A Democratic Majority?

Photo Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

Yesterday, Democrat Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. President. His party, in fact, has won at least a plurality of the votes in five of the past six presidential elections. On average, Democrats have received about 4.5 million more votes than Republicans in every presidential election since George H.W. Bush won decisively in 1988. Was that the end of the Reagan era?

The Democratic party has also controlled the U.S. Senate since the 2006 midterm elections. Indeed, in the fifteen years between January 2001 and January 2015, Democrats will have controlled the Senate for all but four and one-half years. That's roughly two-thirds of the years to-date of the twenty-first century.

Republicans currently control the U.S. House of Representatives, but this is thanks largely to gerrymandering and quirks of political geography. Democratic candidates in the 2012 elections received one million more votes than did Republicans. Indeed, FairVote.org has estimated that Democrats were actually preferred roughly 52-48% by the electorate in the most recent elections. The Democrats controlled a majority of the House from January 2007 until January 2011, which means they have won a meaningful majority of votes cast in three of the past four congressional elections.

Why mention these facts? Well, it is interesting how quickly political reality can change. Remember when some pundits and insiders were predicting a "durable" majority position held by the Republican Party?

That alleged majority was built largely on the Republican control of the south and the exurbs. To get a taste of the era, consider the following analysis that I found while going through old drafts of posts that were never posted on this blog. The piece was written by Ronald Brownstein in the February 2006 issue of The American Prospect. The columnist was reviewing four contemporary books about the South and American politics:

The South now furnishes the decisive votes for Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Outside the South, Democrats still hold the advantage in the competition on all three fronts. But the Republican dominance of the South has grown so pronounced that it swamps the Democratic strengths elsewhere and provides the GOP with its margin of majority for both Congress and the White House.

Consider the Senate. In the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky -- the generally accepted political definition of the South -- Republicans hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats. In the rest of the country, Democrats control seven more Senate seats than the GOP....

The same is true in the House. Outside the South, Democrats hold a 152-140 edge in House seats....The imbalance is even more pronounced in the race for the White House. In 2000, Al Gore won just over 70 percent of the Electoral College votes at stake outside the South. But George W. Bush narrowly won the White House because he swept all 165 Electoral College votes in the 13 southern states. Four years later, John Kerry won 68 percent of the Electoral College votes outside the South. But Bush won because he again swept the 13 Southern states -- this time worth 168 Electoral College votes after population growth measured in the 2000 Census.

In my review of the 2004 presidential election results, I noted some "ongoing demographic changes" that were already influencing voting patterns in Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia. I described these as a "good sign for Democrats for 2008 and beyond," even though they had just experienced their most disappointing election of the past quarter century.

I suspect, somewhere, Republican analysts are looking at the most recent voting and demographic data in an effort to find some pathways to victory in 2016.


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Bush Memoirs

Over at Duck of Minerva, I've been blogging about revelations from the George W. Bush memoirs.

On Friday, November 12, I posted "Drip, drip, drip," which focused on Bush's acknowledgement of the Israeli destruction of a Syrian nuclear reactor in September 2007. Did the Bush doctrine have limits?

Saturday, November 13, I blogged "Bush: McConnell plays politics with national security." Bush says the Kentucky Senator wanted to withdraw troops from Iraq so the GOP would not lose Congress in 2006 -- even when he was publicly condemning Democrats for proposing the same reductions.

Updated: Monday, November 15: "(Head of) State Secrets." It is about Bush's accusation that German Chancellor Schroeder flip-flopped on the Iraq war -- and the former German leader's reaction. Put simply, someone is lying.

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2007, so far

The new Congress took office this week and the Democrats are back in charge. That fact should make most 2006 voters happy -- but I've read a couple of recent pieces suggesting that the election was just as flawed as the 2000 and 2004 ones seemed to be.

Simply put, the 2006 exit poll results did not come close to matching the 2006 election results:

When we compare the results of this national exit poll with the total vote count for all House races we find that once again, as in the 2004 Election (“E2004”), there is a very significant exit poll-vote count discrepancy. The exit poll indicates a Democratic victory margin nearly 4%, or 3 million votes, greater than the margin actually recorded by the vote counting machinery. This is far outside the margin of error of the poll and has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of occurring as a matter of chance.

Hmmm, it sounds "stranger than fiction," eh?

Maybe that's why my wife and I spotted our new representative at that terrific film (great script) earlier this week.

