Hillary Clinton and the "lonely middle"

Much the way Vietnam played a major role in the 1968 Democratic presidential campaign – driving wartime leader Lyndon Johnson into early retirement, bringing antiwar senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy into the race, and ultimately dooming LBJ loyalist Hubert Humphrey – Iraq figures to be front and center in the 2008 Democratic race. Indeed, it’s already clear that the political fortunes of the candidates will hinge on how well they navigate the preeminent issue of our era.

And the waters may be quite treacherous, because the Democratic contestants will feel great pressure to move leftward, at least during the primary season. Democratic voters are more outspokenly antiwar than the rest of the electorate; as a CBS News poll reported after President Bush’s escalation speech last week, only 14 percent of Democrats favor sending more troops to Iraq, whereas 31 percent of all Americans back the Bush troop hike. And on the general question of either reducing or eliminating the U.S. troop presence, 67 percent of Democrats support those options; among all Americans, the share is only 46 percent.

I was reminded of all this today while monitoring Hillary Clinton’s comments on the NBC and CBS morning shows. She will be squeezed more than her chief rivals; as she tells the New Yorker magazine, "I find myself, as I often do, in the somewhat lonely middle."

Unlike Barack Obama, who can trace his opposition to the war back to 2002, when he was still a state senator, Clinton voted for war authorization. And unlike John Edwards, who as a senator did vote for war authorization in 2002, she has not renounced that vote by calling it a mistake. She seems most concerned with establishing centrist credentials for the general electorate (and, frankly, a female candidate may feel it is doubly important not to seem “soft” on national security), whereas her more antiwar rivals appear to be more in tune with the primary electorate.

On the morning shows, fresh from her latest tour of Iraq, she spoke directly to the public’s general frustration with Bush’s disastrous war of choice. Aside from the dwindling share of Bush loyalists in the general electorate, it’s clear at this point that most Americans – liberals, centrist independents, Republican moderates – would have no truck with Clinton’s reference to “this very bad mission that the president is engaged in.” And Clinton also acknowledged the sentiment on her left flank by talking a lot about “capping the number of American troops as of January 1,” and about the long-term folly of continuing to sustain a troop presence “in the midst of a civil war.”

But that’s where she drew the line. Despite strong support among Democratic voters for a fixed withdrawal timetable, she spoke only of withdrawing our soldiers from Iraq “eventually.” (By contrast, Edwards is calling for the “immediate” withdrawal of as many as 50,000 troops. He is also reportedly topping the polls in Iowa, the first pit stop in the ’08 derby, where antiwar sentiment among Democratic caucus goers is traditionally strong.)

Also, Clinton this morning neglected to explain exactly how she would “cap” the number of troops, leaving the impression that she would prefer not to confront Bush directly. [UPDATE at 5:25 p.m. Clinton did announce this afternoon that she intends to introduce a Senate bill that would cap the troops, as well as require Bush to seek congressional OK for any additional troops.]

On NBC this morning, she was also purposely evasive when asked whether she would favor cutting off Bush's war money. She replied this way: “The president has enormous authority under our constitutional system to do exactly what he is doing. He does have the money already appropriated in the budget (for the escalation)” – whereupon she deftly changed the subject to Afghanistan.

That answer won’t satisfy the antiwar left; in a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of the Democrats opposed to the Bush escalation would like to see Congress cut off his war money. But there is no such majority support across the board. Among all Americans who oppose the Bush escalation, only 43 percent want Congress to cut off Bush’s war money. Clearly, Clinton is hesitant about getting too far in front of the general public sentiment; the White House may be running low on good arguments about Iraq, but there is still some political potency in the charge that a money cutoff would be tantamount to undercutting the troops.

It also should be pointed out that Obama, the media darling of the week, is just as hesitant about a money cutoff. He was asked three days ago on CBS whether he supports such an option. He replied, “We need to look at what options do we have available to constrain the president, to hopefully right the course that we're on right now, but to do so in a way that makes sure that the troops that are on the ground have all the equipment and the resources they need."

Translation: No.

Edwards has the upper hand, at least for now. Since he’s not in the Senate anymore, he can attack his rivals from the left flank, and goad them into taking decisive action, without the need to cast a vote on anything. (For instance, he's pushing for a cutoff of troop escalation funding.) The danger for Democrats, in the longer run, is that all the candidates, in the hunt for primary season voters, may feel compelled to move leftward, to the point where it becomes difficult to seize the center for the general election.

Actually, there may be no such danger if the Bush’s Iraq adventure continues to worsen and centrist opinion becomes virulently antiwar. But, for now anyway, the Democrats may need to heed this warning from the smartest strategist in the party, who happens to be married to Hillary Clinton. As he told the New Yorker last year, “it would be really crazy if the antiwar element in our party thought that the most important thing to do was to beat up Democrats…”

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Meanwhile, President Bush gets our quote of the day. Here is our chef-in-chief, talking about his war last night on PBS:

“I don't quite view it as the broken egg. I view it as the cracked egg – that – where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg.”

At last! An entire blog entry that barely mentions Iraq

You may have never heard of Wayne Allard, but he is a significant political figure this morning, if only because his imminent departure from the U.S. Senate brightens Democratic prospects for retaining control of the chamber two years hence.

The Republican senator from Colorado announced yesterday that he would not seek a third term in 2008, thereby keeping his promise to serve only two. Maybe he planned all along to honor his pledge. On the other hand, prevailing political realities in Colorado probably made it easier for him to pull the ripcord on his parachute. The fact is, he would have been forced to endure a difficult and costly re-election race – at a time when Democrats are ascendant not only in Colorado, but elsewhere in the interior western states.

Indeed, the Democrats announced just last week that they would be holding their 2008 national convention in Denver, in part to advertise the party to westerners who, until fairly recently, were deemed to be loyal Republicans. For various reasons (both ideological and demographic), voters in the region are taking a fresh look at the Democrats.

The facts speak for themselves; in Colorado, for example, the Democrats now control the governorship and both state legislative chambers for the first time in four decades, and they hold four of the seven U.S. House seats. They also hold one of the Senate seats (Ken Salazar, elected in 2004), and they were expected to seriously threaten Allard if he ran again in 2008. But now, with no incumbency trappings to worry about, the Democrats have enhanced their chances for an open-seat pickup – and strengthened their national prospects for holding the Senate, particularly since the GOP has to defend 21 of the 33 seats on the ballot in ’08.

The GOP in Washington yesterday put out a statement about Colorado, quickly drawing a line in the sand: “Republicans will retain the seat currently held by Sen. Allard and (we) will do everything in (our) power to ensure the principles of fiscal responsibility and limited effective government returns to the people of Colorado in November 2008. The voters of Colorado supported Pres. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and again over Senator John Kerry in 2004, and Republican statewide registration is 36 percent compared to 30 percent for Democrats - ensuring Republicans a strong advantage in 2008. Retention of this seat is now a top priority..."

But even before Allard opted to bail on schedule, the Democrats had been talking up the interior West, as potentially fertile turf for their ceaseless quest to become more than just an East Coast/ West Coast party. Just six years ago, Republican governors ran all eight states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming); today, Democratic governors run five. The landscape still seems daunting in national elections – President Bush swept all eight states in 2004 – but some Democratic analysts today argue that an attractive ’08 Democratic candidate could be seriously competitive in five of those states (aside from Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming), thereby easing the pressure on Democrats to crack the solid Republican South.

Their reasons for optimism can be attributed to a number of factors: a large influx of California emigrants, many of whom, while fiscally conservative, are also more tolerant on social issues than the southern-flavored national GOP; a large influx of new Hispanic voters, many of whom dislike the GOP’s hard line stance on immigration; the ongoing presence of traditional western conservatives, whose leave-me-alone libertarianism clashes with the national GOP credo that big government should be utilized to police private behavior; and a growing pragmatic feeling, particularly around major urban centers such as Las Vegas, Denver, and Albuquerque, that government should indeed have a role in solving urban problems and ameliorating the worst aspects of suburban sprawl.

The average voter, of course, wouldn’t articulate the factors that way. I think that Rick Allaire, a Coors brewery worker, probably said it best last month, as he recalled his ’06 vote during a chat with a political reporter: “I figured, hell, why not give Democrats a shot. How much worse can they do?”

That’s the kind of voter that Democrats need to enlist in ’08, both in the presidential race and in the Colorado Senate race. But if Democrats tap candidates who can be easily stereotyped by the GOP as traditional eastern liberals, they may well wind up undercutting their own quest for the interior West.

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Speaking of candidates, Barack Obama filed the initial paperwork today for his ’08 White House bid. Notwithstanding the fact that he is a senator, it’s clear that he plans to position himself as an “outsider” who is fed up with the usual partisan bickering in Washington. (That has been the preferred candidate stance, dating back to Jimmy Carter’s initial wanderings in 1975.) Therefore, he will paint himself as being above the fray, as a transformative figure and a breath of fresh air. From his statement today:

“I've been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics….The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put our country in a precarious place….But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics. America's faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions.”

