I'm all but convinced that if Kerry can create a de facto coalition between the Democrats and moderate Republicans, he can get an awful lot done during his tenure, even if his party doesn't actually control both houses of Congress, and in this way defang and render powerless (or, at least, less powerful) the right-wing leadership of the GOP which all but absolutely controls things now.

I think this is the key for Kerry's administration, the answer to the question being asked a while back "Considering that we probably won't control the Congress, do we really want to get a Democrat elected to the White House?"

I have no inside dope, no deep sources inside the Beltway, but simply observation and folk psychology tells me that some of the moderate Republicans in the legislature (there are a few of them) must be getting pretty damn fed up by now of being slapped around, manhandled, ignored and generally dissed by their party's leadership. I have to think that it's possible that they can't see any end in sight, any chance that they're going to be able to force the party back from the precipice it's on without some kind of outside assistance.

They may, I'm speculating, see an informal (and very much unstated) coalition with Kerry & the Democrats as a way of breaking the back of the ideological bully-boys and saving their party from ruin and disaster, if, in fact, it is still salvageable.

(I guess they must want to save it, otherwise I'm at a loss to explain why people like Snowe, Collins and Chafee and so forth haven't already left the party the way Jeffords did. They certainly get no respect within it, as far as I can tell. Simple inertia? Adherence to principles no longer taken seriously by their compatriots? Blindness to their value to the Democratic party, or inability to see the Democrats as anything but ultra-liberal? That doesn't much sound like the people I'm talking about, so I continue to be perplexed by their staying within a party that clearly has no respect for their views, or any real desire to accommodate them.)

Update (7.28): I wasn't aware of this article, a detailed profile of John Kerry by Tom Oliphant in The American Prospect, when I wrote this entry or my comments to Roger here -- or, rather, I was aware of its existence, but not its contents, and certainly not this bit of it:

Kerry’s other, overarching political thought is that the election of a Democratic president this year would liberate an unknowable number of governance-minded Republicans from the iron grip of the GOP’s congressional leadership, no matter who is in the majority. In the House of Representatives especially, the party discipline Tom DeLay can invoke on President Bush’s behalf would almost by definition be less powerful under a President Kerry. On any given domestic issue, there would be 20 or more Republicans available with the proper enticements and atmosphere. For those to the left of center who recall that JFK’s belief in 1960 was that the country could do better, not that it could be revolutionized, Kerry is the kind of person and politician I believe to be worth trusting for this grubby, central task of coalition building.

So it appears Oliphant (and Kerry) agree with my contention that building a functional coalition with moderate Republicans is a worthwhile way for a Kerry administration to proceed to try and govern this country.

What I think is implicit in that, but perhaps not clear from what I wrote, is that the very act of building that coalition defangs DeLay and Lott and the right-wing ideologues currently running Congress, and seriously reduces their power, which both would have the practical effect of rendering them much less dangerous, without having to have gone whole-hog into hard-fisted meanness to do so. That doesn't mean that an iron-fist within a velvet glove won't be called for at times, but I continue to think that the country can't really stand much more vitriolic vituperativeness in its political life. It needs a break, in fact, we all need a break, and anyone who gives us one is likley to be rewarded with support and a measure of trust.