Quotes of the day: Frank Rich heralds the new era of Chimpyesque "bipartisanship" (while Maureen Dowd passes on a lesson in political gamesmanship)
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"Already we are seeing conclusive evidence that the White House's post-thumpin' blather about bipartisanship is worth as little as the 'uniter, not a divider' bunk of the past."
--Frank Rich, in his NYT column today, "It's Not the Democrats Who Are Divided"*
"The plain reality," writes Rich, "is that the victorious Democrats, united in opposition to the war and uniting around a program for quitting it, have done pretty much all they can do. Republican leaders must join in to seal the deal."
And he concludes: "Most of all, disengagement from Iraq is the patriotic thing to do. Diverting as 'divided Democrats' has been, it's escapist entertainment. The Washington story that will matter most going forward is the fate of the divided Republicans. Only if they heroically come together can the country be saved from a president who, for all his professed pipe dreams about democracy in the Middle East, refuses to surrender to democracy's verdict at home."
ALSO TALKING--Maureen Dowd may not have much to say, but at least she sometimes quotes people who do
I would like to think that Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi learned the valuable lesson from the majority-leadership battle that while the House speaker has a lot of power, he/she always has to remember that he/she can't take that power anywhere his/her members don't want to go. (More practical lesson: If Rep. John Murtha, her candidate for majority leader, is really that bad at head-counting his members, he wouldn't have made a terribly helpful second in command.)
I'm going to guess that Madame Speaker didn't have a whole lot to learn from Maureen Dowd's not wildly perceptive or useful column NYT yesterday ("Squeaker of the House"*). However, after claiming, "Even Pelosi supporters pointed out that she was squandering her power, and hurting the image of the Democrats by making them look like Democrats," our Mo quoted "one":
"The better way to do it is to just let your rival go ahead and win and then strip them of everything. All of a sudden their office is moved and their wires are disconnected and there's a Playskool phone on their desk, so that it's not even worth having the job anymore."
Ah, so this is how the game is played at the "grandmaster" level.
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*As usual, the full texts of the NYT columns are posted in a comment.
posted by KenInNY @ 6:15 PM
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Here as promised are the full texts of:
(1) today's Frank Rich column and (2) yesterday's Maureen Dowd column:
(1)
November 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
It's Not the Democrats Who Are Divided
By FRANK RICH
ELECTIONS may come and go, but Washington remains incorrigible. Not even voters delivering a clear message can topple the town's conventional wisdom once it has been set in the stone of punditry.
Right now the capital is entranced by a fictional story line about the Democrats. As this narrative goes, the party's sweep of Congress was more or less an accident. The victory had little to do with the Democrats' actual beliefs and was instead solely the result of President Bush's unpopularity and a cunning backroom stunt by the campaign Machiavellis, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, to enlist a smattering of "conservative" candidates to run in red states. In this retelling of the 2006 election, the signature race took place in Montana, where the victor was a gun-toting farmer with a flattop haircut: i.e., a Democrat in Republican drag. And now the party is deeply divided as its old liberals and new conservatives converge on Capitol Hill to slug it out.
The only problem with this version of events is that it's not true. The overwhelming majority of the Democratic winners, including Jon Tester of Montana, are to the left of most Republicans, whether on economic policy or abortion. For all of the hyperventilation devoted to the Steny Hoyer-John Murtha bout for the House leadership, the final count was lopsided next to the one-vote margin in the G.O.P. Senate intramural that yielded that paragon of "unity," Trent Lott. But the most telling barometer is the election's defining issue: there is far more unanimity among Democrats about Iraq than there is among Republicans. Disengaging America from that war is what the country voted for overwhelmingly on Nov. 7, and that's what the Democrats almost uniformly promised to speed up, whatever their vague, often inchoate notions about how to do it.
Even before they officially take over, the Democrats are trying to deliver on this pledge. Carl Levin and Joe Biden, among the party's leaders in thinking through a new Iraq policy, are gravitating toward a long-gestating centrist exit strategy: a phased withdrawal starting in four to six months; a loosely federal Iraqi government that would ratify the de facto separation of the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds and fairly allocate the oil spoils; and diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy to engage Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria, in securing some kind of peace.
None of these ideas are radical, novel or much removed from what James Baker's Iraq Study Group is expected to come up with. All are debatable and all could fail. At this late date, only triage is an option, not "victory." There's no panacea to end the civil war that four years of American bumbling have wrought. But the one truly serious story to come out of the election--far more significant than the Washington chatter about "divided Democrats"--is that the president has no intention of changing his policy on Iraq or anything else one iota.
