Which is why the GOP pundit corps rallied with such ferocity last week when John Kerry said something maladroit about the troops in Iraq, in a typically boneheaded effort to ridicule President Bush. Suddenly, if fleetingly, it felt like 2004 all over again: Republicans could advertise their fidelity to the military and all its glories while making Kerry stand in for all Democrats as a troop-deriding, appeasement-happy elitist. It was a bit like a crowd of hapless frat boys trapped in a Cirque du Soleil performance suddenly hearing “Free Bird” blare over the loudspeakers: now, this is the shit!

Down the rabbit hole
Democrats, too, feared that their campaign-season gains might evaporate all at once, in the flicker of a Treebeard sound bite. But the news cycle promptly moved on to far crazier conservative misdeeds, from the rugby-style pummeling that George Allen’s field staff gave to a blogger asking impertinent questions about the incumbent’s divorce, to the outing of evangelical heavyweight Pastor Ted Haggard as a john for a gay hooker and, quite possibly, a meth fiend. Lay those embarrassments alongside the Republican-choking-of-female-companions outbreak (Pennsylvania Representative Don Sherwood [mistress], New York Representative John Sweeney [wife] and Nevada gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons [hooker]), and you simply had a fog of GOP sleaze too thick even for the suspiciously French pointed chin of John Kerry to penetrate.

Of course, when the smoke clears, Washington will have much the same, grim Bush-led agenda before it. While the Democrats made troop redeployment in Iraq sound like meaningful change, the harsher truth is that there are no good options. We have exported a lethal civil war to an already alarmingly unstable region of the world, and neither our continued presence in our new Middle Eastern client state, nor our imminent departure from it, will likely break the Gordian knot. There’s been much talk about Nancy Pelosi ordering new drapes for the Speaker’s office, but the real task ahead for a Democratic leadership in the 110th Congress is to meet the challenge of a post-occupation Iraq in a way that doesn’t simply involve rearranging the furniture.

If they fail, I fear I’ll be running into hordes of glassy-eyed, hidebound, punch-drunk Democratic House aides at roughly this point in the 2008 election cycle.

Chris Lehmann is senior editor at Congressional Quarterly and Washington correspondent for the New York Observer. He can be reached at lehmannchris@mac.com .

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