{"id":11091,"date":"2007-06-11T16:10:43","date_gmt":"2007-06-11T20:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11091.html"},"modified":"2007-06-11T16:10:43","modified_gmt":"2007-06-11T20:10:43","slug":"did-dems-play-the-war-funding-debate-like-a-stradivarius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/did-dems-play-the-war-funding-debate-like-a-stradivarius\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Dems play the war funding debate ‘like a Stradivarius’?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Election analyst Stuart Rothenberg watched congressional Dems struggle recently with how they would fund the war in Iraq — with\/without a withdrawal timeline, with\/without benchmarks, with\/without a date certain, etc. — and concluded<\/a> that the party may not have gotten what it wanted, but it came out ahead anyway.<\/p>\n

Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill played the issue like a Stradivarius. They forced a vote on a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, putting Republicans on record supporting the status quo and President Bush, but allowed a subsequent vote to “fund the troops.” That gave their own Members from swing districts the opportunity to demonstrate their support for the military.<\/p>\n

From a purely political point of view, Democrats had their cake and ate it too. Yes, the war is unpopular, and opposing it is a no-brainer. But the one thing Democrats need to avoid is looking like themselves during the 1970s and 1980s — weak and unwilling to support America’s men and women in uniform. Yes, they’ve spent the past few years speaking the right words on national security and the armed forces, but if they had refused to pass a spending bill, they would have at the very least opened themselves to attack from the GOP.<\/p>\n

So, in ignoring the demands of the party’s left, Congressional leaders have kept their party right where they want it — against the war but also against terrorists and for the troops.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This seems flawed. As Greg Sargent explained<\/a> very well, Rothenberg is predicating his analysis on the notion that fighting Bush over war policy would be awful for Dems: “Why are we concluding that voters would automatically have seen it as ‘weak’ or as against the troops if Dems had stuck to their guns, as it were, and had continued to insist that a withdrawal timetable be tied to funding? After all, majorities were telling pollsters that they wanted<\/i> Dems to do this — that they wanted the war to be funded only on the condition that a withdrawal date be fixed.”<\/p>\n

But Rothenberg really gets into trouble describing the political consequences for the Dems.
\n
\nRothenberg sees Dems emerging from the fight smelling like roses.<\/p>\n

While a bit more confrontation with the president probably wouldn’t have gotten Congressional Democrats into trouble and would have pleased the party’s left, the Democratic House and Senate leaders wisely played things safe by allowing a bill to pass that Bush could sign.<\/p>\n

Why take a chance alienating swing voters when the party already made its point by sending the president a deadline bill that he vetoed?<\/p>\n

Anti-war critics of the Democratic Congressional leadership have nowhere else to go, both now and in November 2008.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even if we put aside the argument that the left will stick with Dems no matter what — hardly an uncontroversial contention — Rothenberg seems to be missing something. He insists the Dems won’t pay a political price for capitulating. I’d argue they already have.<\/p>\n

Less than a week ago, a national WaPo\/ABC poll<\/a>, conducted shortly after Congress gave Bush the war-spending bill he wanted, showed congressional Dems’ popularity taking a sharp hit. In April, when Dems passed a withdrawal timeline, 54% of Americans approved of their job performance, while 44% disapproved. Almost immediately after Dems capitulated and passed war funding without restrictions, those numbers reversed, 44% approve, 49% disapprove. <\/p>\n

The poll was quite illustrative. Dems enjoyed modest leads over Bush on handling every major policy issue, but the number of people who responded “neither” is at or near all-time highs. People know Republicans are wrong, and they’re disappointed Dems aren’t fighting Bush more aggressively.<\/p>\n

Democrats “had their cake and ate it too”? They “played the issue like a Stradivarius”? It looks like Rothenberg is the only one who thinks so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Election analyst Stuart Rothenberg watched congressional Dems struggle recently with how they would fund the war in Iraq — with\/without a withdrawal timeline, with\/without benchmarks, with\/without a date certain, etc. — and concluded that the party may not have gotten what it wanted, but it came out ahead anyway. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill played […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}