As noted
here , six Senate Democrats (or five and Zell Miller) voted against an amendment that would require missile defense to have passed some basic operational tests before deployment.
Let's leave aside debate as to as to the desireability of the sytem (and assume that proponents of the system would want it to actually work). The fact is that the rush to deploy the system is POLITICAL. Bush made deployment before the elections a priority, so much so that many of the scheduled tests were pushed back until after deployment.
Why Democrats like Clinton and Lieberman (among others) would not only fail to take advantage of Bush's vulnerability on the issue, but would vote to allow him to get away with it is beyond me.
The missile defense budget for 04 is just over $9 billion dollars. Compare that with the paltry amounts for minor things like, say, port security and securing loose nuclear materials, and then compare the threats each address. For 2 years after September 11th, in fact, the Bush administration did not request port security funding, though Congress appropriated it anyway.
Will someone please explain to me how the Democrats can fail to reframe the security debate to their advantage so greivously?