Why the Democrats are a minority party

According to CNN (emphasis added):

The announcement came after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the top-ranking Democrat in the House, emerged from a White House breakfast meeting with President Bush and Cheney to say the vice president needed to come forward.

"I guess I'm kind of old-fashioned," Reid said. "He hasn't had a press conference in three and a half years."

Said Pelosi: "Open government demands that the vice president come clean with what happened ... There's probably a very simple answer to it, but we have to break this habit of the administration, of closed government without the openness that is healthy to a democracy."

They said they did not tell Cheney to his face that he should come forward

That's just gutless.