US election: roundup of articles to prepare you for Tuesday's showdown on how much we hate/love Bush's Iraq War

1. Keeping Our Eyes on the Ball -- by Molly Ivins

I’m still worried sick. The R’s have seized the news cycle! Which says more about how dim American politics are than anything else I can think of.

Apparently, the Michael J. Fox affair didn’t have enough meat to it, and even Rep. Mark Foley is out of the game, so now we have the semi-hemi-demi-gaffe from John Kerry, who is not in fact running for anything.

If Kerry had been given as many breaks for misspeaking as George W. Bush has, he’d be a professor of grammar by now. And this all shows what the Bush regime has: attacks on Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy, Pelosi, liberals! ... but not any actual policies to help it.

The Great Wall of Republican ads is bearing down on us—race-baiting, scare tactics and sleaze-mongering. (Who knew so many people had signed up to “promote the homosexual agenda”? I don’t even know what it is. But apparently, you don’t have to sign up to support—you could be part of it and not even know!) The R’s are throwing distorting ads, funded by endless money, all over the place. Can the people see that, and ignore and punish them for it?

Aside from the Wall of Ads, we are also faced with Disenfranchisement of Democrats again. For some reason, this has come to be regarded as “one of Karl’s dirty tricks”—a clever ploy, a little hardball, rather to be admired.

I’ve covered East Texas politics for a long time. All over East Texas—and elsewhere around the country—there are elderly black Americans who don’t have driver’s licenses because they’ve never had a car, who can’t read because they never got to third grade, and who are scared of The Law because for 70 years or better they’ve been oppressed by it. So if they see a sheriff’s car blocking the road to the polling place and officials checking people’s papers, they head the other direction.

Voting isn’t hard, and believe it or not, these elderly blacks have worked all their lives and paid into Social Security and paid taxes, and they know a lot about how government affects people.

With pundits in Washington, who just a few weeks ago were claiming the Democrats would likely take the House by a razor-thin margin, now victoriously claiming they all along knew it would be a wipeout, I just feel that overconfidence juice starting to kick in. “Maybe 20 seats, maybe 40 seats” ... yeah. People could think: “So that’s settled. I don’t even really have to vote.” Folks, step up and make sure there’s some control on this regime.

May I remind you what this election is about? Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, unprecedented presidential powers, unmatched incompetence, unparalleled corruption, unwarranted eavesdropping, Katrina, Enron, Halliburton, global warming, Cheney’s secret energy task force, record oil company profits, $3 gasoline, FEMA, the Supreme Court, Diebold, Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, Terri Schiavo, stem cell research, golden parachutes, shrunken pensions, unavailable and expensive healthcare, habeas corpus, no weapons of mass destruction, sacrificed soldiers and Iraqi civilians, wasted billions, Taliban resurgence, expiration of the assault weapons ban, North Korea, Iran, intelligent design, Swift boat hit squads, and on and on.

This election is about that, but much more—it’s about honor, dignity and comity in this country. It’s about the Constitution, which gives us this great nation. Bush ran on a pledge of “restoring honor and integrity” to the White House. Instead, he brought us Tom DeLay, Roy Blunt, Katherine Harris, John Doolittle, Jerry Lewis, Richard Pombo, Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, David Safavian, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and an illegal and immoral war in Iraq. People, it’s up to you.


The Great Divider (NY Times editorial)

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.


3. After Victory
If the Dems take over Congress, the question remains: what'll they actually do in power? Here's a look at the legislation they'd push.
By Harold Meyerson/American Prospect

Against their better judgment, the Democrats are starting to taste it. In the House, the number of Republican incumbents polling under 50 percent considerably exceeds the number of seats the Democrats need to pick up to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker. Controlling the Senate depends on winning two of the contests in three Upper South states -- Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia -- that could go either way.

And then what? Putting a fleet of carts before a herd of horses, let's look at the legislation that the Democrats would push through the House and just maybe through the Senate. (Even if they win the upper house, of course, they'll still need the support of a number of Republicans to overcome a filibuster.)

