With Democratic Strategists Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

Some democratic consultants are getting cold feet when it comes to exploiting BushCo's PoliceStateGate Scandal. From Walter Shapiro at Salon.com:

Democratic consultants are outspoken about their political concerns over the warrantless wiretapping furor, as long as their identities are protected by don't-use-my-name-in-print anonymity.

Typical was my lunch discussion earlier this week with a ranking Democratic Party official. Midway through the meal, I innocently asked how the "Big Brother is listening" issue would play in November. Judging from his pained reaction, I might as well have announced that Barack Obama was resigning from the Senate to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door. With exasperation dripping from his voice, my companion said, "The whole thing plays to the Republican caricature of Democrats -- that we're weak on defense and weak on security." To underscore his concerns about shrill attacks on Bush, the Democratic operative forwarded to me later that afternoon an e-mail petition from MoveOn.org, which had been inspired by Al Gore's fire-breathing Martin Luther King Day speech excoriating the president's contempt for legal procedures.

A series of conversations with Democratic pollsters and image makers found them obsessed with similar fears that left-wing overreaction to the wiretapping issue would allow George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans to wiggle off the hook on other vulnerabilities. The collective refrain from these party insiders sounded something like this: Why are we so obsessed with the privacy of people who are phoning al-Qaida when Democrats should be screaming about corruption, Iraq, gas prices and the prescription-drug mess?

Unbelievable. There is a reason that Bush tried to keep this particular scandal under wraps, and the reason had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political damage control.

Shapiro's article was widely discussed on talk radio a few nights ago. One particular right-winged extremist called in and said something to the effect that "if the Democrats go after Bush on this NSA domestic spying issue, then it will mean the end of the Democratic party." He finished by saying that if the Democrats pushed the issue, then Bush will be able to appoint at least two more ScAlitos to the Supreme Court in the next three years.

You could actually hear the fear in this guy's voice. Bush's Brownshirts know that this illegal wiretapping has ticked off folks on both sides of the aisle and that this is not a good issue for them. [And by the way, I just love how members of the American Taliban keep insisting that ScAlito isn't "out of the mainstream," only to turn around the next day and extol him as "the worst nightmare of liberal democrats." If ScAlito really was a mainstream jurist, he wouldn't be a "worst nightmare" for anyone, except (of course) for members of the Extreme Right, who've never met a mainstream judge they didn't hate.]

Democratic consultants are, of course, buying into all the G.O.P. bullshit on how Bush is "untouchable" when it comes to National Security issues. For Shapiro, it's deja vu all over again:

[F]rom my own vantage point, the Democrats' positioning on the eavesdropping issue invites comparisons to their fetal crouch in the run-up to the Iraqi War. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for Bush's go-to-war resolution -- including John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton -- at least partly because the pollsters insisted that it was the only politically safe position, a ludicrous and self-destructive notion in hindsight.

The problem with a consultant-driven overreliance on polling data is that it is predicated on the assumption that nothing will happen to jar public opinion out of its current grooves. As Elaine Kamarck, a top advisor in the Clinton-Gore White House and a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argued, "These guys [the consultants] just don't get it. They don't understand that in politics strength is better than weakness. And a political party that is always the namby-pamby 'me too' party is a party that isn't going to get anyplace."

I have a question for these consultants -- what if anything has Bush gotten right as Commander-in-Chief? He ignored warnings in August of 2001 that bin Laden was "determined to strike the U.S." Much to the delight of terrorists everywhere, Bush ultimately decided to respond to the 9-11 attacks by invading Iraq -- a country that both Colin Powell and Condi Rice considered not to be a threat prior to 9-11 -- and he carried out this unnecessary invasion in the most incompetent way possible. In fact, Bush routinely seems to go out of his way to help terrorists. Yet some democratic consultants are still afraid to go after him on security-related issues.

My God -- how many more BushCo failures do these people need before they find some political courage?

Molly Ivins recently gave this advice to the Democrats: "Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite." I have a feeling that Ivin's warning will go unheeded.

UPDATE: The Bush Administration is deperately trying to turn the PoliceStateGate Scandal into a positive for them. From the New York Times:

With a campaign of high-profile national security events set for the next three days, following Karl Rove's blistering speech to Republicans on Friday, the White House has effectively declared that it views its controversial secret surveillance program not as a political liability but as an asset, a way to attack Democrats and re-establish President Bush's standing after a difficult year.

The Democrats can easily counter this strategy as long as they focus on three facts:

1. Bush's illegal acts were unnecessary because the FISA law allows the Administration to wiretap first then get a warrant later;

2. Bush's illegal acts didn't produce squat as far as fighting the War On Terror is concerned; and

3. Bush's illegal acts actually compromised the security of this country because they caused FBI agents to go off on wild goose chases when these agents could have been going after real terrorists.

UPDATE II: Atrios is reporting that BushCo has a new name for their illegal wiretap operation -- they are calling it a "Terrorist Surveillance Program." One of Atrios' readers posted this comment:

It's all about the polls. By calling it "Terrorist Surveillance Program," we can now have polls that question:

Do you agree that terrorists need to be surveilled. If not, why do you hate America?