A new Washington Post/ABC News poll out today shows Dems with a big lead among Americans on who the nation trusts on the issues. On the war in Iraq, it isn’t even close — 54% trust Democrats to get the war right, while 34% trust Bush.
The lead was bigger in mid-January, but the numbers are still one-sided. As Greg Sargent noted, “[T]he new numbers — combined with Bush’s 31% approval rating on Iraq in today’s poll — would appear to suggest that Dems are in a commanding position as they prepare to debate ways to engineer a showdown over the war with the White House.”
With this in mind, Roll Call’s Stu Rothenberg wonders why Dems are going out of their way to characterize congressional opposition to the Bush war strategy as “bipartisan.” On the House vote on the anti-escalation resolution, more than 91% of Republicans voted with Bush, while 99% of Dems voted against the White House policy. Rothenberg asks, “[I]f the vote was overwhelmingly partisan, why don’t Democrats just say so?” It’s a fair point.
The likely answer is that Democrats are trying so hard to avoid allowing Republicans to label their criticism as merely partisan that they won’t even acknowledge the obvious. Instead, they are looking for any opportunity to portray their opposition to the President’s policies as part of the nation’s dissatisfaction with the administration’s Iraq policy.
While that’s understandable – one of the few ways Democrats could screw up during the next year and a half would be to appear to be basing their opposition on possible political gain and a petty desire to punish Bush politically – there is no indication that Democrats have been too aggressive in criticizing the President or his policies so far.
In fact, a partisan division over the war probably would help Democrats by further damaging the Republicans between now and next year’s Presidential election. After all, if it isn’t merely President Bush, but also his entire party, that supports the war and ignores public opinion, Democrats would seem to benefit.
Quite right. The temptation, which I admit to occasionally falling into, is to say, “Even the Republicans are abandoning Bush on Iraq,” even when the number of GOP defectors is fairly small. The point is to characterize opposition to the president’s policy as overwhelming.
But there’s definitely an upside to highlighting the partisan reality: most Dems have the good sense to reject Bush’s approach to Iraq, and most Republicans don’t.
Atrios summarized it quite succinctly: “Republicans want to continue the war and Democrats want to end it. It’s that simple.”
Any other debate is about what the best method to get George Bush to end the war is. I think even now too many Democrats are a bit stupid about the political reality – people hate George Bush and people hate the war – and are scared they’re going to be painted as traitors by the wingnut noise machine. But that’s about politics and strategy, not the desired result. Democrats want to end the war, Republicans want to continue it. If some Republicans want to defect and join with the Democrats to end the war, good for them, but that doesn’t change the fact that Democrats want to end the war and Republicans want to continue it.
Make it partisan. The Republicans are. Let them have their war.
Just to be clear, if Republicans want to join Dems on war policy, that’s obviously a good thing, especially in the Senate where GOP obstructionism has led to procedural blocks on Democrats’ efforts.
But when the vast majority of Dems are united against the Bush policy, and the vast majority of Republicans are united to support it, it’s kind of silly to insist that this is “bipartisan.”
Dems want to end the war. Republicans prefer an open-ended commitment and falling in line behind a president who’s been wrong every step of the way in this crisis from the outset. Let’s take that dynamic to the country and see what happens.