Perhaps John Yarmuth was doing homework: is the Bush administration a (perhaps now dated and not particularly humorous) comedy -- or a tragedy?

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been busy this week -- "rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenberg."

And finally, while the information about the election and Bush foreign policy team has been bubbling around in my head for a couple of days, I have discovered that there is one less voice I can turn to for reliable and interesting analysis of the news: Billmon seems to have closed his Whiskey Bar blog.

This is disappointing, to be sure. Needless to say, I hope he continues to write -- perhaps a book -- and that he finds all the time he needs and deserves for his family.


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Filed as: news

Results

You can get the news lots of places, so I won't try to report much.

At the party I attended tonight, the host cracked open some champagne and the entire group tosted when Anne Northup conceded to John Yarmuth. Disclosure: I gave Yarmuth a small amount of my cash this election cycle.

I'm also intrigued by the Virginia Senate race, where Democrat Jim Webb is winning by about 2200 votes with 99% counted. Unfortunately, it's not looking good for Claire McCaskill in Missouri, with two-thirds of the vote counted (50-46). Jon Tester is doing well in Montana (54-44), but only about 28% of the votes are counted.

Harold Ford is down 50,000 votes in Tennessee, so I'm not sure why the networks haven't called it yet. With 94% counted, there must be a lot of Democratic votes remaining (otherwise they would call it) -- but I'm skeptical.

A 50-50 Senate means Dick Cheney breaks the ties.


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Filed as: 2006 midterms

Election predictions

I'm going to an election party tomorrow night (that's what Political Scientists do for fun) and am expected to weigh in on these races:

IN-09 Sodrel (R) Hill (D): Hill
KY-02 Lewis (R) Weaver (D): Lewis
KY-03 Northup (R) Yarmuth (D): Yarmuth
KY-04 Davis (R) Lucas (D): Lucas
AZ-Sen Kyl (R) Pederson (D): Kyl
CT-Sen Lieberman (I) Lamont (D): Lieberman
MO-Sen Talent (R) McCaskill (D): McCaskill
MT-Sen Burns (R) Tester (D): Tester
NJ-Sen Menendez (D) Kean (R): Menendez
OH-Sen DeWine (R) Brown (D): Brown
PA-Sen Santorum (R) Casey (D): Casey
RI-Sen Chafee (R) Whitehouse (D): Whitehouse
TN-Sen (*) Corker (R) Ford (D): Corker
VA-Sen Allen (R) Webb (D): Webb
House majority R D: Democratic + 24 = 227 - 208
Senate majority** R D: Democratic + 6 = 51-49

Yarmuth’s final score (score rounded up to two decimal places): 50.62

** Jeffords and Lieberman will be counted as D; 50-50 means a R majority


Post-election update: Apparently, I only had to select between R or D control of the House and Senate. Thus, I wasn't penalized for guessing that the Dems would merely pick up 24 House seats (it looks like they'll get 28, accounting for the fact that the Independent seat used to caucus with them).

So, I got 15 out of 16 correct (all but KY-04) and won the election pool!


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Filed as: 2006 midterms

The rats are abandoning ship

It looks like a lot of flacks from corporate America stuck a finger in the air and figured out which way the political winds are blowing this fall. From The New York Times, October 28:

Corporate America is already thinking beyond Election Day, increasing its share of last-minute donations to Democratic candidates and quietly devising strategies for how to work with Democrats if they win control of Congress.

The shift in political giving, for the first 18 days of October, has not been this pronounced in the final stages of a campaign since 1994...

In 1994, of course, the Democrats lost 52 seats in the House. It was the greatest shift in power in that chamber since 1946. The newspaper provided a simple graphic which summarizes the data on corporate PAC giving.

In the last decade, corporate political action committees typically gave 27.2% of their funds in October to Democrats, 72.8% to Republicans. Republicans maintained control of the House throughout all those elections.

This October, these same corporate PACs are dividing the money 43% to 57% in October. Some corporations have already started giving 60 to 70% of their money to Dems. The article mentions PACs from Pfizer and Lockhead Martin, for example. Sprint, UPS and H-P have also increased contributions to Dems by at least 15%.

Finally, the article also notes without irony that the freshmen members of Congress will likely have new corporate "friends" after the election -- many offering, for example, to help retire campaign debt. If a hypothetical Speaker Pelosi hosts events between election day and the beginning of the new Congress, expect them to be crowded and economically productive.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?