Already we are seeing conclusive evidence that the White House's post-thumpin' blather about bipartisanship is worth as little as the "uniter, not a divider" bunk of the past. The tip-off came last week when Mr. Bush renominated a roster of choices for the federal appeals court that he knew faced certain rejection by Democrats. Why? To deliver a message to the entire Senate consonant with the unprintable greeting Dick Cheney once bestowed on Patrick Leahy, the senator from Vermont. That message was seconded by Tony Snow on Monday when David Gregory of NBC News asked him for a response to the Democrats' Iraq proposals. The press secretary belittled them as "nonspecific" and then tried to deflect the matter entirely by snickering at Mr. Gregory's follow-up questions.
Don Imus has been rerunning the video ever since, and with good reason. The laughing-while-Baghdad-burns intransigence of the White House makes your blood run cold. The day after Mr. Snow ridiculed alternative policies for Iraq, six American soldiers were killed. It was on that day as well that militia assailants stormed the education ministry in Baghdad in broad daylight, effortlessly carrying out a mass abduction of as many as 150 government officials in some 15 minutes. Given that those kidnappers were probably in cahoots with a faction of the very government they were terrorizing, it would be hard to come up with a more alarming snapshot of those "conditions on the ground" the president keeps talking about: utter chaos, with American troops in the middle, risking their lives to defend which faction, exactly?
Yet here was what Mr. Snow had to say about the war in this same press briefing: "We are winning, but on the other hand, we have not won" and "Our commitment is to get to the point where we achieve victory." If that's the specificity the White House offers to counter the Democrats' "nonspecific" ideas about Iraq, bring back Donald Rumsfeld.
Mr. Snow's performance was echoed by the more sober but equally nonsensical testimony of Gen. John Abizaid, our chief commander in the Middle East, before the Senate Armed Services Committee less than 48 hours later. It was déjà stay-the-course all over again. The general is not for withdrawing American troops or, as John McCain would prefer, adding them. (General Abizaid delicately pointed out to Mr. McCain that a sustainable supply of new American troops is in any case "simply not something that we have right now"; the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, doesn't want them even if we did.) The general's hope instead is for more Iraqi troops, even though, as he conceded, we still don't have any such forces operating "completely independently" of their embedded American advisers. In other words: We are still, so many sacrifices later, waiting for the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down.
An even more telling admission was to follow. "General Abizaid," Jack Reed of Rhode Island asked, "how much time do you think we have to bring down the level of violence in Baghdad before we reach some type of tipping point where it accelerates beyond the control of even the Iraqi government?" After some hemming and hawing came a specific answer: "Four to six months." Thus did our commander in Iraq provide the perfect exit ramp into the Democrats' exit strategy, whether intentionally or not: the Iraqis must stand up by exactly the same deadline that Mr. Levin proposed for the start of a phased withdrawal.
Everyone outside of the Bush bunker knows that's where we're heading. As the retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey told Keith Olbermann last week, "The American people have walked away from the war." The general predicted, as many in Washington have, that the Baker commission, serving as a surrogate Papa Bush, would give the White House the "intellectual orchestration" to label the withdrawal "getting out with honor." But might this Beltway story line, too, be wrong? Everything in the president's behavior since the election, including his remarkably naïve pronouncements in Vietnam, suggests that he will refuse to catch the political lifeline that Mr. Baker might toss him. Mr. Bush seems more likely instead to use American blood and money to double down on his quixotic notion of "victory" to the end. Not for nothing has he been communing with Henry Kissinger.
So what then? A Democratic Congress can kill judicial appointments but cannot mandate foreign policy. The only veto it can exercise is to cut off the war's funding, political suicide that the Congressional leadership has rightly ruled out. The plain reality is that the victorious Democrats, united in opposition to the war and uniting around a program for quitting it, have done pretty much all they can do. Republican leaders must join in to seal the deal.
Don't count Mr. McCain among them. His call for more troops even when there are no more troops is about presidential politics, a dodge that allows him to argue in perpetuity that we never would have lost Iraq if only he had been heeded from the start. True or not, that gets America nowhere now. Look instead to two other Republican military veterans in the Senate, one who is not running for president and one who yet might. The first is John Warner, who said a month before the election that he would seek an overhaul of Iraq policy in 60 to 90 days if there was no progress. The second is Chuck Hagel, who has been prescient about the war's potential pitfalls since 2002 and started floating exit strategies parallel to the Levin-Biden track last summer.
