After the election, it was painfully apparant(to the 'wild-eyed') that Reid was no Daschle... Pelosi, Kennedy, Boxer and Kerry began acting on their own ... the mornings talking-points were either not getting out... or not being read.
Very astute observation. Party discipline has collapsed, and new, more radical leaders are emerging from the ashes of 2004. Either no one is issuing talking points, or people are no longer heeding them.
You are watching the center collapse.
In analyzing the current situation, it also seems that the Dems have been paralyzed by their cult of personality of Bush. I was amazed by the instant mythology they built around him like construction scaffolding the moment he showed up on the national scene. Bush was known as the son of Bush41, a pretty mild political figure, and as a governor who had earned huge Democrat support in Texas. Yet the Hitler-Halliburton stuff took off like wildfire before it possibly could have even were it a fraction true. It was an overnight mythology.
Now Bush has been broadly successful and popular, but the Dems cannot touch him with a 10-foot pole because they convinced so many of their supporters that to do so would be shaking hands with Satan. They are locked in to a radical position by the severity of their own rhetoric and the effectiveness of their own brainwashing efforts.