NYT's confusion on the basic concepts of government

According to an article in Monday's New York Times entitled "Southern Democrats' Decline Is Eroding the Political Center," those damn dumb conservative Texans have shot off one of Dubya's toes (boldface added):

This [dwindling in the number of remaining conservative southern Democrats] could also have important implications for Mr. Bush's domestic agenda. He needs bipartisan support to achieve major changes in Social Security, for example, but two Democrats considered most likely to work across party lines for entitlement "reform" will not be there: Mr. Breaux and Mr. Stenholm. Some Democrats on Capitol Hill said last week that the Republicans, who campaigned hard against Mr. Stenholm, had perversely cost themselves a potential ally.

Oh, dangnabbit! How will Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay ever get Nancy Pelosi and Lloyd Doggett and Sheila Jackson-Lee to vote for Dubya's programs now that Charlie Stenholm's not around to sweet-talk them into it?

Feh. The fact of the matter is that Charlie Stenholm couldn't sweet-talk any hard-left Dems into anything — past, present, or future. The real world doesn't work that way now, if it ever did. And on the few issues in which remaining "moderate" or so-called "conservative" Democrats in the House could be persuaded to vote with Dubya and the Republicans in the last term, they'll be just as persuadable again without Stenholm as a "bridge." As for his own vote, Stenholm sometimes, but far from reliably — whether because of his own views, or because his constituency was indeed solidly conservative — would vote with the Republicans. His successor, Randy Neugebauer, campaigned as both a conservative and a Republican who'd methodically support his party and its candidate for President.  This was a straightfoward case of voting for someone straightforward.

If there were any realistic chance that in the foreseeable future, the bulk of the Democratic Party might swing back toward the center — if there were a chance that it might regain control of the House, and if its moderate and so-called conservative elements were then in a position to actually dictate the Democratic Party's positions — then an old warhorse like Stenholm might have been a useful ally for Dubya and the Republicans. But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon, friends and neighbors, and the folks like Pelosi who actually do run the show within the currrent Democratic Party are no more sorry to see Stenholm leave than Tom DeLay is.

The fact of the matter is that the voters of Stenholm's district — as redrawn in 2003 to eliminate the gerrymandered advantages that kept him in office despite the state's growing Republican trend — replaced an unreliable conservative who was member of the minority party's increasingly irrelevant fringe with a reliable conservative who's a mainstream member of the majority party. They may drive pickup trucks in a cherry-red state, but as I see it, they seem to have a better handle on this "democracy" thing than the brilliant political reporters of the New York Times — who clearly think that political gamesmanship and duplicity is business as usual, and that straightforwardness is "perverse."