In the House, the Democrats have made clear that there's a first tier of legislation they mean to bring to a vote almost immediately after the new Congress convenes. It includes raising the minimum wage, repealing the Medicare legislation that forbids the government from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices, replenishing student loan programs, funding stem cell research and implementing those recommendations of the September 11 commission that have thus far languished.

All these measures command massive popular support. The reason they've not been enacted is that House Republicans have passed rules making it impossible for the Democrats to offer amendments to any significant legislation, thereby sparing themselves the indignity of having to choose, say, between the interests of their financial backers in the drug industry and their constituents.

Cognizant that they will owe their victory in part to the public's revulsion at the way Congress does (or avoids) business, the Democrats also plan to revise House rules to enable the opposition party to introduce amendments and to sit on conference committees, from which Republicans have routinely excluded them since Tom DeLay became majority leader. They also will ban members from accepting gifts and paid trips from lobbyists.

By bringing such measures to a vote in the House, and conceivably in the Senate as well, the Democrats will be in the enviable position of doing both good and well: promoting long-overdue policy shifts that the public supports and putting their Republican colleagues in a pickle. Confronted with an up-or-down vote on raising the minimum wage or making medication for seniors more affordable, many Republicans will side with the Democrats. Should the Democrats win the Senate, Republicans will have to calculate the risks of filibustering such mom-and-apple-pie measures. These bills will also pose a conundrum for conservatives such as John McCain, whose presidential aspirations have not been clouded by having to vote on these issues.

Should they make it through both houses, many of these measures will face a presidential veto. George W. Bush has already vetoed stem cell legislation, and he has staunchly opposed raising the minimum wage since the day he entered politics. What will congressional Republicans do if they're confronted with a series of vetoes of popular legislation? How large will the lame duck president loom in their calculations?

Not every issue that the Democrats will address if they control Congress will be so easy. The war in Iraq -- to which, if they win, they will owe their victory -- will surely prove the most nettlesome. If the Baker-Hamilton commission recommends a phased withdrawal, as some reports have speculated, the Democrats may be handed a relatively easy way out, whether or not the administration goes along with it. Should the administration persist in staying the course, Congress then could pass the kind of legislation it passed in the last years of the Vietnam War, stipulating the kinds of uses to which our military spending could -- and could not -- be put. At the same time, the ranking House Democrats in military matters -- Pennsylvania's John Murtha and Missouri's Ike Skelton -- might seek to increase the size of the Army, which the Iraq war has shown to be stretched to its limits.

In the course of this year's campaign, Democrats have been pleasantly surprised by the support their proposals for greater energy independence have won in all regions and sectors of the country. They will surely boost funding for alternative energy projects, which they see as a way not just to reduce greenhouse gases but to generate jobs as well. Many congressional Democrats also want to mandate stricter fuel efficiency standards, traditionally a cause that some auto-state Democrats have opposed, even though the Big Three's resistance to such standards is one reason their sales are plummeting.

"We're kidding around if we don't deal with that issue," says one leading Hill Democrat. "The time for that debate has arrived." It's part and parcel, he hopes, of life in the majority.

(Harold Meyerson is executive editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.)


4. Staying the Course, Win or Lose -- by Robert Kagan/Washington Post

BRUSSELS -- Here in Europe, people ask hopefully if a Democratic victory in the congressional elections will finally shift the direction of American foreign policy in a more benign direction. But congressional elections rarely affect the broad direction of American foreign policy. A notable exception was when Congress cut funding for American military operations in support of South Vietnam in 1973. Yet it's unlikely that a Democratic House would cut off funds for the war in Iraq in the next two years.

Indeed, the preferred European scenario -- "Bush hobbled" -- is less likely than the alternative: "Bush unbound." Neither the president nor his vice president is running for office in 2008. That is what usually prevents high-stakes foreign policy moves in the last two years of a president's term. In 1988 Ronald Reagan had negotiated a clever agreement to get the dictator Manuel Noriega peacefully out of Panama, but Vice President George H.W. Bush and his advisers feared the domestic political repercussions of cutting a deal with a drug lord at the height of the "war on drugs," so they nixed the plan. The result was that Bush had to invade Panama the very next year to remove Noriega -- but he did get elected.