There's an incentive for other Republicans to join them in advancing the endgame. Even if the Democrats self-destructively descend into their own Abramoff-style scandals--Mr. Murtha referred to House ethics reforms as "total crap"--that may not be enough to save the Republicans if they're still staring down the bloody barrel of their Iraq fiasco in 2008.
But most of all, disengagement from Iraq is the patriotic thing to do. Diverting as "divided Democrats" has been, it's escapist entertainment. The Washington story that will matter most going forward is the fate of the divided Republicans. Only if they heroically come together can the country be saved from a president who, for all his professed pipe dreams about democracy in the Middle East, refuses to surrender to democracy's verdict at home.
(2)
November 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Squeaker of the House
By MAUREEN DOWD
Washington
Ted Olson, the former solicitor general and eloquent Republican lawyer who argued the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, was warming up the rabidly conservative Federalist Society crowd for John McCain with a few sexist cracks about Botox.
The new Congress could amuse itself, he said, by "searching for any sign of movement in Speaker Pelosi's forehead." The Senate, he added, would be entertained by "the expressionless, Pelosi-like forehead of Senator Clinton."
It reminded you of just how idiotic Republicans can act sometimes. The only thing worse than hearing the first female speaker of the House filleted in such a lame way was seeing the first female speaker of the House flail around in her first big week in such a lame way. It reminded you of just how idiotic Democrats can act sometimes.
Nancy Pelosi's first move, after the Democratic triumph, was to throw like a girl. Women get criticized in the office for acting on relationships and past slights rather than strategy, so Madame Speaker wasted no time making her first move based on relationships and past slights rather than strategy.
Instead of counting votes behind closed doors or even just choosing the best person for majority leader, Ms. Pelosi offered an argument along the lines of: John Murtha's my friend. He's been nice to me. I don't like Steny. He did something a long time ago that was really, really bad that I'm never, ever going to tell you. And I'm the boss of you. So vote for John.
As the adage goes, if you shoot at the king, you'd better kill him. And if you're the queen and you shoot at your knight, you'd better kill him too, or you end up looking like a weak sister.
Democratic lawmakers, who should have been basking, were left baffled as Nancy, spanked by her flock, strained to make nice with Steny.
"I just wish Mom and Dad would get along so I don't have to split my weekends," moaned one.
Everyone in Washington was perplexed at Ms. Pelosi's ham-handed effort to sabotage not only Mr. Hoyer but her former friend and fellow Californian, Jane Harman. In what looks like another self-defeating personality clash, she has been maneuvering to bypass the senior member of the House Intelligence Committee and give the chairmanship either to the ethically challenged Alcee Hastings of Florida or a compromise candidate, Silvestre Reyes of Texas.
"Jane was very aggressive about going on TV; she was on TV so much she could have gotten a SAG card," said one top Democrat who knows both women. "Nancy resented that and felt Jane was leeching attention away from her leadership role. That had a lot to do with poisoning the relationship."
Even Pelosi supporters pointed out that she was squandering her power, and hurting the image of the Democrats by making them look like Democrats. "The better way to do it is to just let your rival go ahead and win and then strip them of everything," said one. "All of a sudden their office is moved and their wires are disconnected and there's a Playskool phone on their desk, so that it's not even worth having the job anymore."
Even as the speaker was acting girlishly churlish, John McCain was mas machoing the machismo president. In twin speeches Thursday, he wooed the Republican base. "He's trying to be the leader of a party that hates his guts," said Rahm Emanuel, the new chairman of the House Democratic caucus.
Mr. McCain told a Gopac dinner audience that he wants more troops in Iraq than even W. is willing to send.
"It is not fair or easy to look a soldier in the eye and tell him he must shoulder a rifle again and risk his life in a third tour in Iraq," he said. "But ask it we must. If, and I emphasize if, we have the will to win."
Mr. McCain is right that the deteriorating situation on the ground calls for more boots and if troops start to withdraw, further chaos will ensue. But even many of the generals and hawks in his own party now believe that a lasting military victory is impossible, no matter how many troops America sends. The best that can be hoped for by the Republicans and Senator McCain--who will have trouble running as a cheerleader for more war in a nation sick of war and heartsick at so many deaths--is that James Baker can finagle a dignified exit.
Madame Speaker made the mistake of speaking out before she had counted her troops. The Arizona senator knows the body count in Iraq and is still calling for more troops.
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