In the spirit of "relying upon unsubstantiated media narratives (Democrats weak! Republicans strong!) while ignoring evidence from your own newspaper that directly contradicts that narrative" style journalism in the Post that Greg Sargent links to here and here, I thought it might be useful to pick apart a similar Adam Nagourney-penned story from last week:

Still, there are questions and risks for the new majority party. The biggest question is how far can Democrats go in opposing this president? The biggest risk is going so far that they feel the sting of a backlash -- of being transformed from the fresh new face of change to the latest cast of Washington players enmeshed in partisan wrangling.

What backlash? This sure makes the public sound unpredictable and impatient. Nagourney doesn't tell us what this backlash means, just that Democrats are in danger of overextending their power.

Democrats clearly have some leeway to go at least as far as they have gone, if not further. A poll for the Pew Research Center last week suggests that Americans are strikingly sympathetic to Democrats: 50 percent said they identified with or leaned toward the Democrats, compared with 35 percent for Republicans. Their main opponent, President Bush, is weighed down by the war and his own unpopularity, making him feeble on this field, even Republicans said.

The problem with this paragraph is that it contradicts the rest of Nagourney's story. Here he provides real evidence that the public is fleeing the GOP and the president and instead embracing the Democrats. But Nagourney can't believe this is true so he seeks out a second opinion:

Yet Democrats need to take care in managing their moment. There is a recent history of aggressive Congressional majorities paying a price for being overly confrontational. The Republican Congress that impeached President Bill Clinton went on to lose five seats in the midterm elections; generally, the opposition party can expect to gain seats in midterms during a president's second term.

Gee, do you think that the public turned against the GOP in 1998 because they tried to impeach a president with an approval rating twice that of Bush? Do you think the public--while condemning Clinton's personal behavior--saw how despicable the Republican witch hunt was? But Nagourney suggests that that political moment is somehow comparable to today. Utter nonsense.

Democrats and some historians say that what to do here is clear, though how to do it may be another matter. Democrats will have room to maneuver as the tough hall monitors of this administration -- think hearings on Katrina and Walter Reed Hospital, more push-back on Iraq and, yes, more subpoenas. But not unless they can also compile a record of legislation by the time the next election comes around.

I guess that 100 hours of legislation never happened. I guess Nagourney forgot that Bush wields a veto pen. He must have also forgot that Democrats do not have veto-proof majorities. But the biggest omission is that the Republicans of the Gingrich era do not compromise. And they don't need to. When your fundamental goal as a party is to destroy the government's ability to do anything other than control the personal and private lives of its citizens, then you don't need 67% to do it. You only need 51%. That's why Bush has governed during his two terms as if he were elected in landslides. Getting in power was the only important thing. All bridges were burned after that.

But how easy is this going to be in this political environment? The party holds a slim advantage in the Senate. For all intents and purposes, it will be impossible to pass big legislation without a few Republican defections. (And yes, that can very well happen as the next election approaches if Mr. Bush continues to be so unpopular.) Democrats marked their first hours controlling the House pushing through a series of high-profile bills, on issues ranging from ethics to stem cell research. Most of those have not passed the Senate.

Nagourney acknowledges some of the difficulties, to his credit. But what gets me is his parenthetical suggestion that Bush might bounce back. Why would he? He is unpopular because he refuses to let go of policies that are unpopular. It's really that simple. And what journalists like Nagourney fail to realize is that Bush isn't politically constrained the way most politicians are. He doesn't care what the public thinks. He could have a 1% approval rating and he would wield executive power the same way. That is a huge obstacle. And that means Democrats have to force him to change because he won't change on his own.

''Democrats have no intention of going where Republicans went,'' said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. ''The Republicans went to such an extreme when they wanted anything from the president, when Clinton was in power, including e-mails from the vice president's office. Democrats are not going to go that far.''

Asked if he could see any situation in which Democrats would bow to a small segment of liberal voters who were pushing for, say, impeachment, Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who is the party's conference chairman and was serving in Mr. Clinton's White House at this time of that impeachment, responded sharply. ''That's not going to happen,'' he said. ''Forget it.''

''We have to continue on parallel tracks, to show that the other parts of government are moving,'' Mr. Emanuel said. ''If the only thing coming out of Washington is the confrontation on executive privilege, that's a moral hazard.''

I don't personally agree with the assessment of these top Democrats. But by quoting them, Nagourney feeds the idea that excess partisanship is a constant threat to the ever-so-fragile Democratic majority. What bugs me is how "partisanship" is defined. When the Republicans did it, it was an impeachment frenzy on flimsy charges. Now the Democrats are in danger of being partisan because they are trying to fulfill the promise that got them their majority? This is supposed to generate a "backlash?"

On Iraq, the party could be perceived as so broadly antiwar that it could undermine its efforts to reassure voters that it can keep them safe in an age of global terror (a theme that even a weakened White House and Republican Party continue to push hard).

Democrats weak, Republicans strong. Polls have consistently showed, from before the midterm elections, that the public wants our involvement in Iraq to end. The public is antiwar. But in Nagourney's mind, antiwar is a hippie burning a flag and spitting on troops. In other words, barely qualifying as reality. Nagourney suggests that the antiwar cliche is not a niche but potentially a force that could overwhelm the Democrats, making them pacific and weak and unable to fight the war on terror. Sounds like something Rove would have orchestrated against John Kerry in 2004. Nagourney doesn't appear to know what year it is.

And in going after the administration on whether the Justice Department removed the federal prosecutors for purely political reasons, it could risk appearing focused on another partisan feud at a time when many Americans would prefer to see the two parties address health care, education and other issues more central to their lives.

"Many Americans." No data. And the reason is the data suggests that the public does think Congress should be investigating the prosecutor purge. Instead, Nagourney ignores this and casts the public as unconcerned with politics and more focused on their personal lives.

To summarize: Nagourney has written a piece that abounds with two general cliches about American politics that originated with neoconservative and Republican criticisms in the 1970s. First, Democrats need to prove they are strong on national security, whereas the Republicans somehow have this ability naturally, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Second, Democrats are inclined towards partisan bickering rather than compromise, despite all the evidence that it has been Republicans who have been playing that game for at least a decade (Even Reagan compromised). A better article would acknowledge the real institutional limits on the Democrats' power (notably the lack of a reliable veto-proof majority) and the absolute necessity for Congressional oversight of an administration that has claimed extraordinary unchecked powers for itself. Instead we get an article that relies upon tired cliches to sustain itself, and focuses on the unending gamemanship of politics which either generates disinterest or backlash in the public, depending on the paragraph. This is just bad political reporting, no two ways about it, and demonstrates how far we have to go to restore the fourth estate's reputation as the watchdog of government.