BILLINGS, MT --- Democrat Jon Tester won election to the U.S. Senate last November by fewer than 3,000 votes in a state that George W. Bush won twice -- by 20 percentage points in 2004, by 25 in 2000 -- and where support for the GOP in presidential election years is as solid as the band of Rockies under the Continental Divide.
But it is also out here in the Mountain West, where sudden springtime blizzards can quickly expose the folly of human calculation, that you begin to catch glimpses of what, politically, the administration's gross miscalculations on Iraq have wrought. The latest miscalculation may have been its response to the withdrawal timelines laid out by Democrats in their supplemental spending bills. Those timelines are at the center of an anticipated showdown between the Democratic Congress and the White House.
But the political ground is shifting so fast that the administration may find itself without the kind of leverage one would have presumed it could count on. While Tester has been firmly against the war -- and campaigned against it – conventional wisdom should still hold that the freshman Democrat would need to be attentive to the larger political reality of red state America; he should have to be at least a little deferential to the president's approach to the war, to be careful not to appear too loyal to the official Democratic line, and to make sure he never puts himself in a position where he could be accused of undermining the troops.
Indeed, it's not hard to imagine why he would feel the need to finesse his position on how Congress should show its "support for the troops." But public apprehension about the war has made all of that unnecessary. Last week, Tester voted with every other Democrat in the Senate, and two fallen-away Republicans, to pass a war supplemental that includes a timetable for withdrawal. Then, he came home to his farm in Big Sandy to plant peas, red and white lentils, and black and purple barley.
A surprise spring snowstorm cancelled those farming plans. But the bigger surprise appears to be that Tester's vote for an Iraqi drawdown, and against the president, seems to have generated none of the political fallout that the administration had hoped for and spent the week trying to generate. Bush's attempts to portray Democrats as political hacks who want to micromanage the Iraq war and play political games with American troops while they are "in harm's way" is falling on deaf ears, and if people are not mad at the timeline vote here in Big Sky Country, it hard to know where you could find people who are. Consequently, Bush may face an even more determined, and confrontational, Congress when lawmakers return next week than the one that went home for spring break. You see hints of this in Majority Leader Harry Reid's declaration that Democrats may be willing to cut off war funding if Bush vetoes the supplemental. (And you thought the vertebrate species of Democrat was extinct!)
On Tuesday, Tester left his farm and drove four hours south and east here to Billings, in Yellowstone County -- solid Republican territory -- for a "listening session" with veterans. The Clark Room (as in Lewis and Clark) on the lower level of the student union building at Montana State University at Billings was not packed, but it was a fair enough crowd -- about 30 people. Tester took questions for an hour. Not a single one challenged his supplemental vote or his position on the war.
One Korean vet wanted to know if the senator could intervene with the Veterans Administration to get him a set of teeth, his original ones having been removed by the Army in 1954. Another wanted to know the extent of the problems at Walter Reed and if and how far they extended to VA facilities throughout the country. An Iraq veteran complained that he was not eligible for the G.I. Bill and did not understand the bureaucratic reasons why. Even the ones who agreed with the president did not bring up the question of withdrawal deadlines.
Joe Cobos, a retired Marine, mentioned that he thought Congress should stay out of the war -- but that's not what he talked to Tester about. He wanted the senator to support funding for math and sciences courses for his Veterans Upward bound program. He expressed his gratitude for Tester showing concern for veterans.
Indeed, the only direct mention of the vote came from a young Army wife, who thanked Tester for "supporting the troops by voting for deadlines to bring them home." Heather Scharre is 28. She's married to 27-year-old Sergeant Paul Scharre, who served three tours in Afghanistan while on active duty, then left the Army only to find himself involuntarily recalled last September. He is now on his way to Iraq. "We've been told to expect 14 to 16 months," Heather said of her husband's deployment.
Scharre asked Tester, who sits on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, to make sure that returning Iraq veterans have access to counseling, including couples and marriage counseling. "We were used to four-month deployments," Scharre said. The adjustments after those tours were difficult enough; she could only imagine what re-entry into everyday life will be like after a tour of 14 or 16 months.
"I think we been hearing from some people, like the president and the vice-president, that if you don't support the war, you don't support the troops," said Scharre, "and I feel very strongly that that is not the case."
Creating some separation between the war and the warriors is the political trick facing Democrats in the next few months if they want to be able to end the former while honoring the latter. But based on the soundings out here in the mountains, doing so may not be as difficult as they might have thought.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C. His weekly TAP Online column appears on Fridays.
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