NYT: Democrats Are Building on Unity Over Iraq Pullout [View All]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/washington/29assess.html?th&emc=th

Democrats Are Building on Unity Over Iraq Pullout


By ROBIN TONER
Published: March 29, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 28 — No one has seemed more surprised by the Democrats’ success in pushing an exit strategy for Iraq than the Democrats.

Their aggressiveness and unity on a major foreign-policy challenge to the president is a striking change for a party that has, on many occasions over many years, seemed to be on the defensive on national security issues.

In fact, for much of the post-Vietnam era, the Republican advantage on those issues has been a defining feature of American politics. Many Democrats felt they needed to prove, again and again, that their party was tough enough to defend the nation’s interests — to fight the notion, often stoked by Republicans, that Democrats were the party of George McGovern and the nuclear freeze.

Critics on the party’s left complained that Democratic leaders had grown risk-averse, too consumed with defending against old charges from the 60s and 70s, too reluctant to stand up against the president.

But the Democratic votes over the past five days, calling for the withdrawal of most American combat troops from Iraq next year despite repeated threats of a presidential veto, show how much that image has shifted.

In the debate on Capitol Hill, Republicans mounted the same arguments that have proved so unsettling to the Democrats in the past: that they advocated policies of retreat, failed to support the troops, lacked the necessary resolve to use force to fight terrorism.

In the House, they chose as their closing speaker Representative Sam Johnson, Republican of Texas, who spent 42 months in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He asserted that the consequences of American withdrawal were then, and would be now, catastrophic.

But Democrats, across the ideological spectrum, did not back down.

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