The party's over

It's time for Democrats to step up and do what they were elected to do: Oppose this president's disastrous war with a smart and courageous strategy.

By Joan Walsh

Read more: Joan Walsh, Democratic Party, Opinion, Nancy Pelosi, Iraq War, 2006 Elections

Photo © WorldPictureNews

Image released by the Pentagon in April 2004 that showed the true realities of the war in Iraq (the Pentagon quickly withdrew these pictures from circulation).

Jan. 5, 2007 | &Let Democrats enjoy the party. Let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her family savor the assorted tributes to the nation's first female and first Italian-American House speaker. Let House Democrats get started on their "First 100 Hours" agenda, even if detractors say it's heavier on symbolism than substance. And then, sometime soon, let the new Democratic congressional majority show the nation its members have a smart, courageous strategy to fight the Bush administration's plans to escalate the war in Iraq and lay out a deliberate exit plan instead.

On Wednesday, President Bush came back from his Crawford Christmas energized, recovered from his November "thumpin'," with a stunningly insincere call for bipartisan action in the Wall Street Journal and in an odd Rose Garden tableau with his Cabinet. (Did anyone else think Condoleezza Rice looked unusually miserable?) But by far the most brazen of the president's new initiatives is his reported plan to "surge and accelerate" the war, sending in somewhere between 10,000 to 40,000 new troops. On this front, at least, Bush has kept his word: He refused the "graceful exit" from an unwinnable war offered by his father's friends in the Iraq Study Group, just as he promised last month. Instead he's proposing a bloody escalation, and Democrats have to decide whether and how to fight it.

We've heard a lot in recent weeks about how the Democrats are coming to power without a real mandate, in contrast with the Republican class of '94, which supposedly sailed into Washington on the wings of the "Contract With America." There's so much wrong with that comparison that it needs to be taken apart piece by piece. The triumph of the class of '94 had much less to do with the Contract With America (fewer than 30 percent of Americans had heard of it, and only 7 percent said they voted for Republicans because of it), or with Gingrich's crackpot agenda (remember orphanages for the children of welfare recipients? Dismantling the Department of Education?), than with voter anger at the Democrats' decades-long and increasingly corrupt control of Congress. Republicans were also aided by the Clinton administration's early missteps on gays in the military and healthcare -- all amplified by the unimaginative Beltway press pack's exaggerated coverage of administration "scandals," starting with Whitewater.

In fact, Gingrich and company's arrogant overreaching and saber-rattling about their "mandate" cost Republicans the chance to implement much of their agenda. It led instead to gridlock and the toxic culture of vicious hyper-partisanship and corruption that turned Congress over to the Democrats in November. So Democrats are right to see their mandate mostly limited to cleaning up corruption, making Congress work, and the other symbolically important if safe initiatives, like a minimum wage hike and funding stem-cell research, contained in their 100 Hour agenda.

But they are wrong if they don't take leadership in the one area where voters gave them a bigger mandate than the Contract With America ever had: ending the war in Iraq. That's why the Democrats' early timidity on opposing the president's war plans has been discouraging. At a time when only 12 percent of Americans believe we should send more troops to Iraq, far too many Democrats seem ready to acquiesce in what should be called an escalation not a surge. In December, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was open to backing the president's plan for a troop increase under certain conditions; on Wednesday, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin said the same thing. On the House side, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told MSNBC Thursday that he'd back a push for 20,000 new troops, though he added, "We need to find out specifically what he wants to do with those troops."

Pelosi skirted specifics in her jubilant speech after being elected speaker. Acknowledging that voters sought change in Iraq when they cast their ballots in November, she added pointedly, "It is the responsibility of the president to articulate a new plan for Iraq that makes it clear to the Iraqis that they must defend their own streets and their own security ... a plan that promotes stability in the region ... and a plan that allows us to responsibly redeploy our troops."

Pelosi is right -- it is the president's mess -- but she's wrong if she concludes the Democrats don't have to help clean it up. (On Friday afternoon, after this piece was published, Reid and Pelosi released a letter to Bush opposing his call for more troops, a laudable first sign of serious spine from the Democrats. But what they do when Bush rejects their advice, as he almost certainly will, is going to continue to challenge party leaders.)

Some of the Democrats' caution is understandable. There are two arguments against the new congressional majority doing much on Iraq. The first is pragmatic: There isn't much they can do. Bush is the commander in chief, he can deploy another 40,000 soldiers without asking permission. While Congress has budget authority, Vietnam showed how hard it is to strangle a war with purse strings. Democrats really only cut funding for that unpopular war when the pullout was a fait accompli, and still had to fight the spurious charge that they "lost" Vietnam.

Next page: Democrats should spurn the White House's insincere advances