One of the most frequent and controversial lines of argument about the Iraq mess has been the idea that it represents a repetition of the U.S. experience in Vietnam. The parallels are obvious: an overwhelmingly powerful U.S. military gets itself bogged down in a theater related to, but ultimately distinct from, a broader war. An administration (or two) unwilling to admit mistakes or tell the truth gets ensnared in its own lies and spin, which then become the justification for continuing the mistakes in the name of preserving U.S. credibility. And the American people, who are divided on what they think should actually be done, eventually reject the status quo and demand a new course of action.Lots of younger political analysts and bloggers view the whole Vietnam analogy as just another example of Baby Boomer narcissism. Far as I’m concerned, if you could make the case that the U.S. effort in Iraq reflected mistakes made by FDR and Truman in WW2, Wilson in WW1, or for that matter, Napoleon in Russia or Cromwell in Ireland, I’d be interested to hear about it.Now that Iraq is semi-officially an ongoing disaster, it’s actually Republicans, including George W. Bush, who seem to be into the Vietnam analogy, but not in a way that indicates any understanding of the lessons of Vietnam. Here’s Josh Marshall’s take on the subject, based on Bush’s quick trip to Vietnam:

Isn’t this trip a really odd venue for the president to be arguing that staying the course basically forever is the only acceptable solution? Though it took a tragically long time, the US, for all the moonwalking, eventually decided to pull up stakes in Vietnam. And what was the result? One might make arguments that the Soviets and Soviet proxies were temporarily emboldened in Africa or Latin America, though I think that’s debatable. But what of the real effects? The Soviet Union was dismantling itself within little more than a decade of our pull-out. And now we have a Vietnam that is politically repressive at home but proto-capitalist in its economy and, by any measure, incredibly eager for good relations with the United States.If geo-political standing and international repercussions are really the issue we’re discussing, it seems very hard to argue that our decision to pull out of Vietnam had any lasting or meaningful ill-effects. And there’s at least a decent argument to the contrary.And yet here we have President Bush, stepping on to Vietnamese soil to further our rapprochement with Vietnam, and arguing, in so many words, that the lesson of Vietnam is that we should still be there blowing the place up thirty years later.We’re really deep into the primitive brainstem phase of our long national nightmare of presidential denial and mendacity on Iraq.

Yeah, it’s odd, though not that suprising to anyone who followed this year’s House debate on the Murtha proposal for Iraq, in which most of the Republican debaters explicitly and reduntantly suggested that we could have won the War in Vietnam if we had really tried. For every Democrat who attacks Bush on Iraq without a clear plan for what to do next, there is at least one, or probably two, GOPers who think America has not sufficiently thrown its military weight around in Iraq or elsewhere. These are the ideological heirs of those who argued that we could have prevailed in Vietnam if we had basically killed everything in sight, and escalated the military presence to the gates of hell, and victory. As Josh noted, sometimes even the most hawkish observers have to be able to figure out that Iraq has been and continues to be a huge propaganda defeat for the United States. There are probably no real victories available at this point, but you’d like to think American policymakers can figure out how to pivot from Iraq to the broader war on jihadist terror. It’s out there, all the time.

There’s a fun article in today’s Washington Post by DeNeen Brown that captures a bit of the slow-motion riot associated with a change of partisan control of Congress. Sure, the important thing is that Democrats will control the flow of legislation in the House and Senate, and the agenda of committees. But underneath the surface is the human drama of Very Important Members becoming nonentities, and all sorts of havoc at the staff level. For one thing, the majority party controls a significant number of committee and subcommittee staff positions. The turnover of congressional staff jobs doesn’t create the kind of employment tempest associated with a change in the Executive Branch, but it still produces a ripple effect throughout the political world; suddenly unemployed high-level Republican staffers will displace all sorts of people in think tanks, law firms, lobbying shops, and so forth. Conversely, it’s a good time for Democrats to move in or move up in Washington. Moreover, the majority party gets the really good offices on Capitol Hill. Given the rabbit warrens most congressional staff occupy, a few extra square feet make a big difference. All these small, subtle but significant changes on the Hill won’t be fully implemented until the next Congress is sworn in next January. But the political culture of Washington is already adapting to the New Regime. Since 1994, Capitol Hill has been a strange right-wing cigar-and-martini-bar enclave in a very Democratic city. To paraphrase David Bowie, that’s about to ch-ch-change.

