It is not difficult to read Russ Feingold's intentions. With his call for a countdown to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, he has made clear that he plans to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. And when he told David Gregory on Meet the Press that, “Yes, I am going to work real hard to try to get a progressive Democrat [elected] in 2008,” it is not a mystery whom he has in mind. For one thing, there are not many elected Democrats who want to be called “progressive,” now an acknowledged euphemism for “liberal” (an that has now achieved iconic status, even among some Democrats).
But the fact that Feingold is the first Democrat to call for a withdrawal timetable says less about the future than about the muddled past of the Democratic Party and illustrates why a “progressive” Feingold Democrat would have trouble wining the nomination.
Feingold's position is seen as a break with the party's position: supporting the war but opposing the way it has been conducted. It is the kind of ambiguous political positioning that has caused Democrats to seem feckless and unmoored, a circumstance poignantly captured in the phrase, “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
It is interesting that at a time when more than 60 percent of Americans are against the war and the president's poll numbers continue to slide, Democrats have not been able to capitalize on the bad news from Iraq. The reason is simple: Having supported the war puts a limit on how much you can criticize it, and that is the box in which many Democrats find themselves.
In the run-up to the 2002 midterms, as the country and the Congress were debating whether to invade Iraq, many Democrats decided to vote for the war. So in the Senate, where Democrats were actually in control, the war vote was a moment of surpassing bipartisanship. Then Tom Daschle voted for it, and Harry Reid was a “yea,” as were many of the party's potential candidates in 2008. The list included Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, John Edwards, Evan Bayh, Christopher Dodd, Dianne Feinstein, and Charles Schumer. In the House, 81 Democrats stood “shoulder to shoulder” with the president, including then-Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who co-sponsored the resolution.
When Robert Byrd tried to have the legislation anticipate an end date for the action in Iraq, his amendment died with the help of Democrats. So now that the war is unpopular, they find themselves wrong-footed and tongue-tied. Pat Buchanan seems to think that Feingold is a latter-day Eugene McCarthy who will cause the Democratic Party to break apart with his anti-war message. That may be just wishful thinking on Buchanan's part, but he does have a point when he observes, “There is Democratic complicity in taking America into a war in which some of them never believed.”
But the political straddle has become a Democratic way of life since the days of Bill Clinton, who had the personal chops to pull it off. But as a political philosophy, it has proven to be a loser -- as a general rule, hedge betting is not a good way to get ahead.
Feingold voted against the war in October 2002. In August 2005, he says the troops should come home because the war was a mistake. His position is as clear as the president's position. But Feingold's position also represents a break from the cautious Clintonian model that has been the controlling paradigm for Democrats for more than a decade. Clintonianism needs Clinton's magic to work. Absent that, Democrats, including Senator Hillary Clinton, will need to be clearer about what they believe and about what they want to do.
Kerry's emergence as a candidate in the spring of 2004 was the result of his perceived electability, which was based on his service in Vietnam. It remains true that Democrats still must answer the are-you-strong-enough question when it comes to presidential elections. So clearly, some Democrats with an eye on 2008 will want to position themselves as hawks on military matters. Feingold sees a danger there, however.
“Democrats are making the same mistake they made in 2002, to let the administration intimidate them into not opposing the war when so many of us knew it wasn't a good idea,” he said on Meet the Press.
The next presidential election is 27 months away, and whether Russ Feingold really turns into Eugene McCarthy is a question that will not be answered for a long time. But the current debate about what happens next in Iraq is taking place at a time when it is increasingly acceptable to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.
It is worth noting that the first 3,500 American combat troops did not arrive in Vietnam until March of 1965. (There had already been 23,000 advisers and a lot of bombing.) By that summer, the troop strength was 125,000, less than the 138,000 in Iraq today, and the 1,863 Americans military personnel who have been killed in Iraq are almost exactly equal to the 1,864 who had died by the end of 1965 in Vietnam.
McCarthy voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, which allowed the escalation of the war in Vietnam. By November 1967, he and many people in America had decided that such an escalation was a bad idea, that the war needed to end, and that Lyndon Johnson needed to go. "We are involved in a very deep crisis of leadership, a crisis of direction and a crisis of national purpose ... the entire history of this war in Vietnam, no matter what we call it, has been one of continued error and misjudgment," McCarthy said.
He declared for president.
On the day that the Senate OK'd the Iraq War, Feingold went to the floor and said this: “I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time … . I'm not suggesting there has to be only one justification for such a dramatic action. But when the administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency … . I am concerned that the president is pushing us into a mistaken and counterproductive course of action.”
Expect that he will declare for president, too.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