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Filed as: 2006 midterms

Midterm election countdown: 23 days

It is three weeks and two days until the 2006 midterm elections. The latest issue of PS includes two different political science studies, using different methodologies, which conclude that the Democrats will pick up 22 seats in the House. Apparently, the latest polling also suggests a solid Democratic victory -- though it seems premature to talk of a "landslide."

Republicans, of course, are not going to roll over and play dead. As Karl Rove warned back in January, they see their trump card as terrorism.

I expect some effort in the coming weeks to raise the level of fear. Basically, they will return to their strategy that seemed to be working for them (well, President Bush's approval ratings increased anyway) around the fifth anniversary of September 11. Their message really was that Americans are "safer," but "still not safe."

As James Fallows implied in the September Atlantic Monthly, raising the level of US fear is all too easy:

Any of the dozens of ports, the scores of natural-gas plants and nuclear facilities, the hundreds of important bridges and tunnels, or the thousands of shopping malls, office towers, or sporting facilities could be the next target of attack. It is impossible to protect them all, and even trying could ruin America’s social fabric and public finances. The worst part of the situation is helplessness, as America’s officials and its public wait for an attack they know they cannot prevent.

Are the Democrats ready for the electorate to be reminded, selectively of course, about some of these facts?

Back in January, I offered what I still think is a good game plan for the Democrats. Talk about Iraq in a very blunt way.

If anyone from the John Yarmuth campaign is reading -- I think this could work to defeat Anne Northup as well.


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Filed as: 2006 midterms

It's good to be King

How will Republicans talk about Iraq this fall? That could be a critical factor determining whether or not the Democrats can win one or both houses of Congress in 2006.

Well, one of the most conservative members of Congress, Republican Steve King from Iowa received a lot of attention two months ago for making this claim about Iraq on the floor of the House of Representatives:

"27.51 Iraqis per 100,000 die a violent death on an annual basis. 27.51. Now what does that mean? To me, it really doesn't mean a lot until I compare it to people that I know or have a feel for the rhythm of this place. Well I by now have a feel for the rhythm of this place called Washington, D.C., and my wife lives here with me, and I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, she's at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C. than an average civilian in Iraq. 45 out of every 100,000 Washington, D.C. regular residents die a violent death on an annual basis."

King's claim is nearly as egregious as one made by Fox anchor Brit Hume, who back in 2003 asserted that US soldiers (then dying at a rate of 1.7 per day) were safer in Iraq than average people are in California (which has 6.6 murders per day). To justify his claim, Hume noted that California and Iraq are nearly the same geographic size!

Hume failed to note that California has a population of 33.8 million people, while Iraq has hosted only about 160,000 US soldiers even when the troop rotations have been boosted for significant threats -- related to elections, etc. If the US deployed just 1.6 million soldiers, and if they were killed at the same rate, that would mean a death rate of 17 per day -- and California would still have more than 20 times as many people. That was a foolish comparison .

If I were a Democrat running for Congress, I think I'd want my opponent to make these kinds of delusional comments about Iraq. The American people know that "stability and order" have not yet arrived in Iraq -- verbal trickery is NOT going to change that.

I want to look in a more detailed fashion at King's remarks. First, consider what King admits he didn't count:

King said that with the help of the Congressional Research Service and a Web site that tracks Iraqi deaths, he and his staff compiled statistics on how many civilians per 100,000 in Iraq die a violent death. He said he did not include police - because they are involved in combat - and other members of the Iraqi military....

King said he did not have the ability to break out figures for Baghdad, where much of the violence in Iraq has occurred, and which would provide a city-to-city comparison.

These errors significantly distort the data. There have been 2200+ police deaths in Iraq since March 2003. Iraq's population is less than 10% of America's, but only 155 American police offers died in the line of duty in 2004 -- and half of those were killed in traffic accidents!

A study by the Brookings Institution reveals what even President Bush knows and discusses publicly-- that Baghdad is a particularly nasty place to live:

Brookings arrived at a Baghdad violent death rate of 100 per 100,000, as of May, but cautioned that "our estimates could be too high as some of the gunshot victims may be insurgents killed intentionally by the U.S. military, or too low since many murder victims are never taken to the morgue but buried quickly and privately and therefore never recorded in official tallies."

Clearly, Baghdad isn't safer than the US capital. According to the assistant director of the Baghdad morgue, 90% of the deaths this past July (2006) were due to violence.

