Hand-to-Hand Combat

What the Democrats should do to win the midterms—and the ’08 race for the White House.

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 2:18 p.m. ET Sept. 8, 2006

Sept. 8, 2006 - Let the talking heads and the lawyers debate the new U.S. Army field-manual rules about interrogation. Democrats should play rope-a-dope, absorb the blows and put the spotlight on President Bush’s empty rhetoric about winning the war against terrorism. Five years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still on the loose and Americans don’t think the Iraq war is making them safer.

What Bush did in his speeches this week is the national-security version of the perp walk. By rolling out a rogue’s gallery of scary-looking Middle Eastern men, Bush transformed a debate about a ruinous war in Iraq into hand-to-hand political combat over which party has captured more bad guys.

Given Bush’s sorry record and all the other conversations the media could be having, the renewed emphasis on terrorism is good news for Republicans. Democrats can’t change the channel. They’ve got to win on the ground that Bush has established. That means thinking like Karl Rove and going after the opposition’s strength until it becomes a vulnerability. Iraq is a quagmire. Whether U.S. troops withdraw next year or in 10 years, they will leave behind a country fractured by civil war and an oil-rich theocratic government dominated by Iran—hardly the democratic beacon to transform the region.

Democrats have no power. It’s not up to them to draft the exit strategy. But if they’re going to win back at least one house of Congress in November, they need to raise the comfort level among the American people with their party. Republican pollster Bill McInturff says it doesn’t take long in focus groups to get people talking about whether Democrats are resolved and tough enough. Republicans are trying to “seduce Democrats into a debate about the future as opposed to a judgment on the past,” says Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. Democrats should keep from “getting snookered” into offering a detailed plan of their own. “There’s no good alternative in Iraq,” he says. “We’ve going to have to settle for the least-worst option as we extricate ourselves.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14735361/site/newsweek/