The Big Lie That Is Skewing the Iraq Debate

Throughout the political coverage and chatter about Iraq, it seems there is a virulent assumption that has jumped from theory into fact, without even a shred of factual support. I'm not talking about there only being a small amount of proof - I'm talking about an assumption that is being made by "experts," "operatives" and the media analysts with literally absolutely no evidence at all. It is so egregious that to call it an assumption is to be dishonest - what it is is a lie.

Listen to today's NPR piece, and you will hear this assumption all the way through, from politicians and political "experts." The assumption is simple: it basically states as fact that those who support an exit strategy in Iraq will not only be attacked as "cut and run" cowards (like the GOP attacked Jack Murtha), but that voters will give credence to those attacks. Put another way, the political Etablishment - which prides itself on "expertly" reading public opinion data - is actually ignoring all the hard data and simply assuming that Americans will politically punish those who support a withdrawal. In the process, they are asserting as fact the concept that Republicans will be able to use the war as a political bludgeon - as a winning issue - when all the hard evidence says the exact opposite.

Let's be clear - polls have consistently shown that on the issue of when/whether to bring troops home, the public is at best evenly split, and more often in favor of an exit strategy. But beyond this question of policy is the clear, crisp evidence that the entire population - regardless of their position on when/whether to bring troops home - is angry about the war and about the administration's behavior surrounding the war. And, at the absolute least, that should lead us to believe that even the minority of voters who say they do not yet support a withdrawal will not electorally punish politicians who do support a withdrawal. For to believe the Establishment's assumption that pro-exit-strategy candidates will actually be punished, you have to actually believe the public is going to simply forget its overarching anger about the war itself, about the President's dishonesty and mismanagement, and about the desire of every patriotic American to see our troops brought out of harms way. That's positively insane.

Let's go to the evidence to see what I'm talking about. The latest CBS News poll shows 60% of Americans support decreasing our troop levels or bringing our troops home now. Just 35% support leaving the same amount of troops or increasing troop levels. So right off the bat, the political concern about politicians being punished for supporting an exit strategy is really only a concern about the voting behavior of a slim minority of the population (this, even though that political storyline gets upwards of 80% of the political coverage).

But beyond that, if you look at the rest of the poll's results, you find a seething anger about the Iraq issue in general - an anger that transcends the "stay the course" vs. "exit strategy" divide. 57% believe Congress is not challenging the White House enough on Iraq; 58% believe Bush is sugarcoating the situation in Iraq; 61% think the president hasn't explained what the goals are in Iraq; 70% say the White House was dishonest about the premise for war; 70% say Bush still doesn't have a clear plan for action in Iraq. In other words, all of the data says that even among folks who support Bush's "stay the course" nonsense, there is a broad, overarching discontent with all aspects of this war, meaning that any politician who actually tried to use their pro-war positions to win elections would run right into a wall.

Maybe you are thinking this is just one poll. But that's not true either. Invariably, this data comes through in every single poll about the issue, right below the surface question of "stay the course" vs. "exit strategy." As just one example, let's analyze the recent Pew Poll, which the NPR story used to simply state that the public is divided on whether to keep troops in Iraq or bring them home. Yet, that poll also shows that 66% believe Bush has no clear plan of action in Iraq - again, an anger point displaying a broad seething discontent among the electorate.

But perhaps more interesting is what the left out of this poll, yet still portrayed as fact by media who reference the poll. You'll notice question number 56 asks the "stay the course" vs "exit strategy" question, and number 57 asks those who support an exit strategy what kind of exit strategy. But the poll does NOT dig deeper among those who support "stay the course." It doesn't ask these folks, "will you vote against a candidate because he/she believes we should develop an exit strategy from Iraq?" It doesn't ask these folks, "will your position on whether to bring troops home or not be a critical deciding factor in how you vote in 2006?" In short, the poll does not tell us whether the Establishment's assumption that these people will automatically see pro-exit-strategy political leaders as "weak" or whether they will punish pro-exit-strategy candidates at the polls. The only data we have that gets near that is in the stay the course vs. exit strategy question (split) and the question about Bush's handling (indictating anger). There is no evidence at all in this poll that such an assumption is true, yet even in referencing this poll, political "experts" in NPR's story peddle this assumption as fact.

Remember, the anger points reflected in all of these polls is not to be taken lightly - the fact that such a huge percentage of Americans are telling pollsters that their president "intentionally misled" the country into a war, or that their president is continuing to mislead them about the situation in that war, or that their president basically has no idea what he's doing in Iraq is not just sentiment on any old poll question about any old issue - these are anger point issues, ones that go well beyond a debate about this policy or that and into the emotional sentiments that actually play in elections.

