Discussing the August 27 resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Fox News Radio 600 KCOL host Scott James asserted on his August 28 broadcast that as a consequence of its “inherent lack of policy initiative,” "[t]he left needs the right bad guys." Restating his point later, James asserted that if the left “had nobody to hate, if they had nobody to slam, then they might have to come up with an original idea, with a policy initiative.” But as Colorado Media Matters has noted, Congressional Democrats attained majority status in the November 2006 election after campaigning on a detailed policy agenda, and the U.S. House of Representatives adopted all of its points.

James' characterization of Gonzales as a “right bad guy[]” for “the left” presumably reflects a series of scandals associated with the attorney general, whose resignation becomes effective September 17. As Media Matters for America has noted, the Justice Department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility are conducting an investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys and Gonzales' alleged attempts to influence congressional testimony about the firings. Further, four Democratic senators have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged “half-truths and misleading statements” in Gonzales' congressional testimony concerning the alleged attempt to influence his aide's testimony and his testimony regarding the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretapping program.

From the August 28 broadcast of Fox News Radio 600 KCOL's Ride Home with The James Gang:

JAMES: I have some thoughts on Alberto Gonzales, on his resignation. And this is going to be interesting. It's almost counter-strategic to, to the left in the fact that the left, far more so than the right -- and the right has our bad guys. I mean, we -- sure, we have Hillary Clintons, the Dirty Harry Reids, the Nancy Pelosis, the Ted Kennedys -- we have our bad guys. But we don't so much need them. The left needs the right bad guys. Witness John Ashcroft, Mark Foley, Karl Rove. The left needs those bad guys because of their inherent lack of policy initiative -- other than that of, of, of socializing us, basically. They need the bad guys. And, and it might be an interesting strategy, in the fact that I take all those, those, those personality tests and all that kind of thing -- they make you take those around here -- and my number one trait is “strategy.” So I love thinking about how one moves the pieces around on the, on the board. It would be an interesting strategy -- especially with the hole, in my opinion, that conservatives, at least the, the neocons, the George Bush conservatives have, have dug the party into -- it'd be an interesting strategy to go ahead and say, “Yeah, this person's resigning, this person's fired,” and take away the bad guys. And then what would the left do? If they had nobody to hate, if they had nobody to slam, then they might have to come up with an original idea, with a policy initiative. I just don't think their message would be as strong with nobody to slam, without a conservative bad guy.

Contrary to James' assertion about the left's “inherent lack of policy initiative,” Democrats in 2006 committed to passing a slate of policy initiatives if they attained the majority in Congress. Colorado Media Matters pointed out that an August 4, 2006, Boston Globe article described the Democrats' “Six for '06” agenda as “a series of easily digestible policy proposals that party leaders hope will help them shed their reputation for diluting their positions with maddening complexity and nuance.” Once they attained the majority, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives passed their legislative agenda during the first 100 Hours of the 110th Congress. As The New York Times reported on January 19, “House Democrats met the goals of their 100-hour legislative offensive with plenty of time to spare.” The Times further noted:

But the easy approval of the half-dozen measures in the 100-hour agenda -- dealing with the minimum wage, embryonic stem cell research, health care, national security, education and energy -- was celebrated by the new majority as a validation of the blitz, an idea born on the campaign trail that blossomed into a central House Democratic theme.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) website notes that the Democratic majority passed measures specified in the 100 Hours agenda related to ethics reform, homeland security, raising the minimum wage, prescription drugs, stem cell research, cutting student loan interest rates, and repealing subsidies for oil companies. Of these, the ethics reform initiative was adopted as the set of rules to govern the House of Representatives, and measures to increase homeland security and raise the minimum wage were enacted into law. President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that originated in the Senate (S. 5) to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The Senate also approved the bill repealing subsidies for oil companies, but has not held final votes on the House-referred bills on prescription drugs and cutting student loan interest rates.