King also cherry-picked the data about Washington DC, which in 2003 had a violent death rate (45 per 100,000) significantly higher than it did in 2005:

Brookings also noted that the homicide rate for Washington in 2005 was 35 per 100,000, down from the 2003 rate quoted by King.

If we reversed King's deception, he looks like a complete idiot because the national U.S. violent death rate is 4.2 per 100,000.

National rate: Iraq 27 (by King's count); US 4
Capital rate: Baghdad 100; Washington, DC 35

I hope every Republican running for Congress asks Steve King to visit and campaign. So long as voters aren't getting their news exclusively from Brit Hume, they should be able to spot the fools.


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Filed as: Iraq

2006 Election update

Tuesday was the primary here in Kentucky and I actually voted for the Democratic candidate who got the majority of the votes, John Yarmuth. The winner took nearly 54% of the vote.

If you don't know Yarmuth's name, he is the former publisher of the alternative weekly Leo newspaper, and widely viewed as the most left-leaning of the candidates. Andrew Horne, who finished second with a bit less than one-third of the vote (32%), was a "fighting Dem" former Marine who served in Iraq during both the Persian Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Yarmuth will now face five-term Republican incumbent Anne Northup in November. With Horne out, I'm not sure how closely national media will follow the race. The "fighting Dem" angle is gone.

What's left to cover? Well, Yarmuth's newspaper accepted "sexually explicit personal ads" and the conventional wisdom among some analysts is that Northup will try to tar him with that come November. And, of course, they'll comb his political columns in the paper.

Meanwhile, Yarmuth is going to try to link his foe to the Bush administration's failings: Iraq, Katrina, the budget deficit (perhaps), the Medicare drug program. etc. It's a long list, as my readers know.

And the Republican party in Kentucky may be in trouble -- what with the governor under indictment since last week.

Whether journalists are watching or not, the race will figure into the national scene because it is one of the few swing seats that some political observers see -- thanks to gerrymandering.

Indeed, some political scientists wonder if the Dems can win back the House even if they take the lion's share of the votes come November.

Matthew Shugart of Fruits & Votes, a political science professor who specializes in comparative electoral systems at the University of California, San Diego, has an interesting post you should read on congressional elections. Matthew presents a lot of data on past congressional elections and finds that parties winning a majority of the votes nationally tend to win the Congress. However:

Despite an overall tendency for seats to follow from votes in a fairly predictable way, it is clear that recent elections are deviating from the pattern. Every election since 1996 is above the trend. More to the point, in each House election since 1996, the Republican party has won a majority of seats on less than 50% of the vote. The only time that had happened before was in 1952. In 1996, as well as 1952, the Republican party did not even win a plurality of the House vote.

There's some additional discussion and the blogger/scholars basically concludes that 47% may be the threshold. If Republicans get less than that, they should lose the body regardless of factors like gerrymandering.


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Filed as: 2006 election

Northup's fight

I was interviewed for this story in the March 26 LA Times, but my quote was cut by an editor. I pointed out that the public "rallies 'round the flag" at the beginning of a war, but that effect declines over time as casualties mount.

Even in the heartland, Democrats suddenly see advantage on an issue that is usually considered a GOP trump card: national security.

Baron Hill, who hopes to unseat the Republican who represents this region of Indiana, said it used to be hard for Democrats to criticize the Iraq war without sounding unpatriotic.

"Not anymore," Hill said in an interview. "I think people are very skeptical now about what is going on over there, and you have more freedom to talk about Iraq."

A Fox News poll this month showed the war in a statistical tie with spending and taxes as voters' top concerns heading into election season. And 50% of respondents to a recent Newsweek poll said they would like to see Democrats take control of Congress; 34% said they would like to see it remain in Republican hands.

A fair amount of the story is about Anne Northup and her possible confrontation with Iraq war veteran Andrew Horne.



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Filed as: Midterm elections

Confronting Karl Rove

This past Friday night, the man sometimes known as "Bush's brain," Karl Rove, delivered a widely covered political speech before the Republican National Convention. In the address, Rove argued that his party should continue to make national security a partisan issue in forthcoming debates and elections.

I saw this bit on TV earlier this morning:

At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security. Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview - and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic, not at all. But it does make them wrong - deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.

Democrats need to confront Rove directly.

