Democratic Senator Russ Feingold is playing a pretty shrewd game right now. He proposes that the U.S. Senate censure President Bush over the warrantless wiretapping. He has even been toying with the I word, though only toying. He backed away from any serious suggestion of impeachment. As Howard Kurtz notices, what's odd about this is the reaction of the two parties.
One thing is clear about Russ Feingold's move to censure President Bush: Republicans love it and Democrats hate it.
Rarely has a maneuver with as much chance of passing as Barry Bonds hitting 73 homers without steroids sparked such a reaction. Feingold's own party wishes the thing would just go away, while the other party would enjoy talking about it for days on end, which is why Bill Frist tried to call a vote on it, only to be blocked by the Dems.
This, of course, does not reflect the parties' true feelings about the underlying issue. Most Democrats believe Bush probably did break the law in approving warrantless eavesdropping, and most Republicans think the president acted properly. But the proposed censure--a word we haven't heard since some Dems were pushing it as an alternative to impeaching Clinton--is scary to most senators with D after their names, many of whom have been ducking reporters or hemming and hawing as a way to avoid commenting.
Its not hard to see why Congressional Democrats are discomforted. Right now President Bush's approval ratings are in the low thirties. But whatever is dragging his popularity toward the floor, it isn't the fact that he eavesdropped on Americans talking to terrorists abroad. Indeed, the last time that public attention was focused on this subject, Bush gained a good ten points in most polls. No Democrat with her eyes focused on this November wants to talk about that issue between now and then.
But of course Feingold is looking ahead to 2008, and there is every reason for him to believe that this will advance his presidential ambitions. E.J. Dionne has it right.
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.
The Democrats problem is that the Internet has empowered the activist core of their partisans in an unprecedented way. But the only coherent idea that activates that core is hatred of Dubya. They are simply uninterested in generating their own security policy. Nor are Congressional Democrats any better prepared to say what they would do about international communications among terrorists. They are as singlemindedly focused on political rather than strategic matters as Feingold and the Daily Kos. The only difference is which November they are thinking about.
The Democrat's vacuous foreign policy may not hurt them much in the upcoming Congressional elections. But in Presidential elections such things matter. The Democrats made foreign policy the focus of the 2004 election. John Kerry lost to Bush because Bush had a foreign policy and Kerry didn't. I don't think Feingold is another John Kerry. Right now he is positioning himself to be another Howard Dean.
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