Democrats: Suspend Your Campaigns!!

All the talk about Iraq last week boiled down to this: We're trapped in a h ydra-headed religious, ethnic civil war until Congress musters the will to change course.

The Sunday editorial of my local paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, says it all. The Iraq war is going to go on its pointless way unless "Congress musters the will to change course."

And there's almost no confidence that Congress will muster that will.

The Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate might have enough confidence to pass more legislation with withdrawal deadlines. But neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid have shown any inclination to defy a Bush veto and cut off funding for the war.

However, continuing the war is bad policy, bad morality and bad politics wrapped into one. The Democrats should move to cut off funding and they shouldn't wait for a Bush veto to begin publicaly promoting their cause.

But the Democrats need to concentrate all of their energies if they are going to succeed in ending the war.

And that means temporarily calling off all the presidential campaigns. I mean it. The Democrats should suspend presidential campaigns.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are three of the best known figures in the Democratic Party and they're all running hard-charging presidential campaigns. But the fact that they're all running to be elected president in November 2008 is draining the Democrats of a lot of their leadership ability, imagination, and firepower in the here and now.

Given the stakes of the upcoming fight over war funding, that's not an appropriate use of Democratic Party resources.

Instead of running for president, Clinton, Obama, and the rest should commit themselves to ending the war. There's no need for the candidates to cancel scheduled events. They should just stop treating those events as campaign events and begin to treat them as anti-war speeches and rallies. Their staffs should stop developing health care initiatives, education plans, and anti-poverty proposals and focus instead on proposals for troop withdrawals and post-withdrawal plans. Their campaigns should stop generating subtle little digs at each other and start cutting through the Bush administration's weak arguments for continuing the war.

In fact, the Democratic presidential campaigns should start cooperating with each other. The Hillary, Obama, and Edwards organizations should be organizing shows of unity among the candidates, coordinating their daily themes about the war, and sharing their ideas. They should be coordinating everything they do with the Democratic leadership.

Suspending their presidential campaigns would be a tremendously innovative political idea that would generate a lot of media buzz. It would jump-start the Democratic base and potentially turn popular anti-war sentiment into anti-war excitement. The Democrats would probably start drawing bigger crowds, raising more money, and getting better media coverage as well.

Suspending presidential campaigns would give everyone more confidence that the Democrats have the backbone to lead the country through difficult times.

People have felt good about the Democratic candidates. People would feel even better if the Democrats stopped campaigning.

But most importantly, the suspension of presidential campaigns would increase the chances that the Democrats could actually cut off funding for the war.

That means that suspending campaigns would be good policy, good morality, and good politics.