This President Bush doesn't have to worry about getting anyone elected in 2008 and appears to be thinking only about his place in history. That can lead him to act in ways that please Europeans -- for instance, the vigorous multilateral diplomacy on Iran and North Korea. But it could also take him in directions they will find worrisome if that diplomacy fails.

There is a deeper reason this election, and even the next presidential election, may not change U.S. foreign policy very much. Historically, and especially in the six decades since the end of World War II, there has been much more continuity than discontinuity in foreign policy. New administrations change policy around the margins, and sometimes those changes prove important -- George H.W. Bush temporized about the Balkans; Bill Clinton temporized and then sent troops. Clinton temporized about Iraq and then bombed. George W. Bush temporized and then invaded. But the motives behind American foreign policy, and even the means, don't differ all that much from administration to administration. Republicans berated the Democrats' "cowardly" containment until they took the White House in 1952, then adopted that strategy as their own.

This tendency toward continuity is particularly striking on the issue that most divides Americans from Europeans today: the use of military force in international affairs. Americans of both parties simply have more belief in the utility and even justice of military action than do most other peoples around the world. The German Marshall Fund commissions an annual poll that asks Europeans and Americans, among other things, whether they agree with the following statement: "Under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice." Europeans disagree, and by a 2 to 1 margin. But Americans overwhelmingly support the idea that war may be necessary to obtain justice. Even this year, with disapproval of the Iraq war high, 78 percent of American respondents agreed with the statement.

This broad bipartisan conviction is reflected in U.S. policies. Between 1989 and 2003, the United States engaged in significant military actions overseas on nine occasions under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II: Panama in 1989, Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995-96, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq three times -- 1991, 1998 and 2003, an average of one major military action every year and a half.

The reasons for this prolific use of military force have to do with the nation's history -- Americans have been fighting what they considered just and moral wars since the Revolution and the Civil War. And it has to do with Americans' relative power. It is no accident that the United States began to use force more frequently after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Those who imagine that the Iraq imbroglio may change this approach could be right, but the historical record suggests otherwise. Less than six years after the defeat in Vietnam, Americans were electing Reagan on a promise to restore American military power and engage in a concerted arms race with the Soviet Union.

Even today leading Democrats who oppose the Iraq war do not oppose the idea of war itself or its utility. They're not even denouncing a defense budget approaching $500 billion per year. While Europeans mostly reject the Bush administration's phrase "the war on terror," leading Democrats embrace it and accuse the administration of not pursuing it vigorously or intelligently enough. Nor do leading Democrats reject the premise of the United States as the world's "indispensable nation" -- a notion that most Europeans find offensive at best and dangerous at worst.

In this respect, there is even less debate over the general principles of American foreign policy than during the Vietnam era. In those days, opponents of the war insisted that not just President Richard Nixon was rotten but that the "system" was rotten. They did not just reject the Vietnam War, they rejected the whole containment strategy of Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, which, they rightly claimed, helped produce the intervention in the first place. They rejected the idea that the United States could be a benevolent force in the world.

Today Democrats insist that the United States will be such a force as soon as George W. Bush leaves office. Although they pretend they have a fundamental doctrinal dispute with the Bush administration, their recommendations are less far-reaching. They argue that the United States should generally try to be nicer, employ more "soft power" and be more effective when it employs "hard power." That may be good advice, but it hardly qualifies as an alternative doctrine.

Many around the world will thrill at the defeat of Republicans next week. They should enjoy the moment while they can. When the smoke clears, they will find themselves dealing with much the same America, with all its virtues and all its flaws.

(Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, writes a monthly column for The Post. He is the author of "Dangerous Nation," a history of American foreign policy.)


5. The Joke's Still On Us
Kerry Out
By DAVE LINDORFF/Counterpunch

There are so many things to say about the John Kerry gaffe, it's hard to know where to start.