So, House Democrats voted today, and elected Steny Hoyer Majority Leader over John Murtha by a big 149-86 margin. I´m happy with that result, and not terribly surprised, given the dues Hoyer has paid, the broad support he had across the usual factional lines, and various issues raised by Murtha´s non-Iraq voting record over the years.Nor am I surprised that the Washington Post reported the vote as a big setback for Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi. I still don´t understand Pelosi´s reasoning in publicly endorsing Murtha, attributing the entire election victory to Murtha, as she did, was weird, as was her suggestion that his election as Leader would magically end the war in Iraq.Whatever the impact of this result on the internal dynamics of the caucus, I don´t think this should be interpreted as some sort of ideological Gotterdamerung among Democrats. Sure, a lot of progressive blogospheric types basically endorsed Murtha or said negative things about Hoyer. But they sure didn´t go to the mats on this (beyond the predictably shrill David Sirota), and have quickly moved on to other topics. I don´t know if this was just a matter of counting votes more accurately than Pelosi, or a sign that many threatened post-election intraparty fights just ain´t happening.

Sorry for the hiaitus, but I´ve been on the road and offline. I was not terribly surprised, however, to learn how quickly George W. Bush got tired of the bipartisanship rap he dusted off and rehearsed several times last week. In case you missed it, Bush´s first official action after the November 7 debacle is apparently going to be to send up a big batch o´previously rejected conservative judicial nominees. Here´s how the Wall Street Journal summarized it:

After calling for bipartisanship, President Bush surprised Senate Democrats with plans to renominate a controversial list of judges – some of whom may be unacceptable even to a few Republican senators. “It’s an unfortunate signal,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide.The Senate Judiciary Committee has not received the nominations yet. As word spread about the nominations, however, the committee’s Republican Chairman Arlen Specter told reporters: “It is obvious they cannot move during the lame-duck session.” After January, he added, questions about the fate of the nominees should be “directed to someone else.”The White House action is viewed largely as an effort to appease the party’s conservative base. An administration official says there will be a formal White House announcement on the renominations later today. The president is in Moscow, having left Washington last night.

Appease the party´s conservative base? Lord a´mighty, Bush is right where he was in the runup to the elections. This has to be the longest political learning curve in history.

I did a post on Friday deploring the idea of a purge of Howard Dean as DNC chairman. This one deplores the idea of a purge of Steny Hoyer as the number-two official among House Democrats. It’s motivated by a statement made by Speaker-Elect Nancy Pelosi supporting Jack Murtha’s strange challenge to Hoyer as Majority Leader in the next House. It’s strange because there’s really not a case to be made for any failing by Hoyer as Whip; it’s all about Murtha’s late-life emergence as an antiwar icon. It’s not as though Steny has done anything to undermine House Democrats in their criticism of Bush Iraq policies. And it’s not as though Murtha has any other case to make for being a good representative of House Democrats. He’s actually been a bit to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage on a host of issues over the years. I don’t necessarily hold that against him, but I do object to the idea that he’s an impeccably good Democrat, and Steny’s not. It’s just not true. Hoyer’s probably going to win, unless Pelosi really goes to the mats for Murtha. Let’s hope she’s made her statement for Murtha precisely because it sends a nice signal to those in the party who think Iraq is literally the only issue that matters, without staking House Democrats to an unnecessary internal fight and an exclusive commitment to Murtha’s views on redeployment. And maybe Nancy Pelosi and James Carville should get together, compare notes, and eschew intraparty battles for a while. This we don’t need.

