Posted By: Brad Martin

by Stephanie GriffithThu Nov 9, 6:19 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrats who seized control of the US Congress must learn to keep their sometimes fractious coalition together or they won't be in power for long, experts warned.
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Democrats clinched control of the House and Senate for the first time in 12 years, putting them in charge of day-to-day congressional operations as well as the legislative agenda set by committees that oversee the US military, foreign relations and purse strings, among other important dossiers.

But the election saw a number of moderate Democrats voted into office, including many soon-to-be lawmakers with positions considerably to the right of liberal Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the current minority leader who will likely take over as House speaker.

"The Democrats have actually seen an influx of a significant number of moderate and conservative members," said Norman Ornstein, resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, at a post-election forum held Thursday.

He said Pelosi "will have to deal with a significant number of moderate or conservative members, enough that they could, if they decided not to go along with policies, leave her without a majority on the floor."

While a broad spectrum of Democrats were able to find common ground on Iraq, they are more likely to splinter on social issues, experts said.

"It's going to pose a challenge for them to create the level of unity," needed to get legislation passed, particularly in the runup to the 2008 presidential election as the political stakes increase.

"Finding that unity is not always going to be easy and if you can't find it, moving across to members on the other side of the aisle will also be challenging," Ornstein said.

Professor Allan Lichtman, who teaches history at American University in Washington, said it's true enough that Democrats are fractured, but asks, rhetorically, "what else is new?"

"Democrats have always been a more splintered party than the Republicans," Lichtman told AFP.

But with the current crop of lawmakers, who span the gamut from the Senate's liberal lion Senator Ted Kennedy on the left to socially conservative senator-elect Bob Casey on the right, find it particularly difficult to contain the broad spectrum of viewpoints under one party umbrella.

"It will be quite interesting to see how they find middle ground," Lichtman said.

Ornstein also predicted especially potentially bitter leadership struggles as Democrats vie among themselves for committee chairmanships and other plum leadership assignments.

He noted in particular "the potentially difficult battle for House majority leader" -- the number two position in the party, with Pelosi's deputy, Steny Hoyer, facing a challenge from Representative John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), an outspoken administration critic on the Iraq war.

Caveats also came from noted Republican Dick Armey, now out of office, but who was part of the House majority leadership from 1995 to 2003 and an architect of the "Contract with America" that was a part of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.

He said they form at "an accidental majority" which will make party unity hard to maintain.

"They are not succeeding because of their principles or policy proposals, but simply because they have kept their heads down," Armey wrote in The Washington Post recently.

Armey said that as the new governing party faces the challenges of appealing to their base with long-deferred social legislation, it will be challenged from within by socially and fiscally conservative members.

"Democratic policy goals such as nationalized health care and low-interest student loans are expensive, and dozens of new spending 'priorities' will crop up as soon as the election results are tallied," he wrote.

Others have said that Pelosi in particular may have trouble tamping down the Democratic urge for revenge after having been straitjacketed by the Republican majority for years, but the California Democrat insisted that that would not be a problem.

"There are people in the country who are saying it's time for the Democrats to get even. And I say to them: We're not about getting even," she told PBS television Wednesday.

"We're about helping the American people get ahead. That's what our priority is here," she said.

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