They don't get it

I must confess that until now, I really thought that the Democrats in congress understood why we put them in the majority, and why we are angry that they gave in to Bush on continuing the occupation of Iraq. I realize now that they just do not get it.

The new Democratic-led Congress is drawing the ire of voters upset with its failure to quickly deliver on a promise to end the Iraq war.

This is reflected in polls that show Congress -- plagued by partisan bickering mostly about the war -- at one of its lowest approval ratings in a decade. Surveys find only about one in four Americans approves of it.

"I understand their disappointment," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "We raised the bar too high."

I am astonished. Obviously, Beltway-itis is a real disease, and not just a pithy insult. Its main symptom is a chronic inability to perceive things as they really are.

Harry Reid thinks the problem is that they "raised the bar too high" in the 2006 elections? He thinks that we are "disappointed" at their failure to clear that bar? If this is what Reid really believes, he is deluded. Americans are not "disappointed" with the performance of congress. We are disgusted.

Nobody thought ending the occupation of Iraq would be easy. Our disgust doesn't come from Democrats' failure to bring it to an end, it comes from their failure to try. It comes from the spectacle of seeing them talk tough for a few weeks, only to cave in and give Bush exactly what he wanted, which was a blank check for the continued open-ended occupation of Iraq. The outcome was no different than if we had left the Republicans in charge.

We gave the Democrats the majority to fight Bush, not to surrender to him. If Reid and Nancy Pelosi had fought Bush for every penny and insisted on time tables, if they had sent him a bill with mandatory benchmarks over and over and over again, only to have him veto it over and over and over again, their approval ratings would be in the 90s.

Instead, the Democrats made two fundamental errors:

• They accepted and validated the Republicans' framing of the issue as one of "funding for the troops; and



• they listended to Republicans and "Democratic strategists" who told them that the public would not support them if they insisted on benchmarks and timetables for withdrawal.

In each case, the problem is that the Democrats simply did not have the courage to fight, which is what we put them in the majority to do. Dissatisfaction with the GOP congressional majority was not so much about disagreement on individual issues, although that factor was significant in a number of respects, such as political corruption and the occupation of Iraq.

In a larger sense, however, the Republicans lost their majority because Americans came to realize that they were nothing but a rubber stamp for George W. Bush's agenda, which Americans oppose overwhelmingly. On every issue, from Iraq to warrantless wiretapping to the repeal of habeas corpus to name just a few Bush outrages, a handful of GOP lawmakers paid lip service to the notion of checks & balances, only to roll over when it came time to vote. For six years, the congress acted as though its constitutional mandate was to support this president, rather than to hold him accountable on behalf of the American people. Americans understand instinctively how wrong and dangerous that mindset is, and in November, we voted for change.

Yes, we expected the new Democratic majority to work to end the occupation. Yes, we expected them to shed light on Bush's illegal spying programs. Yes, we expected them to work to curtail the influence of corporate lobbyists on the legislative process. But those are just details - significant details, certainly, but details nonetheless. In the larger sense, we placed the Democrats in the majority to hold Bush accountable, to restore the constitutional checks and balances that we used to take for granted, and want to be able to take for granted again. We elected them to fight on our behalf, and instead of fighting on what is arguably the most important issue of the day, the occupation of Iraq, they surrendered. They listened to the Republicans who told them that if they opposed Bush on the occupation, Americans would think they were weak. What they failed to understand, and apparently fail to understand still, is that having Bush call you weak doesn't make you look weak. Surrendering to Bush makes you look weak. Being weak makes you look weak.

The Democrats must understand that a majority of Americans feel the ground shifting beneath our feet. We don't recognize our country anymore. We have come to realize that our president is an outlaw and that his administration is a criminal enterprise. We are concerned that under the stewardship of George W. Bush, control of our government is slipping from our grasp, and that it is ceasing to function as a repository of our will. We suspect that our government has stopped fearing us, as it should, and has become instead something that we must fear. We are looking to congress to restore the proper balance to the relationship between the government and the governed. We knew that the Republicans would never do this. They made it clear that they did not even recognize the need to do so. Democrats won the majority because they convinced us that they did recognize that need. Their failure so far to hold Bush accountable is what makes us doubt that they really understand what we elected them to do.