I haven’t blogged about college football in a while, in part because the political news has been more compelling, and in part because my beloved Georgia Bulldogs were going through a 1-4 stretch in which they lost to Vanderbilt and Kentucky, and nearly lost to Mississippi State.But today the Dawgs hammered fifth-ranked Auburn, at Auburn 37-15. And the score was indicative of the nature of the game (Georgia outgained Auburn 444-172). Indeed, if true freshman QB Matthew Stafford hadn’t lost two fumbles in the course of his inspired scrambling (he gained 76 yards rushing, with a touchdown), the margin might have gone even higher.Stafford actually deserves a lot of praise (his overall performance was amazing), and Mark Richt deserves some praise for putting the ball in the hands of his most talented QB in a lost year and letting him get experience. Georgia’s butter-fingered receivers rediscovered their Velcro. Kregg Lumpkin rushed for over 100 yards. Tre Battle personally made 3 of 4 Georgia INTs (Auburn QB Brandon Cox got sacked early, and seemed to be off-target the rest of the day). The GA defense was generally impressive. And the GA offensive line, down to a handful of reliable players due to injuries, was fanstastic.Georgia’s bad season has been somewhat saved, though a win over the nationally ranked Dirt Daubers of Georgia Tech week after next would do wonders for morale in Athens.

It’s obvious that the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq was a big factor in the Democratic midterm victory (though surprisingly, the national exit polls placed Iraq fourth in the ranks of “most important issues,” after corruption, the war on terrorism, and the economy). And in the wake of the victory, I can’t blame the most avid antiwar Democrats for crowing about the steady trend of public opinion in the direction of a rejection of the war as a bad idea from the beginning.But given the likely long-range prominence of national security in American politics, and the persistent doubts of many voters about Democratic credibility on national security (which mattered a lot in 2004, and might have mattered this year if Bush and company had not discredited themselves so thoroughly), it’s important for Democrats to be clear-eyed about the challenges they face. That’s why I was troubled by a TPMCafe post by the usually excellent Greg Sargent the other day that suggested the intra-party divide on national security was between those who (correctly) wanted to be loud and proud in attacking the administration on every front, and those who (incorrectly) wanted to stay silent and fight out the election on domestic issues. Greg’s right that some Democrats have habitually wanted to ignore national security issues and some habitually have objected (going all the way back to the 1970s), but this is a divide that cuts across the left-right, pro-war anti-war differences of opinion. The apotheosis of the change-the-subject approach was in the last midterm elections, those in 2002, and it was promoted and opposed by Democrats on both sides of the decision to invade Iraq (the DLC, to cite one example, ranted against the concede-national-security point of view relentlessly). Indeed, this was a debate that never ended within the Kerry general election campaign in 2004.Within the now-triumphant don’t-ignore-national-security camp among Democrats, a secondary argument has been, as Greg briefly discusses, whether to attack the Bush administration and the GOP for its incompetence on Iraq, or for its basic decision to go after Saddam Hussein. I strongly suspect a lot of voters would consider this a theoretical and backward-looking dispute that is irrelevant to the basic judgment that Bush and company lied and bullied their way into a war they didn’t know how to win. And that’s why Democrats were almost certainly smart to frame their party message on Iraq almost exactly that way. Going forward, perhaps the most significant divide among Democrats on national security is between those who view the Iraq war, however it ends, as a distraction from the broader fight against (substitute your favorite terms) jihadist terrorism, and those who think that broader war is a chimera or a mistake as well. The latter camp (which extends over into the GOP “realist” ranks) implicitly agrees with Bush, Cheney and the neocons that you can’t separate Iraq from the U.S. reaction to 9/11; the failure of the former indicates a basic misconception of the latter. I don’t think this represents anything like a majority of antiwar Democrats, but it’s a debate that needs to be flushed out in the open, and resolved before 2008.

