Despite feeling a gust of political wind at their backs for the coming election, Democrats still need to make some critically fine distinctions to voters if the war in Iraq is to blow down the house of
For starters, the war against terrorism and Bush’s way of fighting it are not necessarily the same thing. But this is how the president has managed to frame the debate, as a choice between backing his policies and abandoning the war altogether. “If we retreat before the job is done, this nation would become even more in jeopardy,” he said last week, when he launched another wave of speeches around the country to defend his war policies.
Any president inevitably wins a “me or nothing” debate. That is why Bush frames the war in this way. No one in his right mind is going to say that we should give up and let the terrorists do whatever they like. If voters buy the president’s view that without him the terrorists win, then they will surely take his side.
This puts the pressure on Democrats to reframe the debate every time they bring it up in congressional campaigns. Voters need to hear — over and over again — that those who criticize Bush are not saying it is wrong to fight the terrorists. It might seem like an obvious point to the president’s foes, but without belaboring it they are at risk of falling prey to the administration’s vigorous efforts to portray their criticism as a call for retreat.
Listening to conservative talk radio in the heartland while on vacation last month, I noticed what seems to be a new variation in the attack on Democratic war opponents as “cut-and-run” wimps. Citing no more than a couple of articles by liberal writers — none of whom is even associated with the Democratic Party — this new argument holds that Bush’s political opponents do not even believe that the terrorists pose a threat.
Having claimed to establish this thinly supported premise about opposing views, the conservative radio hosts and their listeners then go on a rampage against “naive” Democrats who think terrorists do not exist. According to this line of thinking, Democrats are not only wimps — they are also stupid.
The president’s political guru, Karl Rove, laid the foundation for the “stupid wimps” charge earlier this year when he accused Democrats of promoting a “pre-9/11 worldview” that is “deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.” This is the straw-man debating tactic that’s often been used to great advantage against Democrats by the Bush campaign team and the conservative echo chamber following in its wake. You put words in their mouths and then knock their teeth in before most people realize they never said any such thing.
If Democrats end up being seen as unenthusiastic about the war against terrorism — or even worse for them, as not believing the terrorists are even out there — they will not win control of the House or the Senate in November. Too many Americans still say that combating terrorists is the nation’s No. 1 priority. And even if plenty of them are losing faith in the president’s prosecution of the war, they cannot be lured to vote against his party if they think the other side is against a war on terrorism.
The war in Iraq presents another fine distinction that Democrats must still make to the voters. The president adamantly insists that there is no difference between the Iraq War and the global fight against terrorism, that if “we leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here,” as he said last month in a news conference.
Some Republican candidates took Bush’s rhetoric a bit further. Rep.
Democrats should not scoff at such seemingly over-the-top rhetoric. Plenty of voters are going to believe it. And it will not shake their fear if Bush’s political foes respond with nothing more than an assertion that foreign terrorists would not have gained ground in Iraq if Bush had not invaded the country.
Even if Bush admitted that he is the one who unwittingly opened the door for terrorists to Iraq — which he does not admit — his argument could still stand. No matter how they got there, foreign terrorists are definitely in Iraq now, although some experts say not nearly as many as the administration claims.
As with Bush’s “me or nothing” claim in the overall war against terrorism, countering his “there or here” mantra for the fighting in Iraq requires more than just rehashing mistakes of the past. It requires making the connection between those perceived mistakes and the way forward. After all, if Bush could not keep the terrorists out of Iraq, how can he keep them out of the local supermarket?
Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.