When Dean says that he "hates" Republicans, or Reid says that the president is a liar, or the Senate Democrats go to war over Alito, they run the risk of making the Democrats look too hot. And they'll never be hot enough for the bloggers. Moreover, the bloggers' partisanship leads them to pour scorn on Democratic politicians who question the party's direction. As a result, they inhibit the kind of self-criticism that might revitalize the party.

Third, the party keeps missing the political moment while it chases its own tail. Not capitalizing on the Abramoff scandal in January was only one recent instance of Democratic political malpractice. When Katrina hit, the Democrats might have been able to persuade the public that Bush's response was incompetent. But they were never going to get most Americans to believe that Bush deserved all the blame while Louisiana officials deserved none, or that he didn't care about black suffering. Dick Cheney's hunting accident would have inflicted more damage on the Republicans as well, if Democrats, and the press, hadn't piled on.

Fourth, the Democrats continue to lose on national security. Perhaps the Democrats deserve credit for sticking with principle even at the cost of unpopularity on the wiretaps. (Whatever the principle is. Their position seems to be that warrantless wiretaps are terrible, and that Congress should authorize them.) But the wiretapping debate followed Rep. John Murtha's call for a withdrawal from Iraq and Dean's declaration that the war was unwinnable. Marshall Wittmann, a political analyst at the Democratic Leadership Council, says, "I believe that more damage [has been] done to the Democrats on national security in the last four months than in the last 20 years."

The Democrats realize that national security is their Achilles' heel. Most of them have come to see that trying to change the subject from foreign policy to domestic issues--their losing strategy in the 2002 elections--won't work. But many of them think that louder dovishness is a winning strategy: that Dean or an anti-war Kerry could have won the presidential race in 2004. They think that the unpopularity of the Iraq war argues for this strategy. But following the polls here is a mistake. It does the party no good to be on the popular side of one poll question about national security if, at the same time, it is reinforcing its overall image as insufficiently tough to protect the country.

Fifth, the Democrats are too dominated by their congressional wing. Popular Democratic governors run an increasing number of states, such as Arizona, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Virginia. Every one of those states is red. Every one of those governors is to the right of, and less partisan than, the party's congressional leadership. Yet it's the congreessmen who set the party's tone. Congressional Democrats are the members of the party least inclined to try to replicate Bill Clinton's political success, in part because they did not share in that success. Congressional dominance might even grow worse if the Democrats do well this fall. If they take the House, for example, John Conyers will become chairman of the judiciary committee. He has spoken favorably about impeaching President Bush.

Impeachment is enjoying a vogue on the left that neatly combines each of these problems. A big part of the impeachers' motive is the most mindless kind of tit-for-tat partisanship. Some liberal bloggers treat the impeachment of President Clinton as though it were an obvious political triumph for the Republicans, although there is certainly evidence on the other side: Approval ratings for the GOP fell to rock-bottom levels during impeachment. And the articles of a Bush impeachment would consist of the president's national-security policies.

The Democrats' flaws ensure that even a good year for them won't be a great year. It is not surprising that the decline in popular approval for Bush over the last year has not led to an increase in support for the Democrats. But Republicans cannot put too much stock in that fact. Ed Kilgore, another DLC official, argues that one would expect the polls to follow a certain sequence before a big Democratic victory. First there would be signs of public dissatisfaction (the wrong-track numbers). Then that dissatisfaction would generate reduced ratings for the Republicans. Only then would voters, having been detached from the Republicans by their unhappiness, move to the Democrats. He thinks we're in the middle of stage two.

Don Fierce, a Republican strategist, offers another caution. "Republicans are whistling past the graveyard when they say we're doing badly but [the Democrats] can never put it together. That's like the Democrats saying in '94, 'Don't worry, Newt Gingrich can never put it together.' Republicans are counting on incompetence on the other side, and that's a very dangerous thing to do."