I was out of pocket travelling most of today, and initially missed the brouhaha over the alleged plot to get rid of Howard Dean as DNC chairman. Having now read my emails; the Ryan Lizza Plank post that seems to be the source for James Carville’s suggestion that Dean be replaced by Harold Ford; and the angry reaction of the blogosphere, my first thought is:Lordy, lordy. I’ve always liked Carville, as a guy with impressive strategic and tactical instincts, and impeccable partisan credentials. And I also like Harold Ford, who I suspect was as surprised as anyone by Carville’s dropping of his name. But this is a really bad idea, at a really bad time. In the wake of Tuesday’s victory, party committee chieftain Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean appear to have buried the hatchet, and there’s a general sense among most Democrats that they both did their very different jobs during the campaign well enough. We do not need any purges at present, thank you. Since I’m sure it’s a matter of time before someone suggests the DLC is behind the Plot Against Dean (Markos has already indicated that his post-election attitude of sweetness and light and unity does not extend to the DLC, for whom he holds an especially personal, intense and consistent hostility), allow me to say that Dean’s long-range 50-state-strategy, and the broader insistence of the netroots that Democrats should not write off big swatches of the country, reflects what the DLC has been saying for eons. Hell, it was exactly what the DLC (and most explicitly, PPI president Will Marshall) argued for in the wake of the 2004 elections. There are undoubtedly legitimate differences of opinion about exactly how and how far to “expand the battlefield,” but this is actually one political issue where the netroots and the DLC tend to agree, against the ancient habits of the party professionals, who so often fight the last war in the narrowest possible trenches.In any event, James should get off the purge-Dean bandwagon, if indeed that’s what he’s riding, and focus his considerable talents on the very different challenges Democrats will face in 2008. I see nothing other than good things in the rear-view mirror of the 2006 elections.

The first installment of the inevitable intra-party Democratic debate over what yesterday’s victory means has been stimulated by Fox Newsish claims that Dems took Congress by running conservative candidates who will be at odds with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And this spin war has converged with a pre-election argument about where Dems should look for a national majority.One Democratic spin on the results has been that the Donkey Party won by consolidating its Blue State strength, snuffing congressional Republicans who had previously survived by pretending to be more moderate than the national GOP leadership.There’s some truth to this take, if only because a national “wave” election tends to take out the Nancy Johnsons and the Jim Leaches who indeed were living on borrowed time.But the results do not provide a good argument for Democrats to write off Enemy Territory and focuse on their Blue State geographical base.15 of the 28 Democratic House gains were in Red States, most of them in Red or Purple Districts.3 of the 6 new Senators are from Red States.3 of the 6 gubernatorial pickups for Democrats were in Red States.About half of the state legislative gains were in Red States.We are beginning to turn Purple States blue, and Red States purple. I can’t imagine why any Democrat would think of this as bad news, but there is clearly a point of view among Democratic intellectuals that messing around with voters in Red State areas, particularly in the South, represents an exposure to ideological contamination.I am beginning to slog my way through Tom Schaller’s recent book, Whistling Past Dixie, that makes the most intellectually credible case I’ve read so far for Democrats to eschew any southern strategy. I will probably review the book somewhere or other, but the bottom line is that Schaller’s worried about the ideological risks involved in any Democratic strategy that involves the weird, religiously-oriented, “backward” South, as opposed to allegedly progressive ground in the Midwest and West.I don’t know how much time ol’ Tom has spent in the Rocky Mountain West, which he posits as a vastly more progressive region than the South, but I have to tell you there are a whole lot of rednecks there, which doesen’t bother me but should bother Schaller. And I’m not sure I understand why it’s okay for Democrats to focus on states like Indiana, which have not gone Democratic since 1964, but not okay to pursue votes in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennesse, Kentucky and Georgia, which have cast their electoral votes for Democrats in the last decade or so.On the more general point of whether it’s a problem for Democrats that their freshman class has some alleged “conservatives” on board, the much-esteemed Mark Schmitt nailed it over at TAPPED:

Unlike Tom Schaller, I have to admit, I wasn’t bothered at all by the spin that the Democrats won because they embraced a lot of candidates with conservative views and backgrounds….

