That’s an easy thing for a 93-year-old government-paid commentator with no term limits to say. Schorr was circulating the same liberal "wisdom" of the week that Sen. Evan Bayh has identified that Washington is somehow "dysfunctional" or "broken" when ultraliberal bills that are not popular in the polls aren’t rammed through boldly and persistently:
SIMON: Another week, another Democratic senator announced that he's not running for reelection. This week, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. What do you see as the immediate political effect of Senator Bayh's decision?
SCHORR: Well, immediately it's another hurt for the Democrats in getting ready for the next elections. I mean, this follows losing the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey and then the Kennedy seat in Massachusetts. But I would suggest to you that this is not only a matter of where parties stand against each other, I think something larger is happening here.
I think what Senator Bayh is saying is that this whole thing doesn't work anymore. I can't get legislation through. It's not that I'm opposed, it is that I can't get anything done. And he's reached the point now, the idea of America so angry that they're willing to look at a Congress and say you're not doing anything suggests something that is more menacing than simply whether one or another wins a couple of seats in the Congress.
In his interview with another NPR analyst, Juan Williams, Scott Simon demonstrated why the architects of CPAC have handed liberals another tool to insist that social conservatives opposed to the promotion of homosexuality to some lofty plane of a highly protected status are dying off:
SIMON: There is a gay contingent at this CPAC conference and I wonder if there is a generational divide among conservative activists, or maybe something else going on here.
WILLIAMS: No, no. I think you're exactly right, and I think it's been evident all week at the CPAC convention. You see people who are there, you know, arguing old arguments, things that go back, you know, to the Reagan era and the like. And then you see younger people who are invested in things like let's end Don't Ask Don't Tell and making the arguments for more of the kind of anti-government low-tax issues that I think appeal to the Tea Party energy, you know, this new energy that's come to the party since Barack Obama's election and since Barack Obama's - President Obama's numbers began to fall.