Translation: I am “new politics,” while Hillary Clinton is a symptom of the “bitter and partisan” old politics. I am part of the solution, she is part of the problem.

The early contours of the Democratic race are already apparent. Obama and ex-senator John Edwards are positioning themselves as outsiders (on Sunday, Edwards, another announced candidate, lectured Capitol Hill Democrats about being too timid on Iraq, declaring that "silence is betrayal"). They seek to contrast themselves favorably with Hillary (the six-year senator, and eight-year First Lady during the bitter and partisan ‘90s) during this crucial early phase, when the donors and activists are busy kicking the tires.

I predict that, with Obama now on board, the odds of an accelerated Hillary Clinton candidacy announcement are approximately 99 percent.

Dick Cheney goes for the gut

It was instructive yesterday to hear Dick Cheney expound at length on the Iraq war, during his visit to Fox News. He actually performed a valuable public service, by reminding all Americans that he is still the power behind the throne, and that he and the members of his neoconservative network are still determined to use that power as they see fit, even though the ’06 voters signaled otherwise.

The neoconservatives who originally sold George W. Bush on the alleged virtues of a regime change in Iraq have been somewhat diminished by the misadventures of the past four years, but many are still ensconced in Cheney’s office, and they hold a number of key positions on the National Security Council. They are also influential at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which helped develop the troop escalation plan.

Their determination to proceed has not been shaken by the adverse public mood, nor by the inconvenient truths of empirical reality – as evidenced by Cheney’s defiant comments on Fox, notably this one: "I think if you look at what's transpired in Iraq, we have, in fact, made enormous progress."

If Democrats and restive Republicans on Capitol Hill truly want to gauge the seriousness of the impending battle over Iraq policy, they might be well advised to study the Cheney transcript. It was patently obvious that he is the engine that powers the Bush vehicle. He is the steel in Bush’s spine. Even after a decisive repudiation on election day, he is still willing to say the things that not even Karl Rove is saying these days – notably, that anyone who assails the Bush administration’s troop escalation plan is merely validating “the al Qaeda view of the world.”

That was one of his sound bites yesterday. There were many others, including his argument that the current debate over Iraq is more about anatomy than ideology. To wit: “If the United States doesn’t have the stomach to finish the job in Iraq, we put at risk what we’ve done in all of those other locations out there…We have to prevail, and we have to have the stomach for the fight…(Al Qaeda is convinced that) the election campaign last fall, all of that, is evidence that they’re right when they say the United States doesn’t have the stomach for the fight…”

Perhaps most Americans would forego the Pepto Bismol if they had substantive reasons to be confident about the workability of the troop escalation plan that Cheney helped to hatch. (New reasons to feel queasy, here.) But, beyond assuring host Chris Wallace yesterday that the Bush administration has been “very direct” with the oft-recalictrant Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, Cheney refused to say what the U.S. would do if the escalation plan flops and the bloodshed continues unabated.

“Time will tell,” said Cheney. “We’ll have to wait and see.” (Translation: There goes another year.)

Wallace then asked, “What do we do if (Maliki) doesn’t live to his promises” – namely, to go after the murderous Shiite militias that are controlled by his Shiite allies? Wallace basically asked whether Bush and Cheney have a Plan B.

Cheney replied: “I’m not going to get into that, Chris. We’ve got a good plan.”

Wallace, to his credit, then asked a variation of the same question. And Cheney replied, “I’m not going to go beyond what I’ve said. We’re focused on making this plan work.”

Wallace tried again: “But it’s not an open-ended commitment?”

Cheney: “We’re focused on making this plan work.”

And perhaps stomachs would not be so queasy if most Americans had confidence that an error-prone administration was suddenly exhibiting more competence. On the contrary, Cheney made it clear yesterday that he would prefer to rewrite history rather than acknowledge past error.

A number of experts, for instance, have faulted the Bush war team for failing to anticipate or combat the burgeoning sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. But Cheney’s view, expressed yesterday, is that none of this violence occurred “until the spring of ’06,” after al Qaeda operatives bombed a famous Shiite religious landmark.

Cheney’s claim, however, is factually inaccurate. There was plenty of evidence in 2005 that Shiite death squads were precipitating sectarian violence – thanks in part to the Shiite government that came to power in the wake of the January ’05 “purple finger” elections. Here’s one passage from a Knight Ridder article, on Feb. 27 of that year: "Shiite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni Muslim regime with impunity in a wave of violence that, combined with the ongoing Sunni insurgency, threatens to escalate into civil war. The war between Shiite vigilantes and (Sunnis) is seldom investigated…”

But perhaps the most revealing moment occurred midway through the interview when Wallace asked Cheney about the recent election day verdict: “By taking the policy you have, haven’t you, Mr. Vice President, ignored the express will of the American people in the November elections?”

Cheney: “I don’t think any president worth his salt can afford to make decisions of this magnitude according to the polls. The polls change every day – "

Wallace: “Well, this was an election, sir.”

Cheney: “Polls change every day, week by week…You cannot simply stick your finger up in the wind and say, ‘Gee, public opinion’s against; we’d better quit.’”

Consider that exchange for a moment. One can certainly have a legitimate debate over whether policies should be subjected to a popularity contest; indeed, John F. Kennedy (with great assistance from his ghostwriter Ted Sorenson) won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Profiles in Courage” which lauded some political leaders who had followed their consciences rather than popular opinion. But Cheney’s offhand dismissal of elections in general – equating them with fluctuating public opinion polls – is another matter entirely. His comments should serve as fair warning to administration critics that he and his ostensible superior in the White House will never feel compelled to change course in Iraq just because the will of the people wishes it so.

Cheney made it perfectly clear yesterday that Democrats and dissenting Republicans on Capitol Hill will get nowhere if they merely pass non-binding resolutions condemning the troop escalation (“it would not affect the president’s ability to carry out his policy”). He essentially signaled administration critics that only a fight over the purse strings, or an outright constitutional clash, would really get his attention.

The White House seems fully prepared for a confrontation, lawyering up for a court showdown over the national security prerogatives of the commander-in-chief. The Democrats, by contrast, are not. The big question, as Democrats chart their own new way forward, is whether they will have the “stomach” to take on the likes of Dick Cheney.

Goodbye to "surge," hello to "augmentation"

It’s a pity that George Orwell can’t be with us to witness the latest White House word play.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Capitol Hill yesterday to defend her boss’ decision to dispatch 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. While insisting that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his fellow Shiites were on board with the Bush plan (a dubious claim, by the way), she introduced the latest in Bush administration terminology:

“They know that the augmentation of American forces is part of that plan.”

She then attempted to elaborate: “Now, as to the question of ‘escalation,’ I think that I don’t see it, and the president doesn’t see it, as an escalation. What he sees – ’’

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel then felt compelled to interrupt, probably because, at this point, most Americans aren’t particularly impressed with how President Bush sees things. He asked her, with some astonishment, “Putting 22,000 new troops, more troops in, is not an escalation?”

To which Rice replied, “Well, I think, Senator, escalation is not just a matter of how many numbers you put in. Escalation is also a question of, are you changing the strategic goal of what you’re trying to do?…I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad.”

So there it is. At least in Decider circles, surge is out and augmentation is in. This battle over words may seem trivial, but it is not. Language is powerful. Whoever captures the language has the power to frame an issue. Which is why the Bush camp has now unveiled augmentation, a word that sounds more benign than escalation, which still carries the stench of a certain lost war in the jungle.

The Bush administration has long understood the importance of word play, which is why, among many examples, it has long sought to redefine the privatization of Social Security as a push for “personal accounts” (because the word personal has a more positive connotation). Similarly, the urge to push the friendlier word surge (a burst of electrical power) stemmed from a war council desire to cushion the blow of a new troop hike.

Orwell, the British journalist/commentator/novelist, understood this impulse more than six decades ago. In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” he argued that because our leaders often have little interest in candor, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism.” He also wrote: “Politics otself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred….When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

Well, the general atmosphere is bad today, and language is suffering. Back in mid-November, Bush administration sources told The New York Times that any decision to hike the number of troops would be dubbed “the surge option.” By the end of that month, most of the Washington press corps had adopted the government’s preferred term. And on Christmas Day, The Wall Street Journal confirmed the Times account, reporting that “White House aides and senior Pentagon commanders have chosen an unusual term to describe the addition of the extra troops…”

Interestingly, the word was first used in the press as the word is supposed to be used: to signify (in the words of my Wesbster’s dictionary) “a short, sudden rush.” NBC News on Nov. 21 referred to a “short-term surge.” ABC News one day later referred to a “temporary surge.” But, as the weeks passed, the adjectives were dropped – and not just by the mainstream media. A Dec. 27 headline on the liberal Huffington Post website announced: “White House Pushes for Iraq Surge.”

