In a much talked about piece (at least within the liberal blogosphere), Newsweek's Howard Fineman extols the job Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid has been doing. As Kos writes, "Dean, Reid and Pelosi, versus Bush, Frist and DeLay. I'll take our guys any day of the week." Along these lines, The Hill's Alexander Bolton (whose work we often cite here at Basie!) pens an article entitled "GOP fears it's losing Frist v. Reid."

Senate Republican leaders were due to meet last night amid rising concern that they are being beaten on the “nuclear option” by Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) public-relations war room.

The GOP’s talks follow a meeting last week in which aides warned Bob Stevenson, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s (R-Tenn.) communications director, that something needs to be done to win back lost ground, a participant said.

[...]

At a closed-door luncheon Tuesday, members of the Democratic caucus were presented a stack of more than 260 press editorials from 41 states and the District of Columbia arguing against changing Senate rules to prohibit judicial filibusters. That’s quite a change from a year and a half ago, when many editorial boards criticized Democrats for blocking confirmation votes on President Bush’s judicial nominees.

The turnaround has flummoxed Senate Republicans and conservatives. They say it is incredible that Democrats who have “undone 200-plus years of precedent” by filibustering nominees have managed to portray Republicans as “overreaching.” Republicans say eliminating the filibuster of nominees would merely restore Senate tradition.

“They turned it around,” the aide said, and “one can suggest that it’s because of our lack of organized countermessaging.”

The nut quote of the article:

Another GOP aide said: “There’s a general sense in the rank and file that we are a little in the hole and that Democrats have been more aggressive on messaging, that we’ve kind of gone dark. Democrats have gotten a head start and defined the issue ahead of us.”

There is a sense in which the Democrats have patted their leaders on the back for achievements that have not yet come to fruition (i.e. blocking privatization of Social Security), but this article points to the larger idea that the Democrats are simply better organized than the Republicans, something that has not been the case for years (and perhaps decades). This is no time for the Dems to stop and congratulate themselves; nonetheless, it's beneficial for them to see that they may have finally found their voice and that they should continue in this vein as long as it is beneficial.