stephanie
09-19-2007, 02:21 PM
:wink2::smoke:
By: Dan Gerstein
Sep 18, 2007 07:10 PM EST
For many in Washington, the biggest unanswered question from Army. Gen. David Petraeus’ high-profile, low-satisfaction testimony last week was not about military strategy but about political tactics. Why has the anti-war movement been unable to translate the clear public mandate they claim into any clear change in our government’s Iraq policy?
To most war opponents, the blame increasingly lies with the Democratic leadership in Congress, for not taking a hard enough line with President Bush and not fighting to cut off war funding. And their frustration is visibly bubbling over — the provocative group Code Pink, for example, has actually taken to protesting outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco in recent days:coffee:
But there is a growing feeling among many Democrats, particularly within the D.C. establishment, that just the opposite is true. They may not say it publicly, for fear of arousing the grass roots’ wrath, but the realist wing of the party seems to think the Democrats’ biggest problem on Iraq these days is not that there’s too much Bush Lite but that there’s too much Bush Left.
Under this view, too many anti-war activists, not satisfied with berating the president, have too often wound up behaving like him. They have gone beyond fighting back and holding the Decider accountable to adopting the same divisive, dogmatic and ultimately destructive style of politics that Democrats have been decrying for the past seven years, with the same counterproductive results.
What’s the basis for that argument? Consider some of these stunningly similar parallels between Bush and his Democratic doppelgängers, along with the ramifications for progressives’ overarching goal of ending the war. (For the record, that is a goal I share, no matter my continued admiration and work for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut.)
Polarization. As last week’s New York Times magazine reported, the anti-war umbrella coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq started the new session of Congress with a clear, common-sense strategy to stop the surge: Turn up the heat on moderate Republicans, especially in the Senate, and separate them from the president.
They got the Democratic leadership to set up a series of confrontations and tough votes, culminating in the infamous all-night Senate session in late July, and launched a $12 million presidential-style campaign with major TV ad buys targeted at critical swing voters.
The trouble is, AAEI and its supporters ran the equivalent of a base-rallying primary campaign to win a general election debate. They mimicked Bush’s polarizing, “with us or against us” rhetoric while doing little to actually persuade their swing voter targets to change or address their legitimate concerns with withdrawal deadlines.
Not surprisingly, this tack largely tanked — the best the Democrats could do after several months of pressure tactics was, in that July showdown, to get four Senate GOP-ers to back a timeline for troop withdrawal, leaving them seven votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster and political light years away from the 67 needed to overcome a veto.
Read the rest of this amusing article and comments at...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5879.html
By: Dan Gerstein
Sep 18, 2007 07:10 PM EST
For many in Washington, the biggest unanswered question from Army. Gen. David Petraeus’ high-profile, low-satisfaction testimony last week was not about military strategy but about political tactics. Why has the anti-war movement been unable to translate the clear public mandate they claim into any clear change in our government’s Iraq policy?
To most war opponents, the blame increasingly lies with the Democratic leadership in Congress, for not taking a hard enough line with President Bush and not fighting to cut off war funding. And their frustration is visibly bubbling over — the provocative group Code Pink, for example, has actually taken to protesting outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco in recent days:coffee:
But there is a growing feeling among many Democrats, particularly within the D.C. establishment, that just the opposite is true. They may not say it publicly, for fear of arousing the grass roots’ wrath, but the realist wing of the party seems to think the Democrats’ biggest problem on Iraq these days is not that there’s too much Bush Lite but that there’s too much Bush Left.
Under this view, too many anti-war activists, not satisfied with berating the president, have too often wound up behaving like him. They have gone beyond fighting back and holding the Decider accountable to adopting the same divisive, dogmatic and ultimately destructive style of politics that Democrats have been decrying for the past seven years, with the same counterproductive results.
What’s the basis for that argument? Consider some of these stunningly similar parallels between Bush and his Democratic doppelgängers, along with the ramifications for progressives’ overarching goal of ending the war. (For the record, that is a goal I share, no matter my continued admiration and work for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut.)
Polarization. As last week’s New York Times magazine reported, the anti-war umbrella coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq started the new session of Congress with a clear, common-sense strategy to stop the surge: Turn up the heat on moderate Republicans, especially in the Senate, and separate them from the president.
They got the Democratic leadership to set up a series of confrontations and tough votes, culminating in the infamous all-night Senate session in late July, and launched a $12 million presidential-style campaign with major TV ad buys targeted at critical swing voters.
The trouble is, AAEI and its supporters ran the equivalent of a base-rallying primary campaign to win a general election debate. They mimicked Bush’s polarizing, “with us or against us” rhetoric while doing little to actually persuade their swing voter targets to change or address their legitimate concerns with withdrawal deadlines.
Not surprisingly, this tack largely tanked — the best the Democrats could do after several months of pressure tactics was, in that July showdown, to get four Senate GOP-ers to back a timeline for troop withdrawal, leaving them seven votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster and political light years away from the 67 needed to overcome a veto.
Read the rest of this amusing article and comments at...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5879.html