Democrats in the Can't Lose Zone

I can't see how the Democrats can lose in the upcoming war funding showdown. Needless to say, they could lose. After all, the mighty 1927 Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig could have lost to the mightily mediocre, 83 win, 2006 Cardinals. And the Dems are definitely not the 1927 Yankees of politics.

Of course, the Bush administration isn't up to the level of the 2006 Cardinals either.

The three main scenarios that I see are these:

1. The Democrats send Bush a bill without a mandatory withdrawal deadline and he signs the bill. If everything were equal, appeasing George Bush in this way would undermine confidence in the Democratic leadership. But everything isn't equal. The Bush administration is being done in by a thousand cuts both big and little. The surge has been a failure, Alberto Gonzales has been twisting in the wind for weeks, and a couple more Republican Congressmen have been caught in the corruption net. Given the continuous bad news for the administration, the Democrats are going to look good even if they are craven and spineless.

2. The Democrats take the withdrawal deadline out of the funding bill, but keep in the mandates for troop preparedness and limit war funding to four months rather than a year. This is what Matthew Yglesias has been pushing and a group led by John Podesta (former Clinton budget director) came out with a similar recommendation today. The idea is that fewer Republicans would support another round of Iraq war funding four months from now and that funding legislation with a firm withdrawal date would have a better chance of either being signed or having a veto over-ridden. According to Yglesias, "This fight is going to need to keep happening -- less in Washington than in members' districts -- over and over again for months until there's more pressure and more votes."

The adherents of this view don't believe President Bush would veto a limited funding timeline. I don't know why though. Bush almost certainly would consider a short timeline as "overly restrictive." As a result, I'm certain that President Bush would veto any war funding legislation with a short timeline. But I'm also pretty sure that the Democrats would win a veto showdown and either force the President to sign war funding with a withdrawal deadline or just cut-off funding for the war.

3. That brings us to the third option: the Congressional Democrats pass legislation with a definite deadline for withdrawal and mandates for the readiness of the soldiers. Then Bush vetoes the bill. He really can't do anything else. He's boxed himself into the same kind of corner that his father did with his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. If the younger Bush went back on his veto pledge now, support for him would crumble on the right and he's be like Alberto Gonzales, twisting in the wind for the next 18 months.

What should the Democrats do? Two things. They should argue that the funding will be there when Bush is ready to sign the bill and let the pressure continue to build one way or the other. But I think the Dems also will have to go one step further. They will need to draw up a bill that appropriates money strictly for the "strategic redeployment" of American troops to Kuwait and northern Iraq advocated by John Murtha. If Bush wants to fund the war for another year, he can sign the first bill. If Bush doesn't sign the first bill, he'll get a second bill mandating strategic redeployment. And if Bush vetoes the second bill, money will run out and Bush will have to wind down the war.

If the Democrats take option 3, they will be right on both substantive and political grounds. However, they should come out ahead politically no matter which option they take.