Even though there were no empirical indications, prior to Bush’s speech on Wednesday night, that the troop hike would be short in duration, the Bush war team’s preferred word continued to surge through the information pipeline.

A few commentators tried to object; on Jan. 5, CNN’s Bill Schneider pointed out that “Surge sounds temporary….Escalation sounds long-term,” and five days later, on the eve of Bush’s speech, conservative columnist Tony Blankley pointed out in The Washington Times: “The troops would surely be in theatre for an idefinite period. The words escalation, reinforcement of higher sustained troop levels would all be honest. The word surge is deceptive.”

Yet even after it was clear, from Bush’s speech, that the new troops would be incrementally added over a period of months, and with a no exit timeline – in other words, the exact opposite of “a short, sudden rush” – some in the media have persisted in using surge. The U.S. News and World Report website headlined this: “Democrats Seek to Block Surge Funding.” The website ABCNews.com headlined, “Leading Edge of Troop Surge Has Arrived in Baghdad.” They have been joined, of course, by a number of Bush allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who used the word on a cable news show following the president’s address.

Escalation clearly has some Vietnam baggage, and it’s undeniable that Democrats are using it in order to equate Bush with another Texas president who became politically isolated in the wake of an unpopular war. But it’s also undeniable that the dictionary definition of escalation (“to increase in intensity, magnitude”) clearly trumps surge as an accurate depicter of the Bush troop push. Which is why the latter word may not survive over time, even though it fits so nicely in a headline.

No wonder Condoleezza Rice introduced augmentation. Fearing the loss of surge, the Bush war team apparently felt that it needed a backup. The problem, however, is that most Americans no longer seem inclined to back or believe the Bush team, no matter what words it chooses to use. Rather, they would probably prefer to believe George Orwell, who in his essay famously warned, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

The new way forward is to kick the can

President Bush made it abundantly clear in his White House address last night that he intends to dump his Iraq disaster into the lap of his ’09 successor. The new way forward is actually Operation Kick the Can Down the Road.

By announcing to his dwindling Republican base that he is sending 20,000 more troops to help shore up what he persists in calling the “young democracy” – indeed, the Republican base was his intended TV audience, since relatively few others support him on Iraq anymore – Bush signaled that the expenditure of American blood and money will continue until the day that he packs up and moves out.

His basic prescription is for more of the same, on an open-ended basis. By sending more troops and insisting on better behavior from the young democracy, he hopes that the situation in Iraq will improve “over time.” He said that the young democracy needs more “breathing space” in order to succeed. He wants Americans to understand that “the year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice and resolve.” (Given the fact that his overall handling of Iraq is supported at this point by roughly 25 percent of all Americans, it would appear that the majority’s patience is irreversibly exhausted.)

The most noteworthy aspects of his TV address were the things he omitted. He said nothing about how long those additional troops would stay in Iraq. He offered no evidence that the Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, would really take the crucial step of cracking down on the Shiite militias that are pivotal players in the sectarian civil war. All that Bush could offer us was Maliki’s “pledge” to do so (“Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated”). Bush said at one point that we “will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced,” but he didn’t say how he would respond if Maliki spends the year dragging his feet.

Much of the speech was devoted to cut-and-paste passages from the past. He said that our “victory” in Iraq (what victory?) would not look like the kind of victory that “our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.” But he’s used those lines many times before, notably in a speech back in December of 2004. Elsewhere, he extolled the building of democracy in Iraq – “the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy, by advancing liberty across a troubled region” – in words that seemingly had been lifted straight from the tattered neoconservative handbook. It’s debatable at this point whether the neo credo is broadly popular even within Bush’s Republican base.

Another passage was intended as a sign of Bush’s newfound humility: “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” Some in the press reported last night that Bush had admitted making blunders. Actually, he didn’t. He was merely employing the politician’s time-honored shell game of using the passive voice (“mistakes have been made,” somewhere at some point by somebody unspecified), then manfully accepting “responsibility,” only because that’s where the buck stops. He went passive again a few minutes later: “Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed…There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents.”

There were not enough American troops? Well, whose fault was that? Bush didn’t say. But we already know it was Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld – extolled recently by Bush’s vice president as the greatest defense secretary in history – who at the outset squelched the military brass who were urging more troops. Most notably Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, who did his urging up on Capitol Hill - and was subsequently nudged into early retirement.

Rhetorical passivity aside, one passage in the Bush speech was actually quite provocative. Consider this one, buried in paragraph 19: “Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

That sounds like Bush is prepared to widen the U.S. commitment in Iraq and take on the neighbors (as opposed to talking to those selfsame neighbors, as recommended by James Baker’s Iraq Study Group). That passage might also be read as a provocation to the Democratic Congress; perhaps he is daring the Democrats to contest his constititional authority to widen the war. Considering the fact that roughly 70 percent of Americans now oppose Bush on Iraq (according to the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll, conducted after his speech), it's at least clear that Bush, in his fealty to the "young democracy" abroad, appears to care little what most people think in the old democracy here at home.

Yet one does wonder whether he has the requisite fighting resources to do everything he apparently intends – or whether he is merely going to stretch the military even further, with no good results. It’s noteworthy that his 20,000-troop hike is actually only half of what the hawks at the American Enterprise Institute think tank originally recommended. Many military experts doubt that Bush’s number is remotely enough to help quell the Baghdad region violence (especially since, at any given moment, as many as 75 percent of those 20,000 soldiers are either sleeping, eating, or generally off duty). So, all told, a case can be made that Bush’s escalation is both too much and not enough.

No alternative proposals are emanating from the prospective GOP ’08 frontrunners. For the moment, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani are echoing rival John McCain’s escalation endorsement. This makes sense, politically. Most of the voters who still back Bush on the war happen to be the same folks who can be expected to vote heavily in the ’08 presidential primaries, particularly in often-pivotal South Carolina. These three candidates know sticking with Bush now is a no-lose proposition: If the “surge” somehow works, they get kudos from the base for being so supportive in the president’s time of need; if the “surge” flops, they get kudos for giving a failed lame duck the benefit of the doubt.

(Although, interestingly, candidate Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who is a religious-right favorite, declared yesterday that he opposes the “surge.” Politically, he might be betting that even the base is getting increasingly fed up.)

Some of Bush’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are discomfited at the moment. Those people have to run for office again in 2008. Norman Coleman, the Minnesota senator who is up for re-election in a blue state, assailed the Bush plan yesterday on the Senate floor. He is a barometer of moderate GOP sentiment, along with perhaps a dozen others, including Maine’s Olympia Snowe, Oregon’s Gordon Smith, and Ohio's George Voinovich (who today told Condoleezza Rice, "You're going to have to do a much better job" and said that Bush could no longer count on his support). These senators are ripe pickings for the majority Democrats, who are readying a non-binding resolution condemning Bush’s move, and who fully expect to split the GOP ranks and draw enough Republicans to further isolate Bush politically.

But that strategy is mere symbolism; Bush can theoretically kick the can down the road even if Gallup finds that his popularity has dwindled to Laura and his dog. Bush knows this, which helps explain why, in his speech last night, he threw down the gauntlet to the congressional Democrats. He argued that if U.S. troops are sent home, as “many” want him to do, the result would be “mass killings on an unimaginable scale.”

There are reports today that the Democrats, using the power of the purse, might seek to withhold “surge” money, or to attach conditions to such money. At the very least, beginning today, the Democrats will conduct investigatory committee hearings on the war - focusing on what comes next, and trying to get straight answers from this administration.

But, at the end of the day, and without letting Bush off the hook for the disaster that he has created, the Democrats, in the longer term, will still need to address the challenge that Bush posed last night: If the “surge” is a bad idea, and if staying in Iraq is a bad idea, are they prepared to simply wash their hands of the bloodbath that may well ensue?

Setting the stage for the urge to surge

Operation Iraqi Freedom
Mission Accomplished
Stay the Course
Adapt to Win
Plan for Victory
New Way Forward

The first five slogans are inoperative. But tonight, in yet another allegedly pivotal speech on Iraq, President Bush will declare that the sixth slogan is now operative.

With scant seconds remaining on the game clock, and facing fourth down and 50 on his own five-yard line, Bush is determined to throw the ball deep and simply hope for the best. But at this point the odds are heavily stacked against an immaculate reception. (OK, that exhausts my ability to employ football metaphors. Everyone else seems to be using the poker analogy.)

It does take a fair amount of gumption to decree a new troop escalation, in the face of deep skepticism or outright opposition from, among others, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Abizaid, British ally Tony Blair, gung-ho conservatives like retired Lt. Col. Oliver North (“Sending more U.S. combat troops is simply sending more targets”), the majority of the people in red-state Utah, the majority of ’06 midterm election voters (who mistakenly assumed that their votes would sway the Decider), at least 10 Republican senators, and a landslide majority of the American people (who are currently telling pollsters that Bush is wrong).

Therefore, one cannot reasonably imagine how the president expects to achieve victory in the art of public persuasion. His spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Bush needs to “bring the public back to this war and restore public confidence in support for the mission,” but it’s hard to see how he can pull that off, given the fact that at this point most Americans either disbelieve his arguments, or have simply tuned him out.

