Western hits the nail on the head about the public perception of the Democrats: how can we trust them with national security when they won't even stand up for their own values when the public is behind them?
While the Democrats make a show of token "out of Iraq" resolutions that they know will be defeated, Republicans use every procedural trick in the book to protect their agenda, just as they used them even more effectively as the majority.
Democrats claimed they were powerless as the minority, but they rarely used the one power they did have: the filibuster. Republicans are now using it and threatening to use it regularly. So essentially, the Democrats are letting the Republicans control the agenda whether they are the minority or majority.
The only quarrel I have with what Western says here is why Democrats are doing it. It looks more and more like the leadership throws the sop of a token gesture to the public before they "capitulate" to republicans, which is what they actually wanted to do in the first place since at least half the Democrats seem to obey corporations as slavishly as Republicans.
In a press conference Thursday, the president labeled MoveOn's recent ad in the New York Times "disgusting" and questioned the patriotism of Democrats who refused to repudiate it. Those were disingenuous words from a president who was either silent or complicit in the whisper campaign against John McCain in the 2000 primary election (which suggested that McCain's years as a prisoner of war had left him a little unbalanced) and who said nothing as an "independent" organization attacked the metals of a decorated war veteran, John Kerry, in the 2004 election while American boots were on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rather than calling attention to the president's faux outrage at attacks on a military man and the fact that the real outrage is his steadfast refusal to stop playing Russian Roulette with other people's children without a clear exit strategy or even a realistic definition any more of "success" that doesn't shift like the sand depending on which guidepost is no longer even visible in the desert, Senate Democrats took the bait. The same Congress that has never held anyone accountable for the policy that has left 30,000 American soldiers dead or wounded, largely by incendiary devices, suddenly mustered a rousing 72-vote majority to condemn an incendiary turn of phrase.
*****
...After suffering one humiliating defeat after another at the hands of the Republican minority, the Democrats had to prove they could pass something, even if it was their own epitaph.Last November, the electorate was angry but hopeful.
When the Democratic Congress surrendered to the president in late May in an attempt to "support the troops before Memorial Day," however, they were surprised that the outrage had now turned on them. Within a week they found their performance rated unfavorably not only by Democrats but by the Independents who had swept them into power. That should have been a wake-up call that their strategic calculations were miscalculations, and that
their attempt to craft a "middle ground" that would appeal to moderate Republicans in the Congress--and in the process make Democrats appear, as they had been for the last five years, like supplicants to their Republican colleagues, begging for crumbs and pleading for them to be reasonable--was not winning the middle in Middle America. After repeating the same strategy, punctuated by public hand ringing and protestations of impotence (justified in terms of rules about cloture and filibusters arcane to the average citizen), they find themselves today with an approval rating at 11 percent.
The conclusion they should have drawn is that you can't project fear and have people trust you on national security. When voters perceive a mismatch between what their leaders say and what they do, they pay attention to what they do. And right now, they aren't listening to Democrats' positions on national security, which are difficult to discern (because they vary by the day, depending on whether they are preaching compromise, confrontation, or helplessness in the face of Republican intransigence). They're watching their posture, which seems anything but courageous and upright.
They remember well how Republicans bullied the Democrats for five straight years in Congress and cowed them into relinquishing their right to use the same filibuster Republicans now threaten to use at every turn, and they get the message: that Democrats are weak in the face of aggression, and can barely put their hands in front of their faces to block the blows from a minority in Congress and from a bully sitting in his bully pulpit at 29 percent in the polls.FULL TEXT:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/outflanked-in-iraq_b_65436.html
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