It now seems conceivable, though one hates to invoke a jinx, that the Democrats might take the Senate as well as the House. If they do, it will be by the thinnest of margins — a few thousand votes in Virginia, perhaps something like that in Missouri Montana.

And if that happens, we can be sure that we will hear, both from the GOP’s spin brigades and their friends in the media, that a Democratic victory by such tiny margins isn’t that big a deal, and that the Democrats better watch it, and behave.

At that moment, listeners should flash back to recent political history’s most infamous close election: Florida 2000. The entire edifice of the Bush Administration has always rested on the thinnest of hotly disputed margins. That meager foundation never seemed to stand in the way of the GOP’s maximalist efforts.

Should the Democrats end up in control of both houses of Congress, sure, they should work professionally, with the opposition, to “solve the nation’s problems” — to use the dutiful formulation of the career politician. But they shouldn’t let the closeness of their possible win clip their wings.

A victory is a victory — an “accountability moment,” indeed! A sweep of two houses would indeed be a sweep of two houses, and a mandate lies wherever and whenever voters give you a win that gives you clout.
[tags]2006 election, senate, democrats[/tags]

Vanity Fair talks to the neoconservative intellectuals who goaded the nation into invading Iraq and finds that they are, unsurprisingly, aghast and pointing fingers. Mostly, the fingers point at the incompetence of the Bush administration. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,” says Kenneth “it’s going to be a cakewalk” Adelman. “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era.”

“The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless,” Adelman says.

Here’s the problem with that: In the real world of international affairs, there is never an opportunity to disentangle the essential from the circumstantial. Circumstance rules. Execution is everything. Otherwise, we’d all just sit around, wish for world peace and goodwill towards all men, and wait for the happy result to unfold.

If you start with the assumption that anything is possible and everything will go right, it doesn’t matter what you advocate — the entire conversation is preposterous. It’s like saying, “I support the policy of regime change in North Korea by beaming our new mind-control weapon at the dictator’s head and making him abdicate.” A noble and beneficial idea — “but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless.”

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal words, you’ve got to grapple with the world you have, not the world you want.

Nearly every single one of us who argued before the war that it was a mistake to invade Iraq agreed that Saddam Hussein was an awful dictator who, in the abstract, one would wish gone. But invading Iraq to overthrow him carried mad risks — risks that we have now seen play out in their near-worst scenarios.

Balancing judgments of risks against desired goals is the very essence of foreign policymaking. The neocons are eager to blame Bush administration competence, and they’re right, but it doesn’t get them off the hook. In their own foreign-policy field, the neocons — based, now, on their own testimony — have now definitively proven their own incompetence. It is time, really, for them to stop pontificating and go away.
[tags]vanity fair, neocons, neoconservatives, iraq, bush administration[/tags]

John Kerry: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

If you just read those words on their own, it’s pretty clear what Kerry is saying: Good students can “do well.” Those who maybe weren’t such good students — like, for instance, our current president — end up “stuck in Iraq.”

It’s not a great joke, and it’s no model of clarity. But only someone absolutely determined to score points would read it and state with certainty that Kerry meant our soldiers in Iraq are idiots. So of course that’s what Tony Snow and the GOP attack machine are saying. (CNN’s lead basically buys it hook and sinker.)

There’s the stench of Swift Boating here. But Kerry’s not up for election this time. The vote is about Bush’s disastrous Iraq policies. And anyone who really cares about the welfare of our troops — who’ve been thrust into an unnecessary war without the forces, the equipment, or the strategy they need to win — will realize that the Bush administration is playing a desperate game of “Don’t look behind the curtain.”

Maybe they’ll successfully hijack the news cycle for a day or two by twisting Kerry’s words. Every minute spent arguing about what Kerry might have meant is a minute we’re not talking about the wasted billions and the wasted lives. Sooner or later we’ll return to the stark fact of this White House’s responsibility for driving America into the Iraq ditch.

Kerry responds: “If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy… The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it… No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”
[tags]john kerry, iraq, 2006 elections[/tags]

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg was most recently warning Democrats that if they let themselves get too worked up into an anti-war lather through their support of Ned Lamont they will repeat the divisions of 1968 and exile themselves to the political wilderness. But now he’s criticizing Democrats for not talking enough about what to do in Iraq: “The situation is hopeless. The best that our leading foreign-policy minds have been able to come up with is a grim choice among forms of failure and defeat. In a country of optimists, no politician wants to deliver that message.”

Excuse me, but isn’t that pretty much the message Ned Lamont offered in response to Joe Lieberman’s mindless “stay the course”-itude? Back when Lamont said it, Weisberg slapped him for being a “callow” “novice” heading up an antiwar movement that would destroy the party. Now Weisberg’s complaining that Democrats are too chicken to admit the disturbing truth.

If Slate’s editor isn’t careful, he will find his self-contradictions escalating to a height of Escher-like complexity previously attained only by David Brooks.

(On the other hand, I give Slate much credit for publishing Tim Wu’s ode to the high art of Chinese dumplings, which reminded me to go out for dim sum more.)
[tags]slate, jacob weisberg, iraq, ned lamont, tim wu, dumplings[/tags]