Digby:

I know I’m a broken record, but the fact remains that the Democrats have to start actually running against Republican ideology and not just saying they’ll be better Republicans or making promises to change the tone and the process. The people in this country don’t understand that most of what Republicans say with such arrogant assurance is malignant, discredited bullshit. Why would they? Nobody ever challenges it on the merits.

Here’s the result. When Republicans talk it makes “sense” to people because it’s what they’ve been hearing for thirty years. And they figure the other side must be the ones who don’t get it:

[chart removed]

After all the Democratic bowing and scraping, and all the phony baloney GOP sturm and drang about fiscal responsibility, the American people still think all the partisan bickering is the Democrats’ fault. That’s the paradox of the hissy fit.

Look as long as Democrats are incapable of internalizing the value of their own ideas, we can’t expect this to change. Or rather, we can’t begin to apologize for calling Democrats out for not getting self-evident political principles. If you believe your ideas are better than your opponent’s ideas, you have to say why.

The bigger issue, though, when it comes to polling around the attribution of blame for partisanship, if Democrats are incapable of attacking the Republicans’ ideas, then they really are just slowing things down for the sake of partisanship. There isn’t much evidence that our people actually believe their ideas are significantly better than the Republicans’ ideas. After all, if they had ideological backbone, they would by definition be willing to run their policy campaigns against Republican ideologies. This is a scary thought, but after a certain point the simplest explanation for Democratic incompetence may be that they actually don’t believe what Republicans are saying is wrong to the extent that they would directly oppose it.