And don’t just take my word for it. Read this verdict: “He has little credibility left on Iraq.” That’s the word from David Keene, veteran conservative Washington activist and the longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Keene wonders whether the public will be receptive to Bush, given the fact that it “has heard too many different and conflicting reasons for our initial invasion.” (Such as the purported Saddam-al Qaeda connection, which was dismissed by the 9/11 Commission; and the purported weapons of mass destruction stockpile, which was disproved by factual reality.)

Keene is also asking himself “why dumping more young men and women into a disastrous mess will do anything but make it worse.” Indeed, lest we forget (or not even realize), Bush in the recent past has tried several troop “surges,” none of which have worked – primarily because his friend the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is closely allied to the top Shiite warlord in the ongoing sectarian civil war.

Those Americans who are still tuning in Bush might well be advised tonight to listen closely to his remarks about Maliki. It is clear that no last-ditch U.S. troop escalation can begin to turn the tide unless the so-called “unity government” in the “young democracy” demonstrates that it is truly willing to take serious political steps for peace. For this to happen, Maliki would have to take on his political benefactor, cleric Muqtada Sadr, who runs one of the most violent Shiite militias.

Is Maliki really willing to do this, after balking so often in the past? Has he communicated this to Bush? Can Bush persuade TV viewers tonight that, this time, things will really be different? And how can Bush assure us that the United States is now imposing strict “benchmarks” on Iraq, at the same time that he keeps insisting that Iraq is “a sovereign nation?”

There are other questions that Bush won’t address tonight. To wit: If this “surge” doesn’t work, what’s plan B? (Or, perhaps more accurately, Plan Z.) It would be valuable to know the answer, since it does not appear that Bush can be deterred from his chosen course of action, notwithstanding the thumbs-down verdict in the voting booth. The potential downside of being a Decider, acting in defiance of overwhelming public sentiment, is that he risks permanent imprisonment within the bubble of his own making.

And don’t just take my word for it. As conservative commentator Tod Lindberg said yesterday in the Washington Times, the Bush escalation plan is his “last stand," and “if it fails, there will be no one else to blame.”

I withhold the balance of my remarks until after Bush’s TV address tonight.

Fresh evidence of the McCain recalibration

As part of our continuing series on John McCain’s politically calculated conversion to Bush Republican orthodoxy, consider his interview the other day on Bloomberg Television.

Political commentator Al Hunt brought up the issue of Iraq, and asked the alleged maverick whether, in this era of severe budget deficits, he would support raising taxes on some wealthy Americans in order to help pay for this war, which is now costing America (or, more specifically, our children and their children) roughly $2 billion a week. Here’s how McCain replied:

“I’m not sure what the point would be. I would ask them to make other sacrifices, but I’m not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war.”

I'm not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war….There it is: the Bush orthodoxy in action, the argument that we can fight a major war and still have a free lunch at home – a concept that is unique in American history. Taxes were hiked during the Vietnam war, during the Korean war…but let’s go farther back:

Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, raised taxes on the wealthy in order to finance his war; he did this, in part, by introducing the tax on inherited wealth (the same tax that Bush and his allies have long been trying to shelve). Lincoln also signed the first bill introducing the income tax, responding (in the words of author Steven Weisman) to a “widespread demand in the North for sacrifice, especially from the wealthy.”

The inheritance tax expired after the war, only to be brought back four decades later by Republican president William McKinley, who needed it to help pay for the brief Spanish-American war. And the top rate of the income tax was raised precipitously by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1917, to help pay America’s 19-month tab for World War I; as Wilson put it, “The industry of this generation should pay the bills of this generation.”

And a quarter-century after that, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate even higher. In a State of the Union speech, delivered as war clouds loomed, he said: “I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes….I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program to be paid for from (more) taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes.”

But McCain knows that if he was to quote FDR, and suggest that the amount of sacrifice in wartime should be tied to one’s “ability to pay” – in other words, if he was to behave as an actual maverick – he would be toast in the 2008 Republican primaries. If he was to suggest that rich Americans should actually pony up to help pay more for the war that he so vocally defends, just as rich Americans have done in the past, he would quickly lose the support of all those well-heeled Bush campaign donors whom he has been assiduously courting.

Better to let them keep their money, politically speaking. Indeed, they have gotten even richer during the Bush wartime era. In a report released the other day by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, households in the top one percent of earnings have fared best from the Bush tax cuts. Their effective individual tax rates dropped from 24.2 percent in 2000 to 19.6 percent in 2004 – roughly twice the rate cut that went to middle-income families.

There once was a time when McCain was known as a budget-balancing conservative. During the 2000 GOP primary season, when he was competing against Bush for the nomination, he repeatedly contended that Bush’s massive tax cut plan was too big and too risky for the economy; indeed, he countered with a more modest tax cut plan of his own, one that would have directed most of the savings to families with modest incomes. And in 2001, on the Senate floor, he even voted against the first wave of Bush tax cuts.

But many rich GOP donors and Bush loyalists have very long memories; in their eyes, McCain’s past behavior is proof that the man can’t be trusted. Hence his overriding desire to curry their favor during this crucial pre-primary phase. Hence his declaration to Al Hunt that the notion of taxing the rich to pay for a costly war is some kind of alien concept (in his words, “I’m not sure that that’s connected”). Hence his acceptance of the Bush Republican proposition that it is preferable to shift the financial burden for the war on terror to those who today are too young to be taxpayers, and to those not yet born.

It was Woodrow Wilson, 90 years ago, who said of his generation of Americans that “the war must be paid for and it is they who must pay for it, and if the burden is justly distributed…they will carry it cheerfully and with a sort of solemn pride.” But clearly such words are of no use to McCain. In his wooing of the GOP establishment, invoking historical precedents will get him nowhere. His first priority right now is simply to get with the program.

How will the Democrats define their spine?

Even though my latest print column focuses on the Republicans who fear that their leader’s impending troop escalation plan might be a political loser, the news this morning is really about the Democrats.

Because there are indications that they might be growing a spine. Depending on how you define it.

The Democrats are still sending mixed messages about the extent to which they are prepared to contest President Bush’s “New Way Forward,” as evidenced by their myriad comments on the Sunday talk shows, but there was no mistaking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s declaration of defiance. On CBS, she said that, while the Democrats will continue to finance the troops already on the ground in Iraq, they will not be so quick to finance the additional troops that Bush seeks to dispatch:

“If the president chooses to escalate the war, in his budget request, we want to see a distinction between what is there to support the troops who are there now….The American people and the Congress support those troops. We will not abandon them. But if the president wants to add to this mission, he is going to have to justify it, and this is new for him because up until now the Republican Congress has given him a blank check with no oversight, no standards, no conditions.”

Pelosi’s comments echo those made last week by her close ally, John Murtha, the new House defense appropriations chairman, when he said that he intends to “fence the funding.” There is also talk in Democratic circles of holding up the troop escalation money (in the form of an amendment) unless or until Bush proves that it would be well spent.

My translation: The Democrats are not willing to de-fund the war itself (a move demanded by many on the antiwar left), because they do not want to risk being tagged down the road as the party that “lost” Iraq. Fairly or not, this is what happened to the party in the wake of Vietnam. The congressional Democrats in the mid-‘70s cut funding during the last years of that conflict, as a U.S. pullout became imminent, thereby allowing conservatives to claim that the liberal wimps had “lost” Vietnam. Nor does the new gang want to open themselves to the old Karl Rove charge that Democrats don’t back our fighting men and women in the aggregate.

The new Democratic leaders don’t want to take that bait on Iraq. But Pelosi apparently is willing to carve out Bush’s troop escalation plan as a separate and distinct issue – and to subject it to protracted scrutiny, by using the prime weapon that Democrats now have at their disposal: oversight. A slew of House and Senate committees seem primed to examine the Bush plan in detail, and to assess whether more troops can actually make a positive difference – or whether Bush would be merely putting more young lives at peril, in another desperate bid to salvage the signature initiative of his presidency.

It’s clear that Bush, notwithstanding the “thumpin’” that he says he took in the ’06 elections, is daring the newly empowered Democrats to defy him, perhaps in the hopes that they will overreach and play heavily to their liberal antiwar base. Pelosi’s comments yesterday indicate, however, that the Democrats feel more comfortable focusing on the broadly unpopular troop escalation option (which is supported by only 12 percent of Americans nationally, according to the latest Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll; and which is now supported by only 44 percent of the citizens of Utah, the reddest state in the land.)

In other words, by opposing the troop escalation plan, Democrats are practicing safe centrist politics.

Stopping that plan, however, may be another matter entirely. And here we come to the Democrats’ mixed message. While Pelosi was promising serious scrutiny on CBS, Senate Foreign Committee chairman Joe Biden was suggesting on NBC’s Meet the Press that the Democrats really don’t have the clout to block Bush at the end of the day:

“We have a standing army with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. You can’t go in and, like a tinker toy, and play around and say, ‘You can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece’…he’ll be able to keep those troops there forever constitutionally if he wants to.”

