RUTLAND, VT --- Bernie Sanders has spent the week traipsing up and down the Green Mountain State talking to his constituents about infrastructure needs and how those needs intersect with the expansion or stagnation of economic development in his state. This is pretty dry stuff, even for a member of Congress.
Still, the freshman senator, who spent 16 years in the House after being elected as a Socialist in 1980, got more than his fair share to chew on --everything from the quality of water in the state's trailer parks to whether longhaul trucks are sufficiently taxed based on the damage they do when they roll over the state's already-crumbling roads. The "listening sessions" were scheduled before the bridge collapse in Minnesota, but that event brought an urgency to an issue that may suffer mostly from an absence of urgency.
At one point Sanders found himself allied with, and promising to fight for, one man railing about heavy-handed and discouraging government regulation. "I'm going to sound like a conservative here," he worried out loud.
But Sanders says the country needs to look ahead if we are to avoid the crisis that will accompany a wholesale failure of the nation's physical and economic infrastructure. "This could cost us as much as a trilion dollars," he said.
And right about now this long-term view, grounded in costs and consequences, is exactly what Democrats must adopt in dealing with all the pressing issues they will face in trying to govern the country from the legislature. Most urgently, on Iraq. Everyone in Washington is looking forward to what one prominent Democratic senator described to me last week as "the Petraeus moment." Many hope that, come September, David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, will come to Capitol Hill and deliver a report that, like some post-modern Sermon on the Mount (along with pressure from a growing number of Republican senators), will shock the Bush administration into mending its stubborn ways and beginning the process of withdrawing from Iraq.
Blessed are the hopeful, but the Petraeus moment is likely to produce no such results. And more importantly, the next few turning points in Iraq are likely to be turns for the worse, not for the better -- and the blame for that will not all come to rest at President Bush's door.
Congressman Joe Sestak, the former Navy vice-admiral who won a seat in Congress last fall, this week sent out a call for "titans" who can think and talk about Iraq outside the current political frame and find a way to end the war there.
"The titans of Congress need to step forward," he said, "and that may mean compromising."
It's hard to see where the titans come from at this point, but as the American death toll picks up from a monthly low of 80 in July, Sestak 's point is well taken: The names of the U.S. dead in the newspapers each morning should be required reading for every American, every day.
But in a speech at the Center for American Progress, Sestak also warned Democrats not to squander what little credibility they have managed to amass on national security by failing to think about what happens in Iraq,during or after the departure of American troops.
When American troops begin to come home from Iraq, Democrats will get credit for finally doing what the country agrees needs to be done, but they will also get blamed for whatever disasters befall a post-occupation Iraq.
Sestak pointed to the massive loss of life when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan without proper planning. And he recalled that it took an infusion of 19,000 American troops to effectively get 6,300 troops out of Somalia in 1993. After demanding an end to the war, Democrats "own the aftermath," Sestak warned.
The long and complicated process of withdrawal ought to be incorporated into the argument for that redeployment. Indeed, it should be one of the reasons for starting sooner rather than later.
When Democrats were unable to impose withdrawal timetables on the administration with the Iraq supplemental in the spring, some of them were surprised by the harsh reaction from the left. The political calculus seemed so clear: they tried and could not get around the fact that they did not have the votes in the Senate to override the President's veto. They were -- are -- doing the best they could. What did the crazies want?
In truth, however, they had not adequately prepared for that moment, and it was recorded as a victory for the White House and a Democratic capitulation. They took control of the Congress thinking of Iraq as Bush's war and Bush's problem: They never prepared the people who voted for them -- primarily as a mechanism for ending the war -- for the long political battle ahead.
Eventually, they will win that battle, and the president's war will end.
They should ready themselves and the country for that moment, since it is likely to be equals parts triumph and torment.
