Monday, Sept. 11, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.
As President Bush and Republican congressional leaders ratcheted up debate over national security this week as part of the November election strategy, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and other Democratic party leaders gave an unusual response: Bring it on.
After years of being labeled by the right as weak on national defense and from the left for failing to stand up to Republicans over the Iraq war and national security, Washington Democrats reacted aggressively this week.
On Thursday Reid and nine other Democratic senators introduced a 600-page bill, the Real Security Act of 2006. It includes what has become the Democratic mantra: fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, carry out the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, beef up security at ports and transportation systems, and begin to redeploy troops from Iraq by the end of the year.
"It was important to get this legislation together," Reid said in an interview after unveiling the bill. Bush, he said, wants to discuss politics. "We're interested in policy. I think the American people have seen this campaigner in chief too many years."
The new aggressiveness has been building, but solidified with several recent developments - polls show that most Americans now oppose the Iraq war, and Democrats heard as much in their home districts during Congress' August recess.
Plus, Bush administration officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, have begun characterizing war opponents as cowards. Secretary Rumsfeld has compared war critics to those who wanted to appease Nazi Germany in the 1930s, before the outbreak World War II.
Monday, even before Congress was back in session, Democrats had a letter waiting on Bush's desk demanding a phased redeployment of troops from Iraq by year's end. They unveiled a new report Tuesday outlining national security blunders under the Bush administration.
By close of business Wednesday Reid, as Senate minority leader, had orchestrated a nearly six-hour debate on the Senate floor over his amendment to fire Rumsfeld.
"Under Senator Reid's leadership, the Democrats have really decided to go on the offensive and they're not backing down," said Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.
Brazile said the type of coordinated response under way usually would occur only in presidential campaigns, not off-year elections. "Senator Reid has really forced Democrats to come up with their own plans, to come up with their own ideas."
Democrats have been badgered by Republicans in the past two congressional cycles - famously so in 2002, when Republicans successfully targeted Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee by deriding him as unpatriotic, and again in 2004 when they attacked the war record of another Vietnam veteran, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.
Democrats have grown to understand the Republican playbook from those losses, and so has Reid. He also has watched the situation in Iraq deteriorate this summer and public opinion turn against the war.
Democrats, however, may be playing with fire. Republicans have succeeded in portraying Democrats as soft on national security since the Vietnam War. Even the Democrats' own left wing and its friends in the blogosphere bash their party's inability to fight against the Bush administration's response to 9/11.
Polls show voters are giving Democrats better marks on national security than in the past, but whether that translates into votes on Nov. 7 isn't clear. Republicans could succeed in turning the arguments that Democrats have now clearly spelled out as hard evidence of weakness on national security.
Matt Bennett, a former Clinton administration official and founder of the Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank that issued the report this week critical of Republicans' security record, said Democrats could lose the debate.
Republicans, he said, "have just gotten this down to a science You fight with knife-fighters like that, you better bring a gun."
This week, Republicans have been attacking the Democratic moves at every turn. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has repeatedly derided the activities of Reid and the Democrats as "political stunts."
Frist called Reid's Rumsfeld amendment, which was killed on a procedural vote, "a laughable example of the Democrats' approach to foreign policy My colleagues aren't offering tangible solutions and concrete ideas - no, they're wasting our time."
Richard J. Stoll, a political scientist at Rice University who specializes in national security, said Democrats hardly stake out new ground on the issues.
"The underlying attitudes that shape these specific proposals are no different than what their attitudes were in the last election," he said. "I'm not sure if it sort of sways gigantic numbers of the public to their side."
But William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and longtime Democratic adviser who also helped on the Third Way report, said the party has more to lose if Reid and his team don't fight back. "They're doing it better," he said, "finally."
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