The recent efforts by the President to attack his critics try to spread the blame for the Iraq fiasco to all who voted for the resolution that gave Bush the power to go to war.
In responding to this attack, Democrats have too often been drawn into the details of whether they had the same intelligence as the White House, and whether their votes were actually qualified in their own minds somehow.
This approach plays directly into Bush's hands. He may never be able to shake the blame entirely but he can succeed, as he so often has in the past, in muddying the waters enough that the charges slither off his back and lose the force that they deserve with regular folks (not political junkies like us who are a minor portion of the voting public).
Democrats should take a different approach. Let's call it the "Buck-Stop" approach. It works for every kind of weasly dodge Bush might try to make. A couple of examples:
Bush Dodge: It was the intellegence community's fault.
Buck-Stop Response: You run the intellegence agencies, Mr. President. Be a man, like Harry Truman. The buck stops with the boss and that's YOU.
Bush Dodge: The Democrats supported the decision to go to war.
Buck-Stop Response: That was after your administration assured them that it was a "slam dunk" that we could be looking at a "mushroom" cloud. Your people said this, Mr. President. They had a responsibility to get this right and they were wrong. The buck stops with you.
Get the idea?
We need to worry less about getting back into the murk of how the votes went when this war started. That's their game.
Our game is to keep the focus squarely on the fact that rings most true to everyone: This is Bush's war and nobody else's.
The buck stops there.