[T]he bulk of the Democratic majority came from Northeast, Midwest and Mountain seats where the winners were not conservative.So the spin that the Democrats won because they moved in a more conservative direction is inaccurate. But so what? Consider the alternative spin, which is that Democrats are a bunch of extreme liberals, who will be as far out of touch as the Republicans and who will be destroyed in 2008? I’d rather have a party that’s fairly liberal but has a reputation or image as moderate than one that’s really moderate and over-cautious but has a reputation for being extremely liberal, which was the situation through much of the 19990sThe fact is that the Democratic Party has been a centrist, moderate party for some time, in the sense that on balance the party’s governors, legislators and policy agenda fully represent the center of public opinion. (As shown, for example, by the fact that the viewpoint of independents was very much in line with that of Democrats.) But it was a damaged brand; it needed a remake of its image. This is a chance to do it, by showing that the party has in fact incorporated the center. Highly visible veterans, openly religious candidates, and social conservatives like Casey send a cultural signal, not an ideological one, a signal that this is a party you can be comfortable in. Sometimes you need to seem like you have changed just to make people understand what’s been going on all along.

Truth is, moderate Democratic candidates do pretty well all over the country, given a chance. But if we perversely decide not to compete where such candidates do particularly well, we will handicap our party, just as Karl Rove handicapped Republicans by demanding partisan loyalty to a highly ideological agenda.

I’ve just watched about all I could stand of George W. Bush’s press conference announcing the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Not surprisingly, he got a lot of questions about the implications of yesterday’s elections, and started yammering about his desire to work with Democrats.Yeah, right. Next thing he’ll be telling us he wants to be “a uniter, not a divider,” and usher in a “responsibility era.” Day before yesterday, he was finishing up a campaign swing that focused on the argument that the Democratic Party was basically a terrorist front organization. And even in today’s remarks, he couldn’t stop himself from suggesting that anyone who questions his and Rumsfeld’s sorry record on Iraq is undermining the troops and frightening the Iraqis.As for the timing of the decision to finally let Rummy go, a couple of years too late, I’m sure we’ll hear from right-wing chatterers that it couldn’t happen before Election Day because it would have discouraged the conservative “base.” If, God forbid, I were a conservative base voter, I’d be pretty damn insulted by the idea that Rumsfeld, who has done more to discredit Republican national security bona fides than anyone not named Dick Cheney, was one of my heroes. The real issue is that the administration needs to pretend it’s rethinking Iraq before Democrats ride into Washington, take over congressional committee gavels, and start asking questions about Iraq that should have been asked by Congress a long time ago.Rumsfeld’s proposed replacement, former CIA chief Bob Gates, is currently president of Texas A&M University. Let me be the very first to suggest his replacement in College Station: my colleague The Moose. He’d love to return to his native Texas; his original strategy of joining the staff of Governor Kinky Friedman hasn’t exactly worked out. And the timing’s perfect: he could get out of the political arena on a high note, just after the humiliation of Karl Rove and the apotheosis of Joe Lieberman, and before John McCain has a chance to break his heart. Despite his yankeefied higher education in New York and Ann Arbor, the Moose is totally an Aggie Wannabee. I can attest to the fact that he knows every word of the Aggie War Hymn, and can sing it at a considerable decibal level.So if anything really good is to come of the latest Bush maneuver, maybe this is it: A&M President Marshall Wittmann. To paraphrase the War Hymn:Rummy’s horns are sawed offRummy’s horns are sawed offRummy’s horns are sawed offShort! A!