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 emocratic
senators Tom Daschle, Robert Byrd, and Kent Conrad have each raised
questions about aspects of the administration's national-security
policy over the last two days. It's a marked departure from previous
practice of Democrats, who have hitherto been eager to explain that
there is "no daylight" between them and the president
when it comes to the war on terrorism.
Daschle said
that the war's continued success "is still very much in doubt"
as we have not yet found Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden — a
remark that Republicans interpreted as a criticism of the administration.
("Disgusting" was the entirety of Tom DeLay's press release
responding to Daschle; Trent Lott's said, "How dare Senator
Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on
terrorism, especially when we have troops in the field.")
Byrd was much
more explicitly critical, complaining that the Pentagon is "seems
to be looking for opportunities to stay longer [in Afghanistan]
and expand our presence" and that we are better "at developing
entrance strategies" than "exit strategies." Senate
Budget Committee chairman Conrad, meanwhile, balked at the president's
defense budget requests.
The new Democratic
aggressiveness may reflect the fact that the direction of the war
has become, if not uncertain, unexplained. The administration probably
needs to do a better selling job on why our next logical step is
to go into ex-Soviet Georgia.
Democrats may
also have decided that the only way forward for them politically
is to bring down the president's poll numbers by raising doubts
about his conduct of the war. It is, obviously, a risky strategy.
It opens them up to the kind of counter-criticism Daschle is getting
now, and in the short run at least the Republicans are likely to
win the pr fight. And even if Democratic criticisms were to bring
Bush's positives down and his negatives up in the polls over a longer
period, the same might happen to the Democrats — indeed, they
might suffer more.
So far, the
White House is showing some restraint in exploiting the opening
that the Democrats seem to have given it. At today's briefing, spokesman
Ari Fleischer was asked if he thought Daschle and Byrd were "damaging
to unity on the war." He said, "No, I think members of
Congress have every right to speak out as they see fit." But
he also said this: "There's a bottom line, and the President
always understands that members of Congress are going to speak out
as freely as they should. But when it comes to the defense of the
nation, the President surely hopes that nobody will vote to under-fund
our nation's defense needs, because the needs are serious, there
is a war underway."
My guess —
and it's just a guess — is that in the next few days other
Democrats, especially senators in tight races, will politely put
some distance between themselves and Daschle's comments. And that
Daschle himself will follow suit.
Correction
Andrew
Jackson did not, as
I wrote the other day, issue the first presidential veto; that
he did is apparently a widespread myth. He is not even the first
president to have vetoed a bill on constitutional grounds —
an honor that belongs to George Washington.
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