WHAT HE SAID. Josh Marshall is quite right to worry about the Democrats' out-of-the-gate agenda. While the military questions Barney Frank and Charles Rangel want to raise (about gays in the military and whether there ought to be a draft, respectively) are important ones, it is difficult to imagine any two issues more guaranteed to shift the national focus away from Republican mismanagement of the reconstruction of Iraq and how to get America out of a civil war zone and onto what will be framed as Democratic culture war fights. If that is allowed to happen, I am quite certain those moderates and independents who just gave Democrats control of the Congress will start asking themselves what it is that they have done, for neither of these two issues were (I'm pretty certain) what led them to vote Democratic just a few weeks ago.
Further, a decisive national consensus on getting rid of "don't ask, don't tell" may be easier to achieve once the war is clearly on its way to being over. It is extraordinarily difficult to change major national or military policies with regard to specific groups during the middle of a war. However, the examples of the integration of the military and the enfranchisement of women show that change can rapidly follow a conflict's end. Bringing this conflict to an end would thus seem to be the first-order priority.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
