Charlie Cook on intensity

Feingold sprang his resolution on his Democratic colleagues without a word of advance warning or consultation. His Republican colleagues welcomed it, or professed to welcome it, as a distraction from Bush’s manifold, ever-mounting troubles. Feingold focussed on the wiretapping because that is the one area where the Administration has admitted—indeed, boasted of—overriding a particular law. But it is also practically the only area of security policy where Bush retains some lingering public support. Feingold has “energized the base,” but to what end? Apart from establishing a beachhead for his own fledgling Presidential campaign, he has succeeded mainly in deflecting the anger of a good many Democrats from Bush to—well, to “the Democrats.”

Everyone complains that the Democrats have no clear, unified position on Iraq, and they don’t. But what this analysis ignores is the fact that they can’t. Without either a federal power center or an imminent Presidential election—without a President, a Speaker of the House, a Senate Majority Leader, or a Presidential nominee—no institutional instrument or leader has the clout to impose a consensus. Democrats advocate a spectrum of more or less similar positions—an array, not a disarray—ranging from Representative John Murtha’s call for rapid disengagement to the detailed “strategic redeployment” plan backed by the Center for American Progress. But the Bush Administration has created a dilemma to which a satisfactory solution, no matter what new policies are adopted, has become vanishingly remote. As for the Democrats, their point is more implicit than explicit. It is that if they had had power they would not have made the same strategic, prudential, and moral errors that Bush and the Republicans have made, and that if they are entrusted with power they will not be wedded to a manifestly failing policy. Their job is to win power without either being completely cynical or talking themselves into a box that would make it impossible for them to exercise it wisely once they got it.

A poll taken last week by the American Research Group showed that a plurality of voters—forty-eight per cent—actually favor Feingold’s resolution, with forty-three per cent opposed. Among Democratic respondents, support was seventy per cent. For senators whose seats are safely Democratic, supporting the resolution is a personally cost-free choice. (The same is true of the thirty-one members of the House who have endorsed an impeachment resolution: in 2004, all won with at least fifty-seven per cent of the vote. The average was seventy-five per cent.) That A.R.G. poll also showed independent voters narrowly opposing censure. The midterm election will be decided in places where no Democratic candidate can prevail without overwhelming independent support. Tactical calculations like these are never pleasant. But they are not always sordid, and sometimes they are necessary.

— Hendrik Hertzberg

Soros, Big Democratic Donors Targeted by Republican Measure

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. House Democrats may have to pay a steep price to enact legislation overhauling lobbying rules: agreeing to restrict donations by some of their biggest backers.

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Candice Nelson, chairwoman of the political science department at Washington-based American University, said the Republicans proposed the 527 provision as part of the broader lobbying legislation to ensure that new lobbying rules never become law.

``This is just a ploy,'' Nelson said. ``My guess is this is a way to kill the whole thing. No one's going to support this.''

Feingold agreed the two issues should be separate. ``Sometimes you say the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good,'' he said.