Just the idea of President Bush's scolding Kerry and telling him that "words are important" is beyond belief. This, after all, is the guy who for five years has been warning Americans about various "nookular" threats facing us. A guy who has his every utterance scripted for him and yet still manages to screw up his lines with regularity. A guy who had to have a cueing device hidden in his ear canal during his debates with that selfsame Kerry, so he'd avoid just standing at the lectern and saying "duh" in response to questions.

But let's not stop there. Kerry himself was right in character. He clearly didn't write his own joke, and was too slow-witted to get the joke he was supposed to deliver, which reportedly was that if students didn't work and study hard might end up someday being ignorant incurious leaders like President Bush, and getting the country into another mess like Iraq. It wasn't much of a joke, but by bunging it up, Kerry revealed his Boston Brahman snobbishness, saying instead that if students didn't study hard, they'd end up in Iraq--the clear implication being that he thinks that the US troops fighting and dying in Iraq are there because they're uneducated.

Kerry, the candidate who voted for the war but opposes the war, who voted for funding for the war and voted against it, is now trying to say that the joke he told is not the joke that was written for him, but that's not going to work. He certainly should have understood instantly what he was saying when he said it, and realized how smarmy it was. What we're left with is the unavoidable conclusion that Kerry doesn't know anything about what he's saying when he says it. Like Bush, he's just reading a script, and like Bush, he's bungling it badly.

That said, Republicans should be taking no pleasure in this. While it's always fun to see a stuffed-shirt like Kerry get exposed and humiliated, the president is in no position to mock.

Besides, there is the reality that most of the men and women fighting and dying for the US in the deserts and urban jungles of Iraq and Afghanistan are there, not because they are stupid or intellectually lazy, as Kerry said, but because they were too poor to pay for their college or to have their parents pay for their college the way Bush's and Kerry's parents did for them. They're there because Bush and his Republican Congress have for six years slashed federal aid for higher education, driving students into ROTC programs, where they became easy pickings for Bush's wars upon graduation. They're also there because people like Bush and Kerry have conspired to encourage American firms to ship well-paying jobs overseas, leaving students with little but retail clerical work and waitering to help them pay their bills.

As for the active duty troops fighting alongside them, while some may just be patriotic kids from military families who wanted a little excitement, and some may be sadists with a passion for killing, torture and fancy weaponry, most are there because there were no other jobs available. They're not stupid, John. But neither are they happy to be there, George. They're there because both of you have betrayed them in the name of "globalization."

In the end, the joke's really on us, because ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we Americans have accepted uncritically the idea that our political leaders will be simply animated noisemakers for transmitting the carefully scripted "talking points," sound bites, polemics and yes, even jokes written for them by a backroom group of political strategists--all presented as though they were coming from the brains of the people doing the talking.

We get the government, and the politicians, we deserve.

Let's at least be thankful for the laughs they give us, inadvertently.

(Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal .His new book of CounterPunch columns titled " This Can't be Happening! " is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is " The Case for Impeachment ", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com)


6. ...Or You Get Stuck in Iraq -- by Bill C. Davis

John Kerry said:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Clearly Kerry's comment was directed toward a president who, according to the clumsy joke, did not study or do his homework and therefore became stuck in Iraq. But the comment evades the bigger truth. The war is not a result of miscalculation or lack of foresight or education, which does account for a good deal of what is wrong with the current state of affairs in American governance. But the perpetrators of the war knew what they were doing. This war is not an uneducated blunder. It's a crime.

Kerry did not insult the troops. He gave the wrong insult to Bush. The line was confusing only because the real truth is bigger and more grotesque and beyond that - there is nothing funny about being stuck in Iraq - no matter how one construes the "joke."

In fact, like a Rorshach test, the reaction to Kerry's mangled comment exposed the truth of what the White House most likely really feels about the troops. The people ready to pounce, John McCain included, heard what THEY must believe about the troops. Only people who go to nauseating lengths to say "the best and the brightest" each time they speak of the troops must have, just beneath the surface, the perception with which they are trying to slime Kerry.

