L.A. Times:
As congressional Democrats move to force President Bush to veto a war spending bill that would start a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, they are simultaneously pursuing a carefully crafted offensive aimed at another target: Republican lawmakers.
In the charged debate over the war, the strategy aims to achieve Democratic objectives on both policy and political fronts, according to party leaders and aides.
Convinced that Bush will never listen to their calls to bring troops home, senior Democrats have concluded that they must force Republicans to vote again and again in defense of the unpopular war until enough plead with the president to change course.
But Democratic strategists also believe that repeated votes on the war will allow the party to expand its congressional majorities in next year's elections by continuing to link GOP lawmakers with the president and his war policies.
"It bewilders me why these Republicans have tied themselves so closely to this president…. God bless them," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
"Our goal is to keep giving them votes" on Iraq, said Emanuel, widely considered one of Capitol Hill's savviest political tacticians.
If the way to end this war is to reduce the GOP to a small group of kooks in DC, then the only moral thing to do is to reduce the GOP to a small group of kooks in DC. We'll see how this plays out in November 2008.
