Michael Barone wrote a piece headlined "Diplomatic debacle? Not so; Countering the president's critics" analyzing Senator Daschle's divisive comments on the eve of the Iraq war. Excerpt:
It is clear that [Daschle] speaks in the accents of the Senate Democratic cloakroom, in which Bush is regarded as an illegitimate president, a usurper who is trying to impose crazed conservative policies, a stupid man incapable of understanding a sophisticated world, who must be opposed ferociously at every step and on any ground. No Democratic campaign consultant whom I know, and I know all the leading Democratic campaign consultants, would have advised Daschle to make the comment that he did. If the war goes badly, Bush and the Republicans will pay a political price, whatever the Democrats say now; if the war goes well, comments like Daschle's will work powerfully against the Democrats and for George W. Bush. Daschle's words can only be explained as the product of a kind of hatred, unbuttressed by any serious intellectual argument, likely to hurt the party of the speaker far more than the party of the president they were directed against.
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