Tim Russert then asked whether the Democrats could legislatively cap the number of troops in Iraq. Biden replied: “Because it’s very difficult to—it’s constitutionally questionable whether or not you can do that. I think it is unconstitutional to say, ‘We’re going to tell you can go, but we’re going to micromanage the war.’ When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces, when you authorize them, to be able to use the forces.”

Translation: Top Democrats differ on how they would define “spine.”

Biden – a newly-declared ’08 presidential candidate - essentially thinks there is no single definition (“no party out of power ever has a congressional voice that is a unified voice on a particular party”). He basically undercut Pelosi’s declaration that Democrats would substantively fight Bush over the troop escalation issue. Biden clearly has no desire to draw that line in the sand (“there’s not much I can do about it”). Even though he is planning a month of hearings on the Senate side, he sees his role as a public educator (he says he plans to “speak out as loudly as I can”), and maybe a moral persuader (he says he has drafted “a resolution of disapproval”).

One can detect the evolving Democratic balancing act. They will combine tough talk (Pelosi) with caveats about the public expecting too much (Biden). They will stage a slew of committee hearings and submit Bush to the oversight that his Republican allies failed to provide, but, at the same time, the Democrats really don’t want to get into the weeds and grapple with Bush about solutions. They don’t want to share the ownership of this war. They want Iraq to remain Bush’s war, and if somebody on Capitol Hill is really going to pull the plug on Bush, they want Bush’s GOP allies to do it.

Biden even said it: “The only way this is going to change…is when a majority of (GOP) colleagues, Republicans, say to the president, ‘Mr. President, enough. We are not going to support you anymore,’ that when the president will begin to change his policy.”

As I indicated in my Sunday print column, a small number of Republicans (mostly those who are nervously eyeing 2008) have already begun to dissent or waver. But Democrats would be wrong to assume that a critical mass of Republicans will bail them out. In all probability, Democrats will still need to define their own spine.

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Speaking of the Republicans, I wrote again yesterday about how alleged centrist John McCain is risking his standing among independent voters by pushing for the Bush troop escalation plan. Here is another fresh take on that topic.

Insufficiently conservative candidates, and military musical chairs

This is usually the time of year when Democrats wallow in despair; witness the election aftermaths in January ’01, January ’03 and January ’05. But politics in America is cyclical, and today, with the Democrats running Capitol Hill and with the lame-duck liberator of Iraq posting 30 percent popularity, it’s the Republican conservatives who have to hunker down for a winter of discontent.

And what better way to gauge that discontent than to take a snapshot of the fast-evolving Republican ’08 presidential race? Social and religious conservatives basically control the nomination process, by voting in disproportionate numbers in the early primaries– yet, right now, there doesn’t seem to be a true conservative in the top tier of prospective candidates.

Hence, one of the top political stories of 2007: Can GOP conservatives make peace with candidates whom they don’t entirely trust? Or will they signal to other potential aspirants that the market is still wide open for a true-believer?

I thought about this yesterday, while noting that Mitt Romney had filed his “exploratory” campaign paperwork. Romney, now the ex-governor of Massachusetts, is clearly one of those first-tier guys. He has the money and the organization and the hair and the teeth and the jaw to make a serious run. And he has been making all the requisite moves, such as telling conservatives in early primary states that he too views gay marriage as a Trojan horse that would destroy American life from the inside.

The problem for Romney, however, is that a lot of conservatives suspect he is just saying these things in order to get the nomination. (They may be right). This week, for instance, new concerns were raised about whether he’s just another flip-flopping pandering pol. Deal Hudson, a conservative Catholic scholar who has also advised the Bush White House, detailed Romney’s long gay-friendly gubernatorial record, then wrote on his blog: “Romney’s recent conversion to pro-life, pro-family conservatism contrasts dramatically with his public record of speaking and governing as a social moderate or liberal, routinely backing down when the going gets tough, and accomplishing few conservative successes.”

One Romney quote, in particular, keeps circulating in the conservative camp. When he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. senator in 1994, Romney told a gay group that he, not Ted Kennedy, would be the best advocate for their interests: "If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern. My opponent cannot do this. I can and will."

Meanwhile, a top conservative activist in Michigan (an early ’08 primary state) is now openly attacking Romney. Gary Glenn, who runs the American Family Association of Michigan, predicted: “There are going to be more and more pro-family legislators who had bought the Romney campaign's line of being supportive of our values, and that's proven not to be the case in terms of his record. I think you're going to have more and more people in Michigan - and beyond - disassociate themselves from this campaign."

But would conservative Romney defectors gravitate to Rudy Giuliani (assuming he runs)? That’s theoretically possible, as long as they overlook the fact that he supports gay rights, supports abortion rights, and that, during his breakup with one of his previous wives (the one who accused him in legal papers of “notorious adultery”), he roomed in Manhattan with a gay guy. Oh yeah, and he also has marched in gay parades and hosted gay pride breakfasts at Gracie Mansion.

But if conservatives stiff Romney and ignore Giuliani, are they prepared to warm to John McCain? Certainly, he has been slavishly pursuing them for the better part of two years now. But they’re still ticked that he voted in the Senate against a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and that, during his 2000 bid for the White House, he referred to certain religious right leaders as “forces of evil.” They suspect that his current wooing strategy is insincere.

They may be right. I highly recommend a new profile of McCain, which appears in the current issue of Vanity Fair. One priceless McCain quote stands out. But first, a little context: One ’08 conservative litmus test is border security. The GOP base wants to get tough on illegal immigrants by fencing off the southwestern U.S. border, and it wants a candidate who really believes that this is the right thing to do.

Anyway, McCain was speaking to some businessmen in Wisconsin last fall when the fence issue came up. He quickly acknowledged that the GOP base wants the fence. Then he said, “I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."

Clearly, this is not a man who is lusting to move rightward in his heart. And if the conservatives conclude the same, they will have to look in the second tier for a candidate. Maybe to Newt Gingrich, who is reportedly weighing a late entry. What better candidate for conservatives than the architect of the ’94 conservative revolution?

But, on the morality front, isn’t Newt the same guy who, two wives ago, served divorce papers to wife number one while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery?

What a year this is shaping up to be.

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And next week should be newsworthy as well. President Bush is expected to unveil his troop escalation plan for Iraq. As we gird ourselves for that, consider these two recent statements:

There’s no question (that) locally, more troops will have some effect on the levels of violence, but whether more U.S. troops for a sustained period will get us where we're going faster is an open question.

That’s a pretty tepid assessment of the “surge” option – courtesy of General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, speaking last October at a Pentagon briefing.

But now he’s leaving. His retirement, originally slated for next spring or summer, has been moved up to now.

And there’s this: I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the core commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, “in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?” And they all said no. And the reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.

That was Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, testifying on Capitol Hill two months ago…But now he’s leaving too.

Translation: Bush remains willing to listen to the wisdom of his commanders in the field, as long as their wisdom is in sync with his own. If their wisdom displeases him, they can always be replaced. That should at least reassure the 20 percent of Americans who currently believe that Bush has a clear plan for Iraq.

Trouble on the left flank

Just hearing all those antiwar protestors chanting repetitive slogans and shouting down the speakers so that nobody could get a word in edgewise…well, it was like something out of 1968. I was waiting for somebody to sing something by the Jefferson Airplane.

So it went yesterday on Capitol Hill, as a coterie of left-leaning insurgents led by Cindy Sheehan sought to inform the Democrats that the new congressional majority had not moved quickly enough to end the Iraq war, even though the Democrats had already been in power for...nope, they weren't even in power yet. This is precisely the sort of political headache that governing Democrats will be facing over the next two years: a chronic restiveness on their left flank, with the ongoing potential for great embarrassment.

When new House Democratic leaders, fronted by congressman Rahm Emanuel, attempted at a press briefing yesterday to outline their initial legislative priorities, none of which included Iraq, they were serenaded into silence by a few dozen citizens who intoned, “De-escalate/investigate/troops home now.” Emanuel and his colleagues decided to leave the room and try again later, essentially ceding the fact that that their free-speech rights had been preempted.

Some Democrats, including the ubiquitous cable TV talking head Lawrence O’Donnell, insist that incidents such as can only help the Democrats. O’Donnell said last night that the Democrats in Congress come off as “sensible” centrists whenever folks on the left behave in an unruly manner. In other words, middle-of-the-road Americans will surely conclude that, if the left is ticked off at the Democrats, then the Democrats must be doing something right.

I’m not sure I buy that, probably because I’m old enough to remember how “middle Americans” (as they were called circa 1970) turned against the national Democrats, precisely because they saw the party and the left-leaning antiwar crowd as one and the same.

