The Chris Moeller Archives

That sleeping giant to your left

Democrats are on the offensive this week in Congress, where they've grabbed control of the Senate and forced a closed session on the Bush Administration's handling of intelligence before the war in Iraq. It was a desperate, petulant maneuver that was as long overdue as it was highly effective, as Republicans promised to speed up the official inquiry yesterday.

What continues to pain me, however, is the overriding belief in some Democratic circles that weapons and terrorism exaggerations, coupled with White House obstructions and perjury, should provide enough political shelter for Senate Democrats who initially voted in favor of the war. This is absolutely not the case.

War has not been sanctioned by Congress, as required by Constitutional law, since December of 1941. So by turning over military authority to the President, as they did by roll call vote in 2003, Senate Democrats made themselves jointly responsible for this fiasco in Iraq. They knew the implication of their vote going in. The war lingers on-- with undocumented progress and mounting casualties. A firm majority of Americans now oppose our involvement in it. Yet, to my knowledge, only Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has laid out a specific time table for U.S. withdrawal.

In a leadership role, Harry Reid deserves a modicum of credit for thumbing his nose at parliamentary procedure and finally displaying public distrust towards his Republican colleagues-- and in a way that his predecessor, Tom Daschle, never did. But where are the admissions of culpability by Presidential aspirants on the Democratic side of the aisle, especially by party standard-bearers like John Kerry, who still says he would have voted for the war (and who, not coincidentally, would still lose an election to the President-- only this time with Bush's approval rating having sunk below 40 percent,) or Hillary Clinton, who's hiding from the entire debate like a sniveling coward.

Ms. Clinton is going to find she has a major problem on her hands in 2008 if she stays the course of her campaign strategy, which is to blame and deflect responsibility. That problem will be anti-war superstar Cindy Sheehan, who stands to cut directly into Clinton's base support, and who has vowed to never again support a pro-war Democrat. She has already described Clinton as "a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys."

Millions of uncommitted voters and millions more uninspired voters are expecting to hear the same two sets of empty promises in 2006, but before then, they're looking for something more defiant than the cave-ins on the war or recent economic bills like bankruptcy "reform." Surprise them. Bush and the Republican Congress have been faltering. They're bungling natural disasters, dodging indictments, and fighting amongst themselves. Yet, there's no indication from recent polls that Democrats are benefiting from their opponents' malaise. This is because the Dems have yet to learn the most important lesson of campaigning-- voters cannot be fooled or underestimated. I've heard dozens of Democrats-- elected officials and voters both-- who say that they hold America's mainstream values, but that the party does a lousy job of explaining what those values are. Wrong. Americans know what the Democrats stand for, and they refuse to be fooled by words that don't match behavior. They want the action, and they want it born of conscience and courage.

posted by CM @ 7:54 PM