Miserable Failures

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5879.html

I nominate Batman.

[rquoter] Who bears blame for anti-war failures?
By: Dan Gerstein
September 18, 2007 12:19 PM EST

For many in Washington, the biggest unanswered question from Army. Gen. David Petraeus’ high-profile, low-satisfaction testimony last week was not about military strategy but about political tactics. Why has the anti-war movement been unable to translate the clear public mandate they claim into any clear change in our government’s Iraq policy?

To most war opponents, the blame increasingly lies with the Democratic leadership in Congress, for not taking a hard enough line with President Bush and not fighting to cut off war funding. And their frustration is visibly bubbling over — the provocative group Code Pink, for example, has actually taken to protesting outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco in recent days

But there is a growing feeling among many Democrats, particularly within the D.C. establishment, that just the opposite is true. They may not say it publicly, for fear of arousing the grass roots’ wrath, but the realist wing of the party seems to think the Democrats’ biggest problem on Iraq these days is not that there’s too much Bush Lite but that there’s too much Bush Left.

Under this view, too many anti-war activists, not satisfied with berating the president, have too often wound up behaving like him. They have gone beyond fighting back and holding the Decider accountable to adopting the same divisive, dogmatic and ultimately destructive style of politics that Democrats have been decrying for the past seven years, with the same counterproductive results.

What’s the basis for that argument? Consider some of these stunningly similar parallels between Bush and his Democratic doppelgängers, along with the ramifications for progressives’ overarching goal of ending the war. (For the record, that is a goal I share, no matter my continued admiration and work for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut.)

Polarization. As last week’s New York Times magazine reported, the anti-war umbrella coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq started the new session of Congress with a clear, common-sense strategy to stop the surge: Turn up the heat on moderate Republicans, especially in the Senate, and separate them from the president.

They got the Democratic leadership to set up a series of confrontations and tough votes, culminating in the infamous all-night Senate session in late July, and launched a $12 million presidential-style campaign with major TV ad buys targeted at critical swing voters.

The trouble is, AAEI and its supporters ran the equivalent of a base-rallying primary campaign to win a general election debate. They mimicked Bush’s polarizing, “with us or against us” rhetoric while doing little to actually persuade their swing voter targets to change or address their legitimate concerns with withdrawal deadlines.

Not surprisingly, this tack largely tanked — the best the Democrats could do after several months of pressure tactics was, in that July showdown, to get four Senate GOP-ers to back a timeline for troop withdrawal, leaving them seven votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster and political light years away from the 67 needed to overcome a veto.

Intransigence. The anti-war movement has rightly castigated Bush for his reflexive inflexibility and, specifically, his maddening decision to stick with the same failed strategy in Iraq.

So what did AAEI and its allies do once it became apparent their pressure campaign was not succeeding in peeling off moderate Republicans? Just like the president — and just as some modest signs of success were emerging from Iraq — they doubled down on their bet and countered with an escalation of their own.

Over the August recess, after the Senate pajama party backfired and prompted the Republican caucus to dig in its heels even deeper, MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser said that he appreciated the Senate Democrats’ efforts to force concessions from the minority, but “we’d like to see it go further.”

The movement itself went further by running more hostile ads against Republicans up for reelection in 2008, slamming Reid for suggesting he would pursue a bipartisan compromise without a hard deadline, and setting up the Petraeus report with the now-infamous “General Betray Us” ad in The New York Times.

Cheap shots. That ad, beyond being a terrible tactical blunder, marked a tragic turning point in the Iraq debate, the moment the anti-war movement seemed to fully morph into the thing it hates.

The very same activists who angrily denounced the Rove machine for broadly questioning the patriotism of war critics, and in particular for smearing disabled war hero Max Cleland in the 2002 Georgia Senate race, turned around and attacked a decorated general commanding troops in a shooting war as a liar and a traitor in one of the most visible ways possible.

Some have suggested that the MoveOn ad was a smart move in marketing terms, because its buzz-generating, base-energizing effect will help MoveOn expand its membership ranks. But as one anti-war Democratic strategist told me, that goes to show a fatal flaw in the movement’s MO — it has elevated its own narrow constituency interests above the good of the party.

In this case, the short-term goal for Democrats, as MoveOn’s own Washington director says, continues to be to separate moderate Republicans from Bush. Yet all the MoveOn ad served to do was to alienate them and push them closer to the president.

Unaccountability. One of the Bush traits that galls the progressive community the most is his unwillingness to acknowledge or take responsibility for mistakes. Yet when substantive criticisms like the ones outlined above have been raised about the anti-war movement’s political tactics, the Bush Left has pointed fingers everywhere but at itself.

Instead, many in the movement have opted to punish their friends — a campaign is now forming online to mount primary challenges against so-called “Bush Dog” Democrats from swing House districts who voted for the big war funding bill in May.

One of the few exceptions to this rule recently came from Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice.

In the Times magazine profile on AAEI, she questioned the anti-war movement’s over-reliance on the Internet as a means of mobilizing opposition to the war, saying it has “undermined a little the more traditional approach to organizing, where you go and knock on doors and talk to people. ... People think, ‘Oh, well, I’ve signed a petition online, so I’ve done my bit.’ So I think a lot of us as organizers have become a little sloppy. We haven’t put enough attention into talking to our neighbors, talking on the shopping line.”

Not exactly a stinging rebuke, but it is revealing nonetheless — in large part because it helps to explain why the anti-war movement has failed to force a wholesale change in our Iraq policy.

As Cagan suggests, AAEI and its allies have been borrowing a page from Karl Rove’s discredited playbook and talking the most to the people who agree with them most — and, it should be noted, in terms that won’t resonate with the people they need the most. In doing so, they have failed to enlarge their base and enhance their strength — which is precisely what they have to do to swing moderate Republicans in Congress to their side.

That is not to say, however, that the anti-war movement’s pressure campaign has been a failure. Indeed, the great irony here, as one Democratic strategist told me, is that AAEI and its supporters could credibly claim some measure of victory if they were not so absolutist in their demands.

Their strategy, while executed in a flawed way, has still paid significant dividends: More and more moderate Republicans are on edge and ready to vote for a change in course. And Bush’s announcement last week of a small troop withdrawal by the end of the year, as unsatisfying as it was to war opponents, was a concession in the right direction.

However, for the anti-war forces to consolidate and build on those gains, they are probably going to have to make some concessions of their own and accept some kind of bipartisan compromise along the lines that Reid is proposing.

The fact is, the swing Republicans whom Democrats need are even less inclined to support a hard deadline post-Petraeus, and they are never going to vote to cut off funding. But they will be hard-pressed to reject the political lifeline that Reid wants to offer them, which would increase the number of Republicans formally breaking with the president and accelerate the momentum for a true change in course.

In the end, much like the war itself, there are no good choices here for progressives. But they are inevitably going to have to decide what’s more important: prolonging their war with Bush or ending the one in Iraq.

Dan Gerstein, a Democratic strategist and political commentator based in New York, is a regular Politico columnist.[/i][/rquoter]