Want to know what I'd do as a Democratic strategist or speechwriter in 2006? I'd take Rove's words and reverse "Republicans" and "Democrats" and replace "9/11" with "Iraq." Try this on for size:

At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security. Democrats have a post-Iraq worldview - and many Republicans have a pre-Iraq worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic, not at all. But it does make them wrong - deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.

I'd continue:

In Iraq, Republicans used America's tremendous military power to provoke terrorists and create al Qaeda outposts where they did not exist before.

They also pulled important security assets out of Afghanistan before the hunt for al Qaeda, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden was finished. As a result, even today, the future of Afghanistan is uncertain and the main perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America remain at large.

Worse, even after learning that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction programs nor operational ties to Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush and the other Republicans who control Washington boldly declare that would still make war on Iraq if forced to decide again. They would again choose to make Afghanistan and al Qaeda a lower foreign policy priority than Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Before the war, Republicans in power in Washington ignored the caution urged by some of America's strongest political allies and they ignored the analysts and policy advisors who were telling them about the likely weakness of the Iraq WMD intelligence data. The President observed millions of people protesting against war in February 2003 and dismissed them as an irrelevant "focus group." Now, Bush and the other Republicans in power ignore the adverse effects of the Iraq war on America's national security.

Promoting liberty in the Arab and Muslim worlds is a tremendous political goal, but there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that the best way to do this is at the point of American bayonets. The far more threatening Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire were brought down by vigilant containment -- not war. South Africa's brutally racist apartheid regime too was ended by the worldwide application of sanction and disapproval -- not war.

If it wants to democratize the Middle East while also fighting a "war on terror," America should be applying the lessons of the bloodless "velvet Revolution," and uneager to repeat the mistakes that lead to the violent insurgency in Iraq. The elections there have been somewhat helpful and promising, but America has lost more than 2200 lives, spent over $200 billion, and has seen its armed forces bogged down in an internal insurgency that even America's military leaders say promises to go on for many, many years.

Iraq was not a "central front" in the war on terror until the Bush administration threw a dart at the Middle East and decided to invade a country that did not pose a significant security threat to American interests. Had that dart landed on Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Egypt, a similar nationalist insurgency would have been created with bloody consequences. Note, however, that the connections to al Qaeda and anti-American terrorism are stronger in every one of these states than they were in pre-war Iraq.

America must be vigilant about the threat from terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation, but it must also be smart. It must not worsen its security situation by undertaking wasteful and deadly wars against tin horn dictators.

Few states in the Arab or Muslim world are free and democratic and America has a long-term interest in promoting its values in that part of the world. However, the "war on terror" is a separate objective altogether. In fact, the raw data reveal that most victims and perpetrators of terrorism are citizens of democracies.

Obviously, that is not a strong argument against democratization. However, it does demonstrate that the Republicans in Washington misunderstand the threat from terrorism. As the former CIA al Qaida specialist Michael Scheur has repeatedly argued, and many studies demonstrate, terrorists do not hate America because of its freedoms. Terrorists attack America and Americans because they disagree with specific aspects of US foreign policy.

We should not therefore give in to the terrorists, but it makes no sense to create yet another reason for the Arab and Muslim worlds to hate America. And make no mistake about it, the Iraq war is extremely unpopular in the Arab and Muslim world. We may claim to be offering them liberty, but the great mass of people in the Arab and Muslim world see the war as just another western occupation of their land that should be resisted.

The US has never apologized to anyone for invading Iraq under what now amounts to false pretenses. While many other states around the world agreed that Saddam Hussein was a horrible leader who certainly behaved as if he had something to hide, few states agreed that it was a good idea to topple his regime.

Even the top-level Republicans who served in the political administration of George H.W. Bush understood why the war was a risky and bad idea. Their early '90s warnings now seem quite prescient: Bush Sr. feared creating "an unwinnable urban guerilla war." Colin Powell thought that such a war would pose an "unpardonable expense in terms of money, lives lost and ruined regional relationships." Dick Cheney thought "we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded."

These former leaders were right at the time and it is not at all clear why the situation in Iraq merited a new view. Former Bush Sr. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft made these sorts of arguments again in the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, but no one listened to him.

What American cannot abide, however, is the failure to learn from this horribly costly foreign policy mistake. In the three and a half years since Republicans in Washington decided to invake Iraq, they are yet to learn the important lessons of that conflict. They continue to say they'd make the same choice again.

