I pulled the following article down from Reuters, and normally liberal news outlet who took some time last night to comment on the Democrats plan (or lack of) for Iraq.
President George W. Bush and Republicans have taken a battering over Iraq, but it’s not because voters believe Democrats have a clear strategy for ending the conflict and bringing American soldiers home.
“If you ask people out on the street what the message is, they wouldn’t know,” said Joan Lowery, a 60-year-old insurance company manager, at a recent Democratic fund-raiser in Cincinnati.
Lowery is not alone. Only a quarter of Americans think Democrats in the Congress have a clear plan for Iraq, far less than the 36 percent who believe the president has one, a USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-September found.
This goes to show how fed-up the American people are with the war in Iraq. Only 25% of Americans say that the Democrats have a plan for Iraq, and only 36% think the President has a plan for Iraq. This doesn’t speak well for our elected officials of either party.
But experts said the lack of a clear Democratic plan made no difference at all to most voters. Ambiguity has been part of the Democratic strategy on Iraq all along and has worked quite well, they said.
“For a lot of Democrats it is a very successful strategy to simply mirror the voters’ underlying discontent with the war, but not to offer specifics that make them a vulnerable target,” said Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University.
That is, I must say, sad; both for the Democrat politicians, and the party voters. The Democratic Party is, effectively, steering a course of ambiguity to avoid alienating any potential voters. This is playing to the masses, and may help in elections, but is no way to run a country.
