Their moment.

KATHA POLLITT, a left-wing commentator, complains in The Nation that the newly empowered Democrats' "program is so modest you need a microscope to see it." True enough. One Democratic bill would authorize the president to use the federal government's bargaining power to lower the price of medicine. Negotiating the price of drugs down might be a step toward price controls on the pharmaceutical industry. But since President Bush opposes such price controls, he won't use the authority, and the bill will have no effect until 2009 at the earliest.

It is politically smart for Democrats to advance that sort of small-bore proposal. They seem to realize, as the Gingrich Republicans did not in 1995, that nowadays it is impossible to govern America from Capitol Hill. Instead, they are using their first "100 hours" to associate themselves with popular causes and to put Republicans in tight spots, the better to win more elections in 2008. A few of those causes are even worthwhile. Democrats enacted ethics reforms that the Republicans should have enacted last year, or even earlier (although they rather sneakily included in their reforms a set of tax-friendly changes to the budget rules).

But the contrast does not tell entirely in their favor. Unlike the Gingrich Republicans, the Pelosi Democrats do not appear to believe in very much. And the popularity of their causes is thin. The public supports federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, for example, but there is no clamor for it. The policy issue that more than any other elected the Democratic Congress was the Iraq War, but the Democrats have no mandate to do anything in particular about it, which is why so far they have not tried.

The bloom will start coming off Pelosi's rose pretty quickly. Her party's Left and Right may not be ...