[Mb-civic] Can Democrats Play This Game? - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Can Democrats Play This Game?
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By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

Russ Feingold tossed a political grenade at President Bush this week, 
but it fell into the middle of the Senate Democratic Caucus. Many 
Democratic senators ran away.

The grenade was the Wisconsin senator's proposal to censure the 
president for violating the law by ordering electronic surveillance on 
Americans without explicit congressional or court authorization. While 
the episode says more about Bush's political frailty than the 
first-blush accounts have suggested, it also underscored the frictions 
and tensions between passionate Democratic activists and their cautious 
leaders.

The president has lost so much support and credibility that Republicans 
were simply grateful Feingold briefly changed the political subject from 
the Dubai ports controversy, the mess in Iraq and Bush's anemic poll 
ratings.

As one of Feingold's colleagues pointed out, a censure proposal related 
to any aspect of the president's policies on terrorism would once have 
unleashed an unrelenting Republican attack on the sponsor's patriotism. 
Now, Republicans have to content themselves with using calls for 
censuring or impeaching Bush to rally their own dispirited troops.

But at a moment when Democrats have Bush on the run, Feingold's proposal 
was a tad inconvenient, a conversation-changer coming along when 
Feingold's colleagues liked the way the conversation was going just fine.

Consider the disparity between the response to Feingold's initiative 
among Democratic senators and the reaction among Democratic activists.

Senators mostly scampered away from the cameras earlier this week, 
because they didn't want to say publicly what many of them said 
privately. Most were livid that Feingold sprang his censure idea on a 
Sunday talk show without giving them any notice. Many see Feingold as 
more concerned with rallying support from the Democratic base for his 
2008 presidential candidacy than with helping his party regain control 
of Congress this fall.

Some Democrats want the party to forget the issue of warrantless 
wiretapping, because engaging it would let Bush claim that he's tougher 
on terrorists than his partisan enemies. Others share Feingold's 
frustration with the administration's stonewalling on the program, but 
they think they need to know more before they can effectively challenge 
Bush on the issue. Both groups were furious that Feingold grabbed 
headlines away from those delicious stories about Republican divisions 
and defections.

But at the grass roots and Web roots, Feingold has become a hero -- 
again. They already loved him for his courage in opposing the USA 
Patriot Act and his call for a timetable for troop withdrawals from 
Iraq. Feingold's latest move only reinforced his image of being "a Dem 
with a spine," as the left-liberal Web site BuzzFlash.com put it in a 
comment representative of the acclaim he won across the activist blogs.

In an interview, Feingold was unrepentant, arguing that before he made 
his proposal, "the whole issue of the president violating the laws of 
this country was being swept under the rug."

"We were going to sit back as Democrats and say, 'This is too hot to 
handle' -- well that's outrageous." He warned that "the mistakes of 2002 
are being repeated," meaning, he said, that Democrats should never again 
"cower" before Bush on security issues, as so many at the grass roots 
saw them doing before the 2002 elections.

And it's a sign of Feingold's view of some of his Democratic colleagues 
that he defended his decision not to let them in on his plan. Had they 
known what he was up to, he said, "they would have planned a strategy to 
blunt this."

Here's the problem: Feingold and the activists are right that Democrats 
can't just take a pass on the wiretapping issue, because Bush's legal 
claims are so suspect -- even to many in his own party. The opposition's 
job is to raise alarms over potential abuses of presidential power.

But Democrats, unlike Republicans, have yet to develop a healthy 
relationship between activists willing to test and expand the 
conventional limits on political debate and the politicians who have to 
calculate what works in creating an electoral majority.

For two decades, Republicans have used their idealists, their ideologues 
and their loudmouths to push the boundaries of discussion to the right. 
In the best of all worlds, Feingold's strong stand would redefine what's 
"moderate" and make clear that those challenging the legality of the 
wiretapping are neither extreme nor soft on terrorism.

That would demand coordination, trust and, yes, calculation involving 
both the vote-counting politicians and the guardians of principle among 
the activists. Republicans have mastered this art. Democrats haven't.

Turning a minority into a majority requires both passion and discipline. 
Bringing the two together requires effective leadership. Does anybody 
out there know how to play this game?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601303.html
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