With Iran on the international agenda, and problem-states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia still to be addressed, Americans must not give the Republicans another chance to repeat the mistakes of Iraq.

Typical of Rove, he addressed the issue of Iraq by trying to take this strong potential issue for Democrats and turn it against them. He tried to link Democrats to the "cut and run" strategy of "immediate stand down of U.S. troops in Iraq and withdrawal by the end of April."

Democrats must not let Republicans get away with this in 2006. Moreover, they must turn this political issue into a winning campaign point so as to assume the reigns of power and put American foreign policy back on a better course.



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"Pro-war" Democrats and the 2006 Elections

For many months, pollsters have demonstrated that public opinion is turning against the war in Iraq. About 60% of those surveyed by CBS News, over a period of many months, "disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq." At times, nearly 60% of those polled say the war was a mistake, and despite some fluctuations in the results, at least half the population seems to think that the US should never have gone to war in Iraq.

Given the way politics about national security and foreign policy are framed in the US, members of the media would probably be surprised to learn that a plurality of respondents say that "the Democratic Party is more likely to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq."

Politically, for now, the most important finding is this: 85% of those surveyed in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll January 6-8, 2006, replied that "the stituation in Iraq" would be extremely or very important to their "vote for Congress this year."

Election contests are not really on the public's radar yet, but the Denver Post recently (December 28) noted an interesting and simple Democratic strategy -- put an Iraq war veteran on the ballot:

More than 30 Iraq and Persian Gulf War veterans have entered congressional races across the country as Democrats, hoping to capitalize on their military experience to topple the incumbent Republican majority.

In my home district, five-term incumbent Anne Northup is being challenged by Andrew Horne, a Marine Reserve officer who "spent months working with Iraqi security forces and helping with reconstruction and humanitarian efforts."

Wait, before anyone gets too excited, note that the Dems tried something like this in 2004 at the very top of the ballot.

It didn't lead to the results they wanted. Republicans called Senator John Kerry a flip-flopper for voting "for the war" in October 2002, but then later criticizing its prosecution. Kerry had a tough time explaining his vote for the $87 billion before his vote against the $87 billion. And his fate might have been sealed in August 2004, when he said he'd still have voted "aye" even after it was quite apparent that Iraq had no threatening WMD or operational ties to al Qaeda.

So much for the idea that a military veteran can assure electoral success in an election dominated by national security issued and foreign affairs.

I'm confident many Republican strategists are planning to use a similar ploy in 2006.

In October 2002, remember, 29 Democratic Senators and 81 Democratic House members voted for Joint Resolution 114, which was entitled "To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq." Not all of the "pro-war" Democrats will be up for re-election in 2006, thanks to a scattering of retirements and previous electoral losses. And, because of six year terms, only one-third of Senators stand for election every two years.

Still, dozens of Democrats up for re-election in 2006 voted for the Iraq Joint Resolution and this apparently bipartisan act will provide ammunition for all Republicans against all Democrats. Indeed, the early signs are that Republicans are prepared to use this fact as a stick with which to beat Democrats over the head.

Congress had access to the same intelligence, the President and other members of the administration claim. They also boast that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq, as he posed (allegedly) an ongoing threat to American security.

In short, Republicans argue that the war was an honest mistake, if it was a mistake, because the intelligence was flawed. Moreover, it wasn't a significant error because 9/11 "changed everything" and America has to be prepared to eliminate its enemies even before they fully develop. Iraq had the ability to make weapons of mass destruction and it was lead by a strongly anti-American despot who could have linked to terrorists at any time. Conclusion? Only weak-willed Democrats would continue to fret over a decision made three years ago. Decisive and strong leaders have to shrug off their mistakes and move on to the next fight, which appears to be Iran.

Even though the situation in Iraq is a mess, and the Bush administration is largely to blame for the American presence there, few war critics are overtly embracing a complete anti-war message and calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Many fear civil war and/or state failure, which is entirely reasonable. Nonetheless, a nuanced anti-war message is hard to sell in politics. As I've explained before, that typically works to the advantage of Republicans.

• What can "pro-war" Democrats do to combat the likely Republican strategy in the 2006 election?
• How can Democrats be against the war, without appearing weak?

Well, arguably, George W. Bush provided an electoral answer in the 2000 foreign policy debate with Al Gore. Debate moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates about the circumstances when the US should use military force.

