In the Christian Science Monitor today, John Hughes opines that there's much to be written yet on George W. Bush's legacy, including Iraq.

President Bush is embattled and his administration is adrift in the second-term doldrums. But three years is an eternity in politics and much can happen to change the landscape before Americans vote on his successor. Dominating all is Iraq and how it turns out. Saddam Hussein's villainy will probably be in the headlines again as his trial enters a new phase. There are intriguing hints about political overtures from some terrorist groups to the interim government. An election two weeks hence will determine the makeup of a new parliament. All these events could have a significant bearing on the future of Iraq.

Aside from Iraq, historians looking at the president's foreign policy record will decide how well he handled relations with Iran and North Korea in the last years of his term, as well as a possible regime change in Cuba, and a possible challenge from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. At home the president will take on significant problems like illegal immigration and Social Security reform.

So it is much too early to assess his legacy. But not too early for the possible successor candidates, both Democratic and Republican, to be dreaming dreams about moving into the White House. On the Democratic side, Sen. John Kerry is said to be mulling a second run for the presidency but is dogged by a reputation for indecisiveness and opportunism.

More than that, Ruben Navarrette notes today in his syndicated column, Democrats are bedeviled by double-talk on Iraq as '08 looms.

Democrats, especially those with presidential ambitions, think they're being so clever. They have devised a line of argument they believe will help them benefit politically from President Bush's troubles in Iraq.

But...the best they could dream up goes something like this: "We were hustled. Sure, we voted to authorize President Bush to use military force to invade Iraq, but we were misled. Not that we regret toppling Saddam Hussein. We only regret that we weren't given all the necessary information to make a more informed decision."

...Democrats lost the last two presidential elections, in part because they sent forth candidates who -- in their eagerness to get as many votes as possible from the left, right and center -- took both sides of every issue, flipped positions, parsed phrases, eschewed straight talk.

Now Democrats are getting ready to make similar mistakes in their attempts to politicize the Iraq war. The Clintons are setting the tone. While Sen. Hillary Clinton, D- N.Y., stakes out a "hawkish" pro-war position, former President Bill Clinton bad-mouths the administration's war effort. On the difficult question of whether we should stay the course in Iraq or pull out, Democrats have a ready answer: "Yes."

By working both sides of the street -- playing to both the anti-war base of the Democratic Party and those swing voters who still feel uneasy about the prospect of an immediate withdrawal -- Democrats run the risk of pleasing no one. They also stand a good chance of coming across as cravenly opportunistic, willing to say anything at anytime completely unencumbered by something as inconvenient as a set of core principles. None of this is likely to help Democrats as they inch toward the 2008 presidential election. At this point, their strategy for retaking the White House is simple: Hope that voters are, by then, so discontented with President Bush that they decide they don't want any more Republican administrations for a while and vote Democratic by default.

That's lazy politics. You bank on the opposition party messing up things so badly that you don't have to lift a finger to win. Trouble is, that strategy rarely works. If you don't have a countermeasure, a different view or an alternative policy, if all you do is criticize the other side while sending mixed messages as to what you really support, then you have nothing. And, in politics, those who offer nothing tend to lose out to those who offer something.

I'm not sure where he stands on Iraq, but I've got the dream presidential candidate for the Dems in '08: plain-talking Montana governor Brian Schweitzer. Hell, I might even vote for him. In the end, it's about character, honesty, and integrity.

TECHNORATI TAGS: DEMOCRATS, PRESIDENT, 2008, HILLARY CLINTON, JOHN KERRY, BRIAN SCHWEITZER, MONTANA, GEORGE W. BUSH, IRAQ

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 30, 2005 09:57 AM