A New Front
Democrats vs. Bush on the war.

By Ramesh Ponnuru
March 1, 2002 9:00 a.m.

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.