Repositioning

I'm sympathetic to the general point Atrios is making here, but I don't think it's right to say that "For some the 2006 election win was premature as the Democrats won without massively repositioning themselves, proving it was possible." The Democrats did, after all, reposition themselves pretty dramatically on the highest-profile political issue of the day: Iraq. They just repositioned themselves to the left and started offering a commitment to end the war rather than 2004-vintage promises to prosecute it more vigorously.

Comments

...and then what did they go and do instead?

Posted by cleek | November 5, 2007 3:56 PM

I think a lot of Democrats, and lefty bloggers in particular, seem to have convinced themselves that the Dems ran in '06 on a withdraw-from-Iraq platform. I don't remember it that way at all. To me, they ran on a muddled message of "Stay-the-course is a failure" without actually making the explicit (and logical) conclusion that that meant withdrawl. It was only AFTER the election that Dems suddenly realized that -- 1) they had won an election and 2) it was largely due to Iraq -- and got some spines. But, it was too late -- they opened the door to Bush to simply escalate the war and claim, reasonably, that he was no longer "staying the course." THAT is why we are still in Iraq -- no one has made withdrawl an explicit agenda item and won an election (yet). Retroactive assumptions that the Dems won with a mandate to withdraw does nothing to help and actually causes harm because it allows them to do the same in '08. How about the Democratic party says, explicitly and without hedging, "Look, we're going to withdraw. We don't know exactly what will happen on the ground, and in fact, things may get worse for a while before they get better. But our troops will come home." They THINK they are saying that, but they're not. They're not preparing the public for anything.

Posted by Ryan | November 5, 2007 5:09 PM