Trying to Catch Up with the Voters

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch

"Both Democratic and Republican politicians are becoming uncomfortably aware that they may have seriously miscalculated just how unpopular the war in Iraq is with a very large number of American voters. And the implosion of the Republican Party--battered by one tempest after another--is getting to be bad as it was in 1932 or 1964. Of course the political system will adapt. Already the National Review's Bruce Bartlett is writing that the party's candidate for the presidency is doomed in 2008 and prudent Republicans should rally behind Hillary Clinton.......

Today the McCain bandwagon is axle deep in news stories freighted with grim talk about his "doomed bid". Mockery greeted his carefully planned photo-op last month in a Baghdad market, where ­- wearing body armor and amid a huge armed escort -- he proclaimed that at last the tide was turning and the US press was ignoring the good news from Iraq. After that debacle, remembering the success of his jaunty call for bombing of Serbia in the mid-90s, "Lights out in Belgrade!" McCain then tried out a Beach Boy-type jingle, "Bomb, bomb Iran" which did him no good either......

So the Democrats are edgy too, though not quite so much as McCain, whose only option is to turn on a dime and come out against the war at the end of the summer. What the Democrats fear is that a very significant number of voters are in a testy mood, ready to punish anyone--Democrat as well as Republican--who doesn't have a clear, simple plan to bring the troops back home. So now they are openly conceding they misunderstood the public mood. But they are also aware that if they seriously tilt towards Gravel's position about the insanity these overseas interventions they will be savaged by the political establishment on every talk show and every piece of political analysis in the mainstream press. So they are caught between the public mood and the imperial imperative and the latter will prevail in their calculations and thus--absent a prodigious orgy of doublespeak -alienate their political base......"