As conservative blogger and lawyer John Hinderaker put it last night: “I think you had to be there in the 60s and early 70s to fully appreciate the damage the antiwar movement did to the Democratic Party. The party, in fact, has never entirely recovered. The Democrats had an ambiguous relationship with the anti-American activists of that era. The activists focused their ire mainly on the Democrats - think Chicago 1968 - but at the same time, they largely made their home in that party. The idea that history might be repeating itself must appall the Democrats' leadership.” (Obviously, Hinderaker hopes that this history will indeed repeat itself. But his historical recap is not wrong.)

The Democrats on Capitol Hill clearly face a difficult challenge. The liberal activists within their ranks are anxious to advance what they see as the moral rightness of their positions, notably a de-funding of the Iraq war. As Sheehan said yesterday, “These are not requests. These are demands.” And as Deborah Sweet, who runs a pro-impeachment group, said the other day, “We've been told for many years, 12 years now, 'Wait until we get in power. Then you'll see things change.’ We'll give them a couple of months or a few weeks to see what they come up with, but if they don't do something very decisive around the war and these other issues, I think there will be trouble."

But the Democrats basically define politics as the art of the possible, the willingness to accept half a loaf. Hence, the opening 100-hour blitz doesn’t mention Iraq, because the Democrats would rather kick off their tenure with issues that are popular not only with most Democrats but even some moderate Republicans: new ethics rules, a higher minimum wage, lower student loan interest rates, and lower prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients. Democratic leaders have calculated that, if they suddenly adopt an out-now stance on Iraq, or if they try to impeach Bush, such moves would merely imperil the newly-elected Democrats who won seats in swing suburban districts in red states like Indiana and Kansas.

The Democrats broadened their tent in the ’06 elections; they captured 59 percent of all independent swing voters. Whether they can hold those voters over the next two years, while satisfying the shouters on their left flank, is another issue entirely. They probably can’t snag the White House in ’08 unless they find a way.

Some civics tips from the lame duck

President Bush has a byline today. In a Wall Street Journal guest column, he offers some tips to the new Democratic Congress on how to best govern effectively. One might argue that this gesture is a tad cheeky, given the fact that Bush was humiliated in the ’06 elections, precisely because he and his fellow governing Republicans were judged to be failures at governing effectively. But even a lame duck president retains the power to cajole, even if the prospects for success are diminished.

The problem for Bush is that his Journal piece contains a number of howlers that are guaranteed merely to bemuse the newly empowered Democrats. For instance:

Together, we have a chance to serve the American people by solving the complex problems that many don't expect us to tackle, let alone solve, in the partisan environment of today's Washington. To do that, however, we can't play politics as usual.

One big reason why the GOP coughed up both congressional chambers is because independent swing voters viewed the Bush and the Republican Congress as responsible for “the partisan environment of today’s Washington,” and for the ineffective governance that results from “politics as usual.” As recently as late summer, Bush and his top surrogates were still suggesting that Democratic skepticism about the setbacks in Iraq was tantamount to surrender. And I don’t recall any protests from Bush when the Republicans were busy painting their Democratic opponents as coddlers of Osama bin Laden (as happened to Georgia Senator Max Cleland, after he objected to the proposed employe work rules in the new Homeland Security Department).

I believe that when America is willing to use her influence abroad, the American people are safer and the world is more secure.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But the election ’06 verdict against Bush was that he mismanaged this important general principle, to disastrous effect. Nobody in Congress, in either party, objects to the notion that America should exercise clout to protect its own people and those of other nations. The problem is how that clout is to be exercised, and as this new exhaustive report illustrates, the incompetence of the Bush administration in Iraq, on multiple fronts, is now beyond empirical dispute. The challenge for congressional Democrats, as they get ready to hold hearings on Iraq, is to demonstrate (if possible) that they would be more effective stewards of that crucial national security principle.

I believe government closest to the people is more responsive and accountable.

This, from the Republican president who has presided over one of the most massive federal government expansions in history – and whose own administration has worked assiduously at eluding accountability, mostly by stiffing Congress. Big example: the true costs in Iraq have kept out of the regular budget process (with the complicity of the governing GOP), thereby minimizing scrutiny. Smaller example: Last winter, after Bush defended his warrantless domestic surveillance program by contending that "appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed," the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service promptly faulted Bush for failing to inform the full membership of the House and Senate intelligence committees – and thereby acting in a manner "inconsistent with the law."

And it’s hard to imagine that the Democrats will take seriously Bush’s newfound devotion to “responsive” and “accountable” government, in light of the fact that he didn’t insist on it before. Best example: Back in the ‘90s, the GOP Congress of that era reportedly took 140 hours of testimony on whether President Clinton had used his Christmas card list to find potential campaign donors. By contrast, in 2004 and 2005, House Republicans took only 12 hours of testimony about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

One important message I took away from the election is that people want to end the secretive process by which Washington insiders are able to slip into legislation billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects that have never been reviewed or voted on by Congress. I'm glad Senator Robert Byrd and Congressman Dave Obey--the Democrats who will lead the appropriations process in the new Congress--heard that message, too, and have indicated they will refrain from including additional earmarks in the continuing resolution for this fiscal year. But we can and should do more. It's time Congress give the president a line-item veto. And today I will announce my own proposal to end this dead-of-the-night process and substantially cut the earmarks passed each year.

Bush underscored this theme this morning, declaring in a statement at the White House that he would like to see the number of earmarks cut in half during 2007. A laudable goal – and very convenient, politically speaking. After saying nothing for years about the burgeoning earmark practices of his Republican brethren (there were 3000 earmarks during the 1996 GOP Congress – and 13,000 in 2006), and after never vetoing a single spending bill that would have at least shelved some of the sweetheart deals, Bush declares that he wants those lawmakers to knock it off – now that the Democrats are running the show.

The Democrats would probably be well advised to curb the practice anyway - in order to mollify independent swing voters, not the president who has suddenly gotten religion on this issue.

The majority party in Congress gets to pass the bills it wants. The minority party, especially where the margins are close, has a strong say in the form bills take.

Just some advice right out of a political science textbook. No doubt those lines are intended as a warning to the ruling Democrats that the GOP should be given “a strong say” in the legislative process – which is a bit rich, considering the track record of recent years. The minority Democrats were systematically excluded from the sausage-making process; often, they never saw substantive legislation until the last moments prior to passage.

As congressional expert Thomas Mann said recently about the GOP Congress, “Regular order - the set of rules, norms and traditions designed to ensure a fair and transparent process - was the first casualty. The results: No serious deliberation. No meaningful oversight of the executive. A culture of corruption. And grievously flawed policy formulation and implementation.”

The Democrats are promising not to exact revenge by humbling the GOP in a similar fashion. As I mentioned this morning on a WHYY radio show, their prime goal is to demonstrate that they can connect with the average voter by governing effectively. They are well aware of this political challenge, in the absence of any civics tips from a lame-duck president.

Farewells to Saddam and Jerry

Before we ring in the new, let’s review a pair of ’06 holiday season deaths:

Saddam Hussein...When the old tyrant took his final swing, the Bush White House barely mustered a response. What a contrast from three Decembers ago, when Hussein was yanked out of his spider hole. Back then, President Bush devoted an Oval Office TV address to the occasion, declaring that Hussein’s capture was “crucial to the rise of a free Iraq,” and a signal that “the United States of America will not relent until this war is won.”

This time, by contrast, the White House merely released a terse written statement, although it did repeat the old mantra that Hussein’s death was another “milestone” on the road to freedom. (Actually, there have been many Bush-described “milestones” on the road to sectarian civil war.)

The muted Bush response signifies, however, that the administration is well aware that any fresh display of triumphalism would not sell well with those Americans (a majority, in fact) who now view the Iraq war as a mistake. Indeed, triumphalism probably would not have sold well with the troops either, since (according to an underrreported Military Times poll) it now appears that only 35 percent of active-duty soldiers support Bush's prosecution of the war.

And it certainly would have been bad salesmanship for Bush to hail Hussein’s death as a great victory – while continuing to plan for a troop escalation that will, in reality, demonstrate that the death of the Bush family's longtime foe has changed absolutely nothing on the ground. Which is apparently what most soldiers believe as well, because only 38 percent told the Military Times poll that they would support escalation.

Gerald Ford...Forget all the satirical shorthand about this accidental president – the physical stumblebum, the Nixon loyalist who handed Nixon a get-out-of-jail-free card, the clumsy debater who insisted that the Soviets did not dominate communist Poland, the leader who tried to combat inflation by wearing a Whip Inflation Now button, the humble guy who really did toast his own English muffins.

What’s most important about Ford – and this could not be truly discerned at the time, back in 1976 – is his historic status as the last GOP leader to serve in the White House prior to the rise of the Republican right. Indeed, as a sitting president, he was nearly derailed in the 1976 GOP primaries by an upstart named Ronald Reagan, who, at the time, was in the process of harnessing the grassroots conservative movement that rose from the ashes of the 1964 Barry Goldwater debacle.

