[Mb-civic] 'The Democrats: Still Ducking' from The Nation

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   The Democrats: Still Ducking 
   by Ari Berman


Iraq returned as a central theme in George W. Bush's State of the Union
address this year. With the war on the minds of many members of the
public and with the 2006 midterm elections approaching, it seemed
natural that the opposition party would forcefully challenge the
President's policy. Instead, the Democrats ducked and covered. Virginia
Governor Tim Kaine devoted a mere three sentences to the Iraq War in his
official Democratic response to Bush. Representative Rahm Emanuel, a
leading party strategist, didn't even mention Iraq when asked on
television what his party would do differently from the Republicans--a hint of how the Democrats have downplayed the issue internally. 

On the advice of top party consultants, the Democrats in the run-up to
the 2006 midterm vote are either ignoring Iraq and shifting to domestic
issues (the strategy in the 2002 midterm elections) or supporting the
war while criticizing Bush's handling of it (the strategy in the 2004
presidential election). Three years into the conflict most Democrats can
finally offer a cogent critique of how the Bush Administration misled
the American people and mismanaged the Iraqi occupation, but they're
unwilling or unable to suggest clearly how the United States should
extricate itself from that mess. 

To be sure, some highly visible leaders of the party, including
Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean and House minority
leader Nancy Pelosi, have publicly advocated an end to the war. "We do
need to make it clear to the American people that after this savaging
we've taken at the hands of [Karl] Rove, we are going to stand up for
the country and that we have a better plan," Dean told The Nation.
"We're not going to make a permanent commitment to a failed strategy,
which is what Bush has actually done." But even Dean and Pelosi have
done little within party channels to push for a change in position among
their prowar colleagues. For now, many prominent Democrats continue to
follow the advice of the party's risk-averse consultants and foreign
policy intelligentsia--a cautious tack that is unlikely to satisfy
voters' desire for change on the crucial issue of the day.

For more than a year Iraq has topped the list of voter concerns in poll
after poll. Asked what should be the highest priority for America this
year, the largest number of respondents in the latest NBC/Wall Street
Journal poll chose bringing most of the troops home. Sixty-six percent
of the public want the United States to "reduce its number of troops,"
with those respondents favoring a timeline for withdrawal by a margin of
2 to 1. Some 72 percent of American troops serving in Iraq think the
United States should exit the country in the next year, a recent Zogby
poll found. "The elites in Washington are thinking a hell of a lot
different than the people right now," says Joe Trippi, Dean's former
campaign manager. "And someone's really wrong."

Democratic officials' decision to listen to the political elites is
proving costly. This past September a Pew Research poll found that while
only 30 percent of voters thought Bush had a "clear plan" on Iraq, a
mere 18 percent believed that Democrats in Congress promised a
"clear alternative." For a moment on November 17, when
Representative Jack Murtha boldly called on Bush to bring the troops
home, the Democrats seemed to have found such a voice--and with it an
opportunity to shift the debate to how to exit Iraq, not whether to
stay. Sure, plans to redeploy US troops within a year or two, sponsored
by Russ Feingold in the Senate, the Out of Iraq Caucus in the House and
the Center for American Progress (CAP), were already on the table. But
none brought with it the standing and sense of urgency of Murtha, who
previously had been known on Capitol Hill as the dean of the defense
hawks.

Yet with the exception of Pelosi, who endorsed his plan, Murtha was kept
at arm's length by the rest of the Democratic leadership. "Jack Murtha
speaks for Jack Murtha," Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, which recruits and supports prospective House
candidates, said on the day of Murtha's announcement. "As for Iraq
policy, at the right time, we'll have a position." 

Steny Hoyer, number-two House Democrat and unabashed war supporter, said
that "a precipitous withdrawal" could lead to "disaster." A Washington
Post survey of eight prominent foreign policy advisers found that
only one, former Carter Administration National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski, proposed a clear plan for how to get out. The
resulting headlines--DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS SPLINTER ON IRAQ, DEMOCRATS FIND IRAQ ALTERNATIVE IS ELUSIVE, DEMOCRATS FEAR BACKLASH AT POLLS FOR ANTIWAR REMARKS--reflected the disarray. As prominent
Democrats shied away from the fight, Bush went on the offensive
with a series of Iraq speeches, allowing Republicans to caricature
Murtha's plan as "cut and run." Pollster Mark Penn and Democratic
Leadership Council founder Al From warned that foes of the war "could be
playing with political dynamite" and needed to be "extremely careful."
These Democrats seemed transfixed by the ghost of George McGovern,
instead of reacting to the mounting unease with Bush's policies.
"Democrats are so obsessed with not looking 'weak' on defense that they
end up making themselves look weak, period, by the way they respond to
Republican attacks on their alleged weakness," Washington Post columnist
E.J. Dionne noted in mid-December. 

Democrats in Congress subsequently went mute on the war. By mid-February
even Pelosi was reassuring nervous party strategists that there would be
no specific talk of Iraq when the Democrats unveiled their own version
of the GOP's Contract With America later this year. The bulk of
Democratic strategists approved of the no-details-on-Iraq approach.