Only those so careless as to put the fate of young soldiers into the sphere of Bush decision-making are the ones who disrespect the troops. Of course, Kerry was one of those who, with his vote, put the lives of the troops in jeapordy. His apology should be for the vote, not the comment.

Bush says Kerry should apologize to the troops who, as Bush says, "are plenty smart." Kerry says it is Bush who should aplogize to the troops for not planning properly - for not giving them the armor or weapons they needed - for not sending in enough troops. Still - not the point. He should apologize for the war. In fact, in a sane universe, Bush should be tried for the war.

But to say the war itself was misbegotten and criminal would invite the question - are you saying the soldiers who died, died for nothing? Are dying for nothing? The question is as impossible as the answer that one dreads giving.

Bush has all of us stuck in Iraq. And it's not because he didn't do his homework, or study hard, or make an effort to be smart. Kerry didn't insult the troops - he insulted the larger truth. We're not stuck in Iraq because Bush didn't apply himself in college. We're stuck for reasons that only Bush knows and that only Bush under oath should be forced to tell us.

(Bill C. Davis is a playwright. www.billcdavis.com)


7. What Happens If the Democrats Win (from Foreign Policy)

With just days before the U.S. Congressional elections, Washington is consumed with predictions that the Republicans are on their way out of power. What would a Democratic majority actually mean for U.S. foreign policy? FP asked Washington insiders, ex-politicians, and pundits to look beyond November 7.

Mark Halperin
Political director of ABC News and coauthor of The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008.
Forget partisan warfare matching that of 1993–2006. President Bush and Speaker Pelosi (and/or Majority Leader Reid) would recognize the need to work together or face two years of stalemate. Watch for an immigration deal, a bipartisan “peace with honor” Rose Garden announcement on Iraq, and a joint 41/42 (Bush/Clinton) presidential diplomatic mission to the Middle East.

Tom Daschle
Former Senate majority leader
Because of America’s ideology-driven foreign policy, our entreaties go unheard and redlines ignored. Adversaries like North Korea and Iran see us overstretched in Iraq, alienated from allies, and losing focus in Afghanistan. A new congress will ensure a return to results—and away from ideology—in U.S. foreign policy. Democrats will change course in Iraq, strengthen our tools in the war on terrorism, and reinvigorate our military and moral power.

Peter Brookes
Senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of A Devil’s Triangle: Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Rogue States.
If the Democrats take the majority, the concern is that their basic foreign policy thrust will be “ABB”—Anything But Bush. This approach may feel good after years in the minority, but it’s no basis for a foreign policy. Our country faces serious international challenges, many of which were in train long before 2001. With Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on the boil, the last thing we need is a bitterly partisan foreign policy—potentially leading to paralysis.

Marc Ambinder
Associate editor at the National Journal ’s Hotline
If Democrats regain control of the House, freshmen Democrats who are military veterans—maybe retired Adm. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois—will become policy generators for their party. Don’t expect McGovernites. Expect, instead, calls for a larger army, more special forces, more accountability in contracting, and a reordering of the relationship between the National Guard and the military. In the Senate, there may be a majority that views free trade agreements with decided skepticism. On North Korea, Democrats won’t abandon the six party talks, but it’s easy to see them pressuring the Bush administration about China’s role (with the crosswinds of trade and currency disputes) and even about Russia. Until the Democrats have a presidential nominee, they will speak with many voices. But they won’t lack for ideas.

Stephen M. Walt
Professor of international relations at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government
Congress has little direct influence over foreign policy, and any Democratic margin will be small. Would a Democratic congress cut off funding for the Iraq war? No. Oppose NATO expansion, green-light a new trade deal, or rethink U.S. commitments in the Middle East? Of course not. Will replacing Richard Lugar with Joe Biden and Henry Hyde with Tom Lantos as chairs of key congressional committees leave us in better hands? Hardly. And let’s not forget that the Patriot Act was renewed 89-10 in the Senate, and Bush’s torture legislation passed 253-168 in the House. So don’t expect a new foreign policy until 2009 (and probably not even then). At best, a Democratic congress will exercise its oversight role and fully investigate Bush’s blunders, so that we can learn from his mistakes. That will be a full-time job in itself.