Ford was a man of the Democratic House; as a longstanding congressman in the GOP minority, he had long been a deal-maker and compromiser with the liberals who ruled the roost in those days. As president he even named, as his veep, Nelson Rockefeller, that pillar of the old GOP eastern establishment who had been booed at the Goldwater convention. Ford’s general profile didn’t cut it with the Reagan loyalists, who advocated a more combative conservatism - promoting a more hawkish anti-communist stance abroad, rejecting deals with Democrats at home, and inveighing against ‘60s social "permissivism."

Pressure from the New Right (as it was known then) eventually forced Ford to dump Rocky from the ’76 ticket and replace him with the scrappier Bob Dole, but none of this slowed the inexorable momentum of the Reagan movement; even though it came up short by barely 100 delegates in ’76, it triumphed four years later. As Jonathan Martin of the National Review writes, “(Ford’s) spirited and successful campaign to bat back Reagan’s insurgency marked the last stand of the moderates’ hold of the GOP. No Republican has since won the party’s nod without the backing of the conservative wing of the party.”

It’s noteworthy that Ford in his last years became increasingly outspoken about the conservative wing; in interviews, he described himself as a supporter of abortion rights, he criticized religious conservatives, and in 2004 he told Bob Woodward that the war in Iraq was wrong. Ex-presidents always tend to their legacies, and it’s clear that Ford – who, during the ‘60s, had tried to impeach liberal Supreme Court justice William Douglas over an article that Douglas had written for a semi-racy journal - was increasingly anxious to distance himself from the right-wingers who had won control of his party.

But Ford, at the end, never did address the big question: Would the Republicans have dominated national politics for a generation, starting in 1980, if they hadn’t rejected moderation and moved sharply to the right?

No doubt there are many conservatives today who will stipulate that Ford was a good and decent man. But winning comes first; the Reagan forces tapped into an angry conservative populism, and turned it into votes. And even though the conservative movement that rattled Ford in 1976 might well fail in the presidential election of 2008, consider its recent track record: The GOP is 5-2 since 1980, and it can be argued that Ford’s socially moderate, fiscally-prudent Republicanism would never have pulled that off.

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So, 2007:

The Democrats take over Congress on Thursday. I’ll talk about it tomorrow morning on WHYY radio (90.9 FM, the NPR outlet in Philadelphia).

From 10 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, I’m slated to be a guest on “Radio Times,” along with Susan Milligan, who covers Congress for The Boston Globe. You can listen live here.

Party on!

Barring some unexpected, earthshaking news (President Bush declares, "It's all my fault that Iraq is a disaster of historic proportions," or Hillary Clinton declares, "The American people are sick to death of Bill and me, so therefore I will not run in 2008"), I don't plan to post again until next Tuesday, Jan. 2. Hey, it's the holidays.

Meanwhile... in my final '07 Sunday print column, I did explore what I consider to be the Democrats' prime political challenge of 2008: the need to demonstrate to swing voters that the party is serious about defeating global terrorism. Indeed, many Democrats are talking about this, as evidenced here, here, and here.

Meanwhile II...an emailer argued this morning that Hillary will be thwarted in '08 because the American people are tired of voting all the time for Bushes and Clintons. Which brings to mind a great trivia question: When was the last time that neither national ticket featured a Bush or a Clinton? Answer: It was so long ago, disco music was hip. We're talking 1976.

Anyway, see you in the new year. Party on!

Hillary's electability: conventional wisdom trumps an inconvenient poll

As I mentioned in a print column not long ago, the conventional wisdom persists that prospective presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is not electable in 2008. Since I consider that assumption to be highly flawed, I was therefore eager to read the current edition of Newsweek, which features a cover story on the same topic.

I finally made time to read it last night. The article was quite skeptical about Clinton’s chances, citing the considerable “anti-Hillary sentiment in the country. The key passage: “A recent Marist Poll showed that 47 percent of respondents nationwide ‘definitely will not consider’ voting for her, a percentage that alarms some former aides to President Clinton. Those numbers will need to change for Democratic primary voters -- now comfortable with assessing electability -- to move her way.”

But there’s a big problem with the Newsweek story: The magazine had, in its possession, the results of its own new national poll…showing that, when Clinton is matched against John McCain, she currently beats him by seven points; and that, when she is matched against Rudy Giuliani, she beats him by one point; and that, when she is matched against Mitt Romney, she slaughters him by 26 points.

And yet Newsweek decided not to include this information in its skeptical take on Clinton’s electability.

I know about these poll results only because Newsweek shared its poll results in a separate press release ballyhooing the cover story. Check out the release here. You will need to scroll 60 percent of the way down the page to the fine print.

Hence, my question: Why would Newsweek run a Clinton electability story without including its own latest poll numbers?

It turns out that others were wondering as well. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham gave media watchdog Greg Sargent an explanation a few days ago: “(The Newsweek poll) numbers were eight, nine, 10 days old. This poll was in the field on Wednesday and Thursday (Dec. 6 and 7). The numbers informed our reporting; we routinely poll on questions that we may not end up specifically citing in the issue.”

That defense doesn’t hold water. If he was so concerned that his own Hillary-favorable poll numbers were “old,” then why did the story cite Hillary-averse poll numbers that were even older? The Marist survey, described in the story s “recent,” was actually conducted in late November.

Meacham also said suggested that “horse race” polls, pitting candidates against each other, are essentially meaningless at this point, and hence not necessarily worth citing. True enough, they do need to be viewed skeptically. But it nevertheless seems worth noting that Hillary Clinton’s horse race numbers have markedly improved. She trailed McCain throughout 2006 in the early match-up surveys – yet now, according to Newsweek, she is ahead. (And another new poll, this one by CNN, now shows her dead even with McCain and two points up on Giuliani.)

I’d suggest two reasons for this potential trend that Newsweek did not find relevent to its story: Starting with the elections on Nov. 7, the overall political landscape has shifted in favor of the Democrats, and as a result a sizeable share of voters now seem willing to view Clinton more favorably. Secondly, McCain in particular appears to have lost some ground with independent voters, which should be no surprise, given his strong rightward tilt and his support for a U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq that draws support from roughly 12 percent of Americans.

The point is, political moods are fluid and changeable (obviously, they could change again), and for those reasons it would appear that Newsweek missed an opportunity to add necessary nuance to its own work. Especially since it had paid for those poll numbers. But its glaring omission will only feed the flawed convention wisdom about Clinton’s purportedly high hurdle.

He was for deferring to the military, before he was against it

In my Tuesday post, I revisited an ’05 speech by President Bush, to demonstrate the perishable quality of his Iraq rhetoric. And today, in the wake of the latest news about his contemplated troop “surge,” I will demonstrate again that what he said in the past apparently means little today.

Remember how he has always said that, on the issue of troop levels in Iraq, he defers to the wisdom of his military commanders in the field? Here’s just a recent sampling:

Dec. 4, 2006: “The force size will depend on conditions on the ground, and upon the recommendations of our commanders on the ground, absolutely.”

April 6, 2006: “I remember coming up in the Vietnam War and it seemed like that there was a -- during the Vietnam War, there was a lot of politicization (in Washington) of the military decisions. That's not going to be the case under my administration.” And if the military tells him that it can live with more troops or fewer troops, “that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Jan. 1, 2006: “I'm going to continue to rely upon those commanders, such as General Casey…(to) determine the number of troops we have on the ground in Iraq.”

June 28, 2005: “Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.”

April 22, 2004, via flak Scott McClellan: “He looks to our commanders in the theater to make (troop) determinations, in terms of what is needed.”

Well, apparently Bush was in favor of deferring to his military leaders before he was against it. Because in his year-end press conference yesterday, while discussing the potential for a troop “surge” (one that is reportedly opposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the soon-to-be-retiring Gen. John Abizaid, and perhaps by other commanders in the field), Bush declined to repeat what he has always said before, about deferring to military opinion.

This time, all he said was this: “The opinion of my commanders is very important. They are bright, capable, smart people whose opinion matters to me a lot."

But the killer quote came from this anonymous Bush official, speaking to The Washington Post: “He (Bush) has never left the decision to commanders. He is the commander in chief. But he has said he will listen to those commanders when making these decisions. That hasn't changed.” (In other words, drop all previous Bush statements into the Orwellian memory hole. The new talking point is: He doesn’t “continue to rely” on the commanders to determine troop levels at all…in fact, he has never continued to rely on the commanders.)

Anyway, in political terms, Bush’s problem isn’t with the commanders. If he overrules their counsel, they’ll zip it and obey. No, his problem will be keeping his restive fellow Republicans in line. Unlike Bush, they still have to run for re-election, and they don’t want his Iraq debacle to be hung around their necks while he goes home to plan his presidential library.

A couple Fridays ago, for instance, I mentioned that GOP Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, who has to run again in ’08, had eviscerated Bush in a Senate floor speech, contending that the president’s war strategy in Iraq “may even be criminal.” I suggested that Smith probably would be joined by other Republicans down the road. Now he has, at least on the “surge” issue.