MODERATOR: ...I figured this out; in the last 20 years there have been eight major actions that involved the introduction of U.S. ground, air or naval forces. Let me name them. Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo. If you had been president for any of those interventions, would any of those interventions not have happened?

After running through the list for Vice President Gore, Lehrer turned to then-Governor Bush and asked him what he thought about his father's military intervention in Somalia:

MODERATOR: Somalia.

BUSH: Started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it's in our best interests. But in this case it was a nation-building exercise, and same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either.

A few moments later, Bush elaborated on his view of nation-building:

I thought the best example of a way to handle the situation was East Timor when we provided logistical support to the Australians, support that only we can provide. I thought that was a good model. But we can't be all things to all people in the world, Jim. And I think that's where maybe the vice president and I begin to have some differences. I'm worried about overcommitting our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. You mentioned Haiti. I wouldn't have sent troops to Haiti. I didn't think it was a mission worthwhile. It was a nation building mission, and it was not very successful. It cost us billions, a couple billions of dollars, and I'm not so sure democracy is any better off in Haiti than it was before.

So, Democrats, there you have it.

It's OK to support a well-intended military mission -- and then reject it later because the "mission changed" to "nation-building." The costs of attempted democratization are high and the benefits are often dubious. The President's views on Haiti were widely shared and an updated Iraq version might well resonate with voters.

If liberal hawks supported the Iraq war in 2003 because they genuinely feared WMD and al Qaeda, so be it. To oppose the war now, run some clips of Governor Bush explaining the circumstances when it is acceptable to change one's view.

Moreover, Dems can claim that they want to save the military. The burgeoning threat from Iran proves the need to have a military not bogged down in a political backwater by insurgents (and "dead enders") who don't have weapons of mass destruction.


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Election: countdown to 2006 midterms

Tuesday was election day and many Democrats are smiling because New Jersey and Virginia elected new governors from their party. Of course, the outgoing governors were also Democrats, so these results were not exactly earth-shattering.

There are much bigger fish to fry.

If the 2006 midterm elections could have been held on Tuesday, Democrats apparently would have reclaimed the Congress. From ABC News:

Indeed, 55 percent of Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say they'd like to see the Democrats take control of Congress in 2006. And if the election were today, registered voters would favor the Democrat in their congressional district by 52 percent to 37 percent.

I've already received an email from a blogger working for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wanting me to link to his attack on Louisville's Representative Anne Northup.

Northup is a shrewd politician and I doubt that many of these attacks will stick. She survived accusations that she was a Newt Gingrich crony, so current efforts to link her to Tom DeLay are probably insufficient to topple Northup -- even if she is among the top ten recipients of cash from DeLay's PAC.

It is kind of interesting that she received a score of ZERO from the National PTA on education issues in 2003-2004. Then again, Mitch McConnell got the same score and he's had little difficulty winning in this state.

The same is true of the ZERO score Northup (and McConnell) received from the Disabled American Vets.

In fact, it would appear from the scores that the test votes selected to make the ratings were highly partisan issues that completely split Republicans and Democrats. I think it's a bad measure if a substantial portion of the respondents receive 0 and many more receive 100.

Would you trust a grade school test for your child if the likely outcomes were all or nothing? I'd suspect the motives or actions of the teacher, wouldn't you?

Tim Saler, the blogger for the DCCC, mentions that Northup supports private Social Security accounts -- as a means of "reforming" the program. True, Northup and other Republicans might be vulnerable on that issue.

Then again, after a lot of talk, nobody actually did anything to change Social Security for the worse. And many people embrace the Republican fantasy, supported by their sleight of hand -- preservation of current Social Security benefits with the addition of private accounts.

Naturally, I believe Saler is correct that Anne Northup should lose because of her politics, but he is missing the elephant in the room.

Most importantly to me, the piece doesn't mention Iraq at all, though the constituent mail I've received from Northup's office continued to tout the threats from Saddam Hussein's Iraq long after it became clear that these were greatly exaggerated.

Republicans are in decline because Iraq is a disaster. Her 2006 Democratic challenger needs to point out that Northup has used incredibly poor judgment supporting a war that is killing a few soldiers every day or two, draining American economic resources, and making America both hated and feared around the world.

Moreover, the war is likely increasing the threats to the US by motivating new terrorists and hastening the proliferation incentives of states like Iran and North Korea.

To me, that's a winning issue because it is vitally important. What is more central to a nation than the question of war and peace?