Norman Ornstein
Resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Foreign policy will not undergo a seismic shift if the Democrats take one or both houses of congress. Two things will change: There will be lots of investigations, on Iraq, torture, intelligence failures, and so on; and there will be more congressional pushback on the unprecedented expansion of executive power—but in both of these areas, expect the president and vice president to push back even harder, leading to constitutional confrontations, tension, acrimony, and lots of vetoes.

Dan Gilgoff
Senior editor at U.S. News and World Report
Bad news from Iraq has created the opening for a Democratic House takeover, but the Democratic candidates who could make that happen are running in traditionally Republican districts in red states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. They’re mostly ambivalent about the Iraq war. They criticize Bush’s performance but oppose their own party’s call for a timetable for withdrawal. Far from foreign-policy revolutionaries, they’d need to burnish their national security credentials if elected, which could mean taking Bush-like stands on Iran and North Korea, and perhaps a moderate line on Iraq. After all, they’d be facing reelection in their conservative districts in the not-too-distant future.

Jeff Birnbaum
Washington Post columnist and contributor to Fox News
If Democrats take control of the House, the Senate, or both, expect oversight and investigative hearings—and not very friendly ones from President Bush’s standpoint—to pop up on issues ranging from Darfur to North Korea. Democrats will also push, with the help of some Republicans, to begin to remove our troops from Iraq, and it may happen. Partisan change would also signal public discontent with our policies there. Also, say goodbye to Don Rumsfeld.

Lawrence Korb
Senior fellow at the Center for American Progress
The most significant impact of the Democrats taking control of congress would be on the war in Iraq and arms control. The Democrats would require the administration to put forward a strategy for Iraq that has reasonable benchmarks, estimated costs and timeframes, as well as an action plan for completing the mission. The Senate would also take up the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as well as prohibit the weaponization of space and the development of new nuclear weapons.

Danielle Pletka
Vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute
Democratic control of one or both congressional chambers would mean little change in the reality of foreign policy. The party is unlikely to have sufficient control to drive through controversial ideas. Members would be further constrained by a Republican Executive that already holds much of the necessary authority to conduct foreign policy. But reality is not everything. If the Osama bin Ladens, Mahmoud Ahmadinejads, and Kim Jong Ils of this world already believe Washington is weak and divided, they will only be encouraged by a Chairman Murtha, who believes America is “more dangerous to world peace than Iran or North Korea,” an empowered Senator Kerry, who longs for an end to the focus on terror, and a Speaker Pelosi, who believes an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is the wisest course.

Thomas Mann
Senior follow at the Brookings Institution
A Democratic majority in both House and Senate, which now seems likely, would lead to much greater engagement by congress on a range of foreign-policy issues. Initially, this will take the form of hearings on Bush administration policies in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and the Middle East, and on the state of U.S. military forces, featuring current and former Republican political appointees and military officers and conducted with the cooperation of concerned Republican members. I don’t expect abrupt changes in policy or personnel forced by a Democratic congress but rather an open, deliberative process that may well persuade the president to change course.

Joshua Muravchik
Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
One of the noblest traditions in American politics is that partisanship stops at the water’s edge. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have done everything in their power to reverse that. What raises their dander is not jihadists but Republicans. Every new challenge or tragedy that our country faces is for them nothing but the occasion for yet another sound bite against George W. Bush. Rarely do they say what they would do different, settling for denouncing “Bush’s failed policies.” If these two become majority leaders, expect a lot of jockeying for position between the parties with an eye to 2008.

Clifford May
President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
During the Cold War, Democrats were regarded as weak on national security. From Lyndon Johnson’s departure from the White House in 1969 to Bill Clinton’s post-Cold War return there in 1992, a Democrat served as president for only four years—and that, thanks to a Republican scandal. Out of power, many Democrats have emphasized politics over policy. Should the Democrats take back congress, they will have a two-year window to put forward their serious and credible voices. Or they can play to the base and the blogs; that would be deleterious for both the party and the country. I’m optimistic—but cautiously so.