Yesterday, GOP Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota – you guessed it, he also has to run again in ’08 – announced that he would "stand against" a troop increase, because “I think it would create more targets. I think we would put more life at risk.”

When these kinds of Republicans go public in this manner, it’s a true sign that the wheels have come off. Ditto Rich Lowry, the conservative commentator. He just wrote a piece (hat tip to Howie Kurtz on this one) basically acknowledging that the mainstream media…drum roll…has accurately reported on the dire state of affairs in Iraq, and that his conservative brethren, who have “lost touch with reality in Iraq,” should learn how to deal with it. The last three grafs go to Lowry:

“Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war….

“The ‘good news’ that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war….

“(R)ealism is essential in any war, and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources. Conservatives need to realize that something is not dubious just because it’s reported by the New York Times, and that the media ultimately will be wrong about Iraq only if - fully acknowledging how bad it is there- the Bush administration takes bold steps to reverse the tide.”

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Meanwhile, is there any room on the next Saturday Night Live for a Sandy Berger skit?

It seems that Bill Clinton’s former national security advisor did some creative subterfuge back in 2003, when he swiped some classified material from the National Archives. According to a report released yesterday by the Archives’ inspector general, Berger (who pled guilty to a misdemeanor last year) hid the documents under a trailer at a nearby construction site, then returned a few days later to retrieve them and destroy a few.

But the real fascination is with his socks; specifically, the unresolved debate over whether Berger was seen at the Archives trying to slip some classified material into his socks (as a witness contends), or whether (as Berger contends), he was merely trying to adjust the hosiery because (as the report put it) “his shoes frequently come untied and his socks frequently fall down.”

I suppose this might prompt a sober debate over what is the best type of undergarment for document theft – Sandy Berger’s socks, or Fawn Hall’s bra? (As Oliver North’s secretary, she allegedly spirited away some of his materials back in ’87.) But when thinking only of the physical comedy possibilities involving a guy screwing up with his socks falling down, I am left to ask only this:

Where’s Chevy Chase when we need him most?

Remember that "Plan for Victory" in November '05?....Oh. You don't?

Much ink and air time has been expended lately on the fact that President Bush chose to postpone, until after the holidays, his long-awaited speech on “the way forward” in Iraq.

For instance, the White House press corps has been peppering spokesman Tony Snow about the delay, and Snow has assured everybody that the Decider is just being deliberative: “This is not not knowing what he wants to do; this is out of an absolute determination to do this right, making sure that he is absolutely convinced that the pieces have been put together, he's gotten the best advice, he's gotten the best facts, and that he now has the policy that he thinks will be the best to move forward.”

What puzzles me, however, is why anyone at this point would assume that anything Bush says is going to (a) break new strategic ground, or (b) quell the sectarian chaos, or (c) lodge in the American memory. On the contrary, we seem to have forgotten that he has delivered dozens of speeches on Iraq over the past few years, most of them instantly forgotten, with nary a phrase that can be invoked years from now as testaments to either his eloquence or prescience.

So as we all brace for the next one, the post-holiday address that may well unveil “the surge,” perhaps it is best to dampen expectations by revisiting one of his earlier, much-awaited rhetorical forays, and taking note of its remarkably short shelf life, its yawning chasm between assertion and fact.

It was just over a year ago, on Nov. 30, 2005, when Bush outlined what he called his “strategy for victory” (not to be confused with the January 2007 strategy for victory), during a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy. He said, for instance, “we are pursuing a comprehensive strategy in Iraq….On the security side, coalition and Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy.” He said that “Iraqi forces have made real progress,” and that “they’re helping to turn the tide of this struggle in freedom’s favor.”

That was good for one news cycle. The problem is, those words are worthless today; not even his own military leaders bother to endorse any talk about turning the tide. As Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday, during a briefing on the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq, “The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace. We have to get ahead of that violent cycle, break that continuous chain of sectarian violence.”

Flash back again to that speech one year ago. At another point, Bush lauded the training of Iraqi police officers: “Iraq has now six basic police academies, and one in Jordan, that together produce over 3500 new police officers every ten weeks…As the training has improved, so has the quality of the recruits being trained. Even though the terrorists are targeting Iraqi police and army recruits, there is no shortage of Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives to secure the future of a free Iraq.”

But again, today’s factual reality has rendered those words inoperative. The new Pentagon report frankly points out that many of those ballyhooed police officers are helping the sectarian killers roam at will: “Shia death squads leveraged support from some elements of the Iraqi Police Services and the National Police, who facilitated freedom of movement and provided advance warning of (security) operations. This is a major reason for the increased levels of murders and executions.”

Here, too, is Bush one year ago: “Iraqi (military) units are growing more independent and more capable; they are defending their new democracy with courage and determination….their confidence is growing…”

But yesterday, Sattler said that even though the number of trained Iraqi forces was expected this month to reach 325,000, the number of available troops – after factoring in all the Iraqis who are “on leave” or who have quit – is actually only 196,000. And as for those aforementioned well-trained police units, the number of battalions deemed ready for “lead responsibility” fell during the autumn season from six to two.

One year ago, Bush also declared that “people are expressing their opinions freely on the streets of Baghdad,” a remark that today might well puzzle the people of Baghdad, who seem to be mostly preoccupied with staying alive. The Pentagon report notes that, last January, there were 180 sectarian “executions,” mostly in Baghdad; during the month of October, the number was 1028.

Bush also said, in that ’05 speech, that “we’re also helping (the Iraqi troops) build a democracy that is worthy of their sacrifice…the Iraqi people have made incredible progress on the road to lasting freedom.” Contrast that assertion with today’s factual reality; yesterday, Peter Rodman, an assistant Defense Secretary, told reporters that the ever-escalating violence is now “shaking the institutions” of our client government.

But perhaps the striking aspect of the Naval Academy speech is the material that isn’t there at all.

That day, Bush blamed the violence in Iraq on what he called three distinct groups: the Sunni Arabs who had lost the “privileged status” they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein; the Hussein loyalists who had held power under Hussein; and al Qaeda fighters. Yet there was no mention of the growing presence of the violent Shiite militias (major players in the sectarian civil war of 2006). In particular, Bush said nothing about the Mahdi Army (controlled by a cleric who is close to the Iraqi prime minister), even though that militia was already a prominent force in the streets. It is cited by the Pentagon today as perhaps the greatest threat to security in Iraq.

In other words, no speech at this point can be expected to “turn the tide,” not when the facts on the ground are clearly beyond his control. Most Americans sense this as well; in the latest CNN poll, 70 percent oppose his handling of Iraq, a record high.

Nor can we assume that Bush’s potential “surge” of additional troops will fundamentally change those facts; Pentagon official Sattler didn’t seem to think so yesterday: “I don’t know how many forces you could push into a country, either U.S. or coalition or Iraqi forces, that could cover the whole country, where these death squads couldn’t find somebody.”

And now, in the wake of reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are skeptical about the workability of a “surge,” Bush has actually reached a fascinating juncture. Would he deliver a speech that overrules the military? Back in that ’05 speech, he said: “If our military leaders tell me we need more troops, I will send them” – but what happens if they tell him NOT to send more troops?

Maybe in January he will simply declare, “I will settle for nothing less than complete victory.” That’s what he said at the Naval Academy. If he uses it again, we will know that none of the evidence from the reality-based community has made a dent.

Our democratic ideals at work

Regrettably, blog posts will be brief and sporadic this week. Other pressing work duties require me to take this temporary measure.

So, two quick items today:

1. Here’s a fresh take on President Bush’s freedom agenda, courtesy of a Navy vet who went to Iraq two years ago as a security contractor. After blowing the whistle on yet another corruption case – his company was apparently selling weapons to Iraqi officials with ties to the death squads – Donald Vance wound up in a military brig for 97 days, without access to a defense attorney or to the evidence that the U.S. had compiled against him. (It turned out there was no such evidence.)

Here’s what Vance says today: “Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had. While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

When a Navy vet/security contractor starts talking like a board member of the ACLU, you know that something must be amiss. Vance is also intending to sue Donald Rumsfeld, who would probably respond by saying that you go to war with the protections we provide you, not the ones you might want or wish to have at a later time.

2. The quote of the day, on the Sunday shows, was uttered by Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Referring to Iraq, and his possible support for a temporary "surge" of additional troops, Reid stated: “The American people will not allow this war to go on as it has.”

The American people won’t “allow” it? What a quaint sentiment. Since when do they have a say?

Even though the ’06 elections were a decisive rebuke of Bush’s war policies, even though most people support a drawdown of U.S. troops, and even though only 12 percent want to send more troops, Bush is nevertheless preparing to send more anyway, as part of his “way forward” to “victory.”

The American people sent Bush a clear message – Bush in the past has defined an election as “an accountability moment” – but thus far it hasn’t mattered a whit. What does this say about the “democratic ideals” that Donald Vance was talking about?