From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On the Politics of the Surge—

FRED BARNES: I’m reading Barack Obama, he says, “We need to start pursuing a more complete plan to constrain the president.” Barack Obama says that, this senator from Illinois.
Now, he doesn’t have a plan to win the war in Iraq, he doesn’t have a plan to secure Baghdad, he doesn’t have a plan to help reconstruct the rest of Iraq that needs to be reconstructed, he doesn’t plan to get the Iranians to stop sending people — troublemakers, revolutionary guards, into Iraq. He doesn’t have any of those plans. What he wants is a more concrete plan to constrain the president. This man does not know who the enemy is.
BILL SAMMON: But what’s amazing to me is that I think by doing this change, Bush has really, sort of, moved to the base lines. He has changed the paradigm. It used to be if you were pro-war, you wanted to maintain the existing level of troops, if you were anti-war, you wanted to reduce the level of troops. Now, if you’re pro-war, you want to surge troops and if you’re on the opposite side, you want to maintain the existing level of troops. In other words . . . a lot of Democrats are now saying “maintain the existing level of troops;” that’s what Bush was saying a week ago.
BARNES: You know, my problem with what the Democrats are doing in voting — and some republicans, wanting to vote on this resolution is, look, the terrorists, al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgents want one thing. Why are they doing what they’re doing? To break the will of the United States. You pass this resolution, it will send them a message — you’re starting to break the will of the United States.

—On the Democratic Race—

SAMMON: Well, I think it is dividing Democrats and I think Edwards senses that Hillary is basically running a general election campaign when she should be running a primary election campaign. In other words, she’s trying to be centrist . . . Edwards is taking advantage of that. I think Edwards is going in and mixing it up at a time before the conventional wisdom congeals that the race is only about Barack and Hillary, he’s getting in there and establishing himself.
KONDRACKE: What Edwards is trying to do is to be the George McGovern of this race. That is to be the anti-war candidate, more anti-war than any of the other candidates. He should remember what happened to George McGovern when he ran for president in 1972. He got clobbered by Richard Nixon.
In the era of terrorism, it seems to be that being that dovey is dangerous in a general election, but it might be very effective in Democratic primaries when the activist tend to be very McGovernite.