The Terrible Politics of the Iraq Funding Debacle

More than anything, what upsets me about this out and out cave-in from the Democratic leadership on the Iraq bill is how poor they played it politically. If the leadership quickly realized that they didn't have the votes for withdrawal or to sustain a veto for any kind of timeline, and they reasoned that they couldn't be seen as denying the troops money - and they had their minds made up about both of these very early, by February - why not give in early and press the domestic agenda instead of getting everyone's hopes up, only to set a self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day and then cave, in the process derailing the other legislation that was critical to electoral success in 2006? Not only are the headlines tomorrow going to be awful, but they lost MORE, far more than they gained in fighting the President to this point. Consider this, via Steve Soto, who I think is one of the sharpest minds in the business when it comes to things like this:

Both Harry Reid and Steny Hoyer stated the obvious today: that the Democrats don't have a veto-proof majority in either house. Yeah, so? You knew this back in February, as did most everyone else. It was your job and everyone else in the Democratic leadership to fashion a strategy that made the GOP pay a price for rubber-stamping Bush's surge while still pushing your agenda. And you and your Beltway consultants failed. So stop your whining and get back to the drawing board [...]

Instead of shifting the burden onto the GOP leadership for finding the votes for a “no-strings” funding bill back in February, and moving ahead with the Democrats’ domestic agenda, Reid and Pelosi got sucked into a futile battle to change course without the numbers or messaging to force such a change. Now, they both will face a hostile Democratic base over the summer while the GOP leadership quietly works towards a face-saving break with Bush late this year. And all the Democrats have to show for it are declining poll numbers, just like Bush.

The worst part of this was imposing this Memorial Day deadline for no good reason. Bush played it the way he goes on about how the terrorists would play a timeline - he waited the Dems out and they panicked. They should have said "our work is done, sign our bill or round up a majority for your own bill" and forced the minority to whip up the votes to rubber-stamp Bush's war. Instead we did the work for them.

AND, if a deal is reached, it'll be the GOP in Congress who "stopped the war." After all, THEIR benchmarks are what made the final bill. THEIR timeline of September is the working assumption in Washington of when the dynamic will change. How could a self-respecting Democratic Party, politically speaking, give away the ability to end an unpopular war and break with an unpopular President?

The domestic agenda has been lying fallow for months while the leadership played a game of chicken that they knew they weren't about to push to win. And adding the minimum wage bill and those Katrina/farm relief programs to this package was doubly stupid. Most true antiwar progressives, like Feingold, aren't going to support a toothless Iraq bill. So now you've put them all in the outrageous position of having to vote against the minimum wage increase, a cruel little trick designed to keep those who don't want to see "Congressman X voted against the minimum wage" ads in their districts next November. And any benefit from FINALLY enacting one piece of the "100 Hour" agenda will be largely forgotten in the wake of the stories about how the Dems conceded and Bush won.

Here's Soto again:

So, four months of bruises leaves the Democrats with perhaps only a minimum wage increase to show for it. In the hopper and still to come is a trade bill written by K Street, a weakened ethics bill, a cave-in on Medicare Part D reform, and nothing yet on an expansion of the SCHIP or implementing fully the 9/11 Commission recommendations. Yes, they are investigating everything that they should, but they still haven’t started the court challenge over White House rejection of congressional subpoenas.

There was a window of time back in early February when the Democratic leadership had split the GOP caucus with the domestic agenda, and that moment has been lost, a casualty of the war funding debates and the Democratic leadership’s willingness to resume its love affair with corporate cash.

It's enough to make you sick. This Congress was elected solely to challenge Bush on Iraq. The other popular pieces of the domestic agenda were nice side benefits. Now the Congress has delivered neither, and their way forward looks completely muddled. (somebody want to tell me why we're debating a crappy IMMIGRATION bill that nobody likes in the Senate right now, when there's so much of the 100 Hour agenda still unpassed?)

Chris Bowers isn't wrong that we've come a long way in the progressive movement (7 years ago our VP candidate was Joe Lieberman) and that we still need to grow our majority of the majority. But all of that was well-known a while ago. It's the horrible politics of this action that irks me. There was a time when I thought Harry Reid was a decent gambler as a leader. He just folded a straight flush while Bush had aces high. He's failed, and so has Pelosi.