"You can't hope the Democrats will ever have a unified message, other
than a unified critique of how Bush mishandled the war," says Steve
Elmendorf, a former chief of staff to Representative Dick
Gephardt and senior adviser to the Kerry campaign who's helping plan the
Democratic agenda for '06. "The point of an agenda is to be unified, and
the party clearly won't be." Nor is it realistic to expect they should
be, says longtime political adviser Paul Begala: "I don't think a
Congressional candidate ought to presume to be able to solve unsolvable
problems." As an example Begala praises Bob Casey Jr., a conservative
Democrat from Pennsylvania who's criticized his opponent, Senator
Rick Santorum, for his allegiance to President Bush but has also
indicated that he would have voted for the Iraq War and has ruled out
any plan for troop withdrawals. Karl Struble, a media consultant to
Kaine and former Senator Tom Daschle who'll produce campaign spots for
Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Nebraska, Washington and West
Virginia, says that Iraq "can't or shouldn't be the primary thing
Democrats talk about" in '06 campaigns. "When the tree's gonna fall, the
best thing to do is stay out of the way," he says.

The Democrats' prospective nominees for the presidency, who often
dictate the public image of the party even during midterm elections,
have largely heeded Struble's advice. "I do not believe that we
should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end,"
Senator Hillary Clinton, the most recognizable Democrat, wrote in a
letter to her constituents in late November. "Nor do I believe that we
can or should pull out of Iraq immediately." If the Iraqi elections were
successful, Clinton said, troops could begin coming home this year,
though she didn't specify when or how. When asked if the outcome of the
December elections met Clinton's criteria, her spokesperson Philippe
Reines answered, "The jury's still out." Clinton continues to speak
about Iraq only when she has to, in the most measured tones. Contenders
such as Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Wesley Clark have charted a similarly
fuzzy approach.

"The tone, unfortunately for the Democratic majority, has been set by
the two Clintons," says Brzezinski, a longstanding hawk and vocal critic
of the Iraq War, "who have decided that Senator Clinton's chances would
be improved if she can manage to appear as a kind of quasi-Margaret
Thatcher, and therefore she's been loath to come out with a decisive,
strong, unambiguous criticism of the war, with some straightforward
recommendations as to what ought to be done. And I'm afraid that has
contaminated the attitude of the other Democratic political leaders." 

It may be impossible to assume that discussion of the war can wait until
after November, given the recent events on the ground. If most
Democratic strategists have continued to counsel caution on Iraq, a few
do not--for moral and pragmatic reasons. "I think the Democrats are
afraid of the issue, but I don't think they should be," says Democratic
pollster Celinda Lake. Lake had previously fallen into the camp of
consultants who advised Democrats to ignore the war and pivot to
domestic issues. Now she says that approach is no longer possible, and
that Democrats must talk about a plan to bring troops home. "Iraq is the
essential factor in the voters' landscape," Lake says, the number-one
issue feeding distrust of the President and a desire for change.

And contrary to conventional wisdom, the public is much closer to Murtha
than most strategists realize, adds public opinion expert Ruy Teixeira.
"There is a big bloc of centrist voters dissatisfied with the President
who don't believe in Iraq, detest it and want to get out," Teixeira
says. Independent voters in particular favor a timeline for withdrawal
by 54 to 36 percent in a January CBS News poll. "There's an awful lot of
people in the party who think Jack Murtha was right," Dean says. "They
may not be saying so, but we know that they agree." 

A growing number of Democratic politicians, like their strategists, are
slowly beginning to realize that Democrats cannot focus on national
security without highlighting Iraq. Murtha has nearly 100 co-sponsors in
the House. Prominent Democrats, including Dean, former Senate majority
leader Tom Daschle and Senator Dianne Feinstein, have endorsed a
moderate version of Murtha's plan, sponsored by CAP, that would redeploy
all US troops by the end of 2007.

Dean personally believes that Democrats can, and may, coalesce around
the CAP plan. "My argument is that we need to be specific, because we
need to show strength and brainpower on defense," Dean says. "I think
having a clear plan to redeploy our troops, which would result in a much
smaller footprint in Iraq, makes sense." Democrats can win back the
House, Dean says, only with a "broad, clearly differentiated strategy"
from the Republicans, including on Iraq. Democratic candidates ranging
from Montana to Ohio to Rhode Island have bucked the permanent
Washington establishment and made ending the war a crucial part of their
campaigns.

"Prolonging the war is damaging us in every respect," says Brzezinski.
"The costs are quite extensive and if you add the economic costs [$1
trillion] and the costs in blood [roughly 20,000 US casualties], staying
the course is not a very attractive solution or definition of victory.
And I think Democrats could make that case intelligently and
forcefully."

With eight months to go until the 2006 elections, there's certainly time
for Democrats to push for a course correction on the war. Fiddling while
Iraq burns will likely only reinforce Republican stereotypes of
Democrats as calculating, gutless and unable to develop a strong and
sensible foreign policy that will protect Americans in a post-9/11
world. If Democrats once again fall into what Lake calls an "absence of
articulation," the midterm voting--despite all the Republican
scandals--could bring a replay of other years, proof of a party that has
become so afraid of losing it has forgotten what it takes to win.



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