What's The Real Reason Dem Leaders May "Compromise" With Republicans On Iraq?
September 17, 2007 -- 10:51 AM EST // //
Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum both have provocative posts up suggesting that a key reason Dem Congressional leaders are talking about "compromising" with Republicans and dropping their demand for a date-certain for withdrawal is that not ending the war means the GOP will still have the Iraq albatross around their necks during next year's elections. Yglesias says:
Nobody seems to want to mention it because it's impolite, but I think this is almost certainly a factor in the congressional politics of Iraq. Not only are Democrats afraid of taking certain kinds of political risks to end the war, but they see no prospect of a political upside to ending it...given that Republicans aren't doing what everyone expected them to do and reducing their political exposure on Iraq by winding the war down, Democrats are disinclined to go out on a limb to do it for them.This may be part of the thinking, as Matt says, and there's something seductively cynical about it. But my conversations with Dem Congressional staffers and strategists persuades me that the overriding motive here is more prosaic: Dems urgently need to reverse the (accurate) perception that they've failed to act on Iraq, and they think the only way to do this is by passing a measure with some kind of concessions from Republicans -- even if the concessions end up being largely meaningless.
Recall that last spring Dems had already ruled out two key options -- defunding the war, and sending the same bill back to the President again and again. That leaves only two current options. First, pass another spending bill including withdrawal timetables, which will be vetoed, and then follow up with more no-strings-attached short-term funding, as happened last spring. This would mean that they'd suffered another short-term failure to force action and ended up funding the war anyway.
Or, second, they can pass a bill without a date-certain but one containing some sort of symbolic concessions from Republicans, such as an unenforceable demand from Congressional Republicans that the President set some kind of tentative deadline for some kind of withdrawal. Option two gets them to the same place faster, without another short-term failure. It lets them sooner argue that they've forced at least some movement on the part of the GOP -- a political must. Meanwhile, they can pursue other measures such as the Webb troop readiness act to nibble around the edges of ending this thing.
I'm not endorsing this -- or even saying that this is what will happen -- just saying that this is what I'm told the thinking is. This compromise talk is more about the Dem leadership having failed to game this out early on and having left itself with few choices than it is about calculating that a continuing war enhances their chances in 2008.
What's more, I think it's worth noting that if the liberal blogosphere is gonna take the Dem leadership to task over Iraq, which in many ways is justified, we all need to say what specifically the Dem leadership should do to end the war, given the limited choices before it. If memory serves, Atrios and Kos have both called for sending the same bill back again and again. But there's certainly been nothing approaching consensus, or even all that much discussion, about what the Dem Congress should do now in practical legislative terms. Just saying that this would be a constructive thing to be hashing out right about now.