Democrats could be split by Iraq issue

A former Green Party member and professional saxophone player says he plans to challenge Hillary Clinton for renomination to the Senate next year. The reason: her support of the war in Iraq.
Steven Greenfield's challenge is unlikely to succeed against the heavily financed New York senator. But it illustrates the growing pressure in the Democratic Party on leaders who backed the war and are trying to distance themselves from its unpopularity.
Another sign: Sen. Joseph Biden's declaration that, while he still backs the war and thinks it can succeed, he now feels it was a mistake to vote for the 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to attack Saddam Hussein.
"It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly," said the Delaware senator, who is exploring a 2008 presidential bid.
The bottom line is that, unless the United States succeeds in Iraq by 2008, anti-war sentiment could dominate the Democratic primaries and create a split that would damage the party's chances.
A similar division may mark the GOP race, though Republicans still back the war more than Democrats and independents do.
War vote
But it's a greater problem for Democrats, because several potential candidates voted for the war in 2002, including Clinton, Biden, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
Of the most-mentioned Democratic prospects, only Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin opposed the resolution authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq.
At the time, backing Bush seemed like a safe political course. The conventional wisdom was that the U.S.-led effort would succeed quickly, though polls showed that Democrats were split on the wisdom of attacking Iraq.
Now, a majority of the public -- and an overwhelming proportion of Democrats and independents -- thinks the war was a mistake. A recent Gallup poll showed 85 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independents felt that way, while 81 percent of Republicans said it was not.
This, in turn, has energized Democratic war critics such as David Sirota, a former congressional aide who has pressed for more-aggressive party positions.
In a recent posting on his "Sirotablog," he noted the country is far ahead of Democratic leaders in demanding an end to U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Citing a poll showing nearly two-thirds favored bringing U.S. troops home in the next year, he asked: "How, in light of these polling numbers, can anyone say with a straight face that supporting an exit strategy is 'not the right place politically to be?"'
Meanwhile, party leaders are toughening their rhetoric, though, among prospective White House aspirants, only Feingold has called for total U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2006.
Kerry, still dogged by his 2004 statement that he voted for war funding before he voted against it, called for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, starting after the Dec. 15 elections.
It sounded like a bid to get in front of the party's anti-war majority. But he continues to create confusion, most recently by switching sides in midvote to oppose a Senate resolution urging Bush to make 2006 a transition year and report regularly on its progress.
Middle ground
Other Democrats, like Biden, are trying to occupy a middle ground, critical of how the administration has run the war but refusing to join Feingold, Kerry and Rep. John Murtha in urging timetables for withdrawal.
Clinton said in a recent speech that an immediate withdrawal would be a "big mistake." But she added that the United States needs to tell Iraq, "We are not going to be there forever," and urged a plan to start withdrawals next year.
Efforts to chart a centrist course are reminiscent of what such top Democrats as Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie tried to do a generation ago in grappling with the Vietnam War.
However, their efforts in 1972 collapsed, as Democrats rallied behind Sen. George McGovern's anti-war position. The result: He won the nomination.
But the country saw an immediate withdrawal as an admission of defeat, so he lost the election.
X Carl P. Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.