But then, let's buttress all this hard evidence that debunks the Establishment's assumptions by considering it in actual political campaign terms, since that is essentially what the Establishment's dishonest assumption is really about. We've heard a lot of bloviating by weak-kneed, insulated politicians like Reps. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) about their "fear" that pushing for an exit strategy would be political disaster. Above and beyond the disgusting nature of insulated D.C. politicians publicly fretting about how issues of war and peace and life and death will affect their personal political ambitions is the fact that this entire analysis asks the public to believe the unbelievable.

At the absolute best, a candidate who goes out and stakes their candidacy on their support for "staying the course" faces a 50-50 political environment - not exactly a "winning" issue. To my knowledge, there has been not one single shred of evidence that shows this position is a clear vote-getter in any congressional district in America. Furthermore, every indication tells us that a candidate who goes out in support of "staying the course" suddenly faces serious problems when the debate gets right below the surface and into the reasons for war, whether the candidate has a clear plan for victory, etc. Basically, the entire issue in the vast majority of cases deteriorates into a 70-30 losing proposition for the pro-war, "stay the course" candidate.

The flip side is the same. Let's imagine a candidate who goes out there and says they support a clear, timed exit strategy. And let's even say they get attacked for being a "coward."

First and foremost, calling that candidate a "coward" is calling at the very least half of the electorate (and polls show it's actually more) a "coward" because at least half the electorate (and again, likely more) supports an exit strategy too.

Secondly, no one has publicly produced a shred of hard data in any congressional district that proves that candidates who support an exit strategy will be punished at the polls for their position, both in general, and specifically among those voters who might disagree with that policy prescription.

Finally, and most importantly, the opponent attacking the pro-exit-strategy candidate is suddenly defending a clearly very unpopular war, defending a decision to go to war that the public sees as dishonest, and defending all the news of casualties and chaos being reported on a daily basis. Isn't that what Democrats should want? Isn't that Campaigns 101 - to make your opponent defend the unpopular? Shouldn't we want to force the GOP to defend this war, which, above and beyond the debate over specific policies, the public has consistently told pollsters it sees as misguided, dishonest, and bad for America in the long-run? The answer is, of course.

Having now debunked the Establishment's assumption that voters will automaticaly punish pro-exit-strategy Democrats at the polls, let's ask the other question: why? Why would the media and the political "experts" - whose only job, after all, is to "expertly" analyze the hard facts - make such an unfounded assumption? I'd posit three reasons, really. First, there is a genuinely pro-war tilt in the Establishment. That's no secret, and never has been. The legion of Washington "experts," "analysts" and "strategists" never has to deal with the visceral, blood-and-guts consequences of its military decisions/theories - and so that has long made this Establishment far more cavalierly pro-war than the general public.

Second, the current crop of Democratic political "strategists" is, not surprisingly, seeing the world from the same out-of-touch place that has led the party into electoral defeat, after electoral defeat, after electoral defeat. Because there has been no Gingrich-style insurgency that has yet rid the party of this pathetic "strategic class," we are left with political "strategy" that sees the political ramifications of a candidate's military policy positions in "strong" vs. "weak" stereotypes that - as shown above with the hard data - no longer apply. Their blindness to the world around them is astonishingly out of touch, but typical.

Finally, and perhaps most destructively is the fact that the highest profile Democratic politicians in America are actually following the advice of this out-of-touch "strategic" class. In the NPR story, we see this very vividly, as analyists are quoted citing Sens. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Lieberman as refusing to support an exit strategy, trying to simultaneously support an exit strategy and a "stay the course" policy, and serving as a White House mouthpiece, respectively. As they do this, Democratic "strategists" are quoted all over the newspapers justifying the positions by using the very same unsupported assumptions reviewed here: they basically say that these figures must do this in order to look "strong" or "hawkish," with the implication that if they don't, they will be punished by voters. That not only projects a destructive image of the Democratic Party as an institution governed exclusively by political pandering, but also helps reinforce the unsupported assertion in the first place.

So here's my request of all those self-styled political "experts," "analysts" and "operatives" in the Washington Beltway: put up or shut up. If it is such an axiomatic fact that pro-exit-strategy candidates will be punished at the polls by voters, let's see the evidence. Let's see a poll that asks voters - even those who personally support "staying the course" - whether they are going to vote against someone for advocating bringing our troops home. Because right now, every shred of data that's out there says exactly the opposite of the assumption you are peddling: namely, that the majority of voters will reward a pro-exit-strategy candidate, and that the minority of voters who personally support "staying the course" will not punish a candidate for having the opposite position. Additionally, every shred of evidence also shows that the candidates likely to be seriously punished over the unpopular Iraq war are those who continue to senselessly advocate for a "stay the course" position that most of the public opposes.

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