Preliminarily, let me just say that the Fighting Dems effort kos, AAR, Seder, et al. have put together is an excellent idea, and will help us take back the house next year. It's important to present ourselves as a party with new perspectives, intent on breaking through the beltway cocoon. Our image in the 2006 campaign should reflect this, and the Fighting Dems are a huge asset in that respect. But we need to think through all of the challenges that we may face if we put novices in front of cameras, and essentially dare the mainstream media to point out and exaggerate their mistakes and lack of experience.
To that end, we should ask ourselves if the message that these candidates will articulate will coordinate with our larger critiques of the war, and think through any potential conflicts that could surface. And so, in pondering all of this, I thought about White Phosphorus. And the fact that Hackett's a Marine and was in Fallujah, and apparently the Marines were using a good deal of the stuff. Ashe is a Marine as well. Given the descriptions of their service, I doubt if they themselves were using much of it. But it's entirely possible that they saw it. Lentz and Murphy and any of the others also could have seen something.
My concern is that WP can be used to derail and distract these candidates when they offer critiques of the war. In fact, if I'm looking to trip Hackett, it's probably a good line of attack. His website says of Fallujah: "Religious fanatics and insurgents had seized the city. They had to be stopped. A civil government had to be restored." Also, some of the highest numbers of fatalities occurred in the attack on Fallujah. Given all of this, the questions that are obvious are : 1) "knowing that we used WP, and used it on civilians, are you still proud of what the Marines did in Fallujah? Are you convinced that your service benefitted America and the world, given that WP was used on civilians?" and 2) "If it violated our treaties to use WP, would you prefer that we had not used WP, even if that meant higher numbers of casualties in Fallujah and elsehwere in Iraq?" Its a bait to put each Fighting Dem between the horns of a dilemma--on the one hand, defending the use of WP and thereby angering the blogosphere and the Dem base, on the other creating swift-boating conditions: forcing them to attack the conduct of their fellow and fallen comrades in arms, followed directly by a nasty commercial featuring a mother of a dead soldier say how awful [insert Fighting Dem name here] is for disparing her son's service, and thus she supports [chickenhawk GOP opponent].
These are not deal-breakers or impossible quandries for any of these candidates. I'm not sure that it would even catch on as a mainstream meme to pester the Fighting Dems about this, unless somebody really botched an answer early on. The danger I see here is that all of them make such a strong, convincing case when they discuss the war, that it would distract and disrupt their momentum when discussing the war with the press. Hearing Lentz on Majority Report, I was blown away. He's clearly not a pro-politician, and generally seemed uneasy on-air. But get him talking about the war and he sounds like a leader, a man of vision with a strong moral core, who has seen these errors in person, can detail their many costs, and can provide common sense solutions. If I'm running against Lentz, I need to do whatever I can possibly do to get him distracted, and take away this strong point from him. So, in that sense, a surrogate asking questions about WP is perfect--at worst it's a diversion, and at best it undermines his authority on the war.
So the best antidote is to come up with simple 5, 15, and 25 second deflections, to keep the Fighting Dems on message. Here are a few I had working, (please offer your best efforts in the comments, since I'm sure they will be much better than mine):
No Cart before Horse, Ask Bush
"If you want to know where we went wrong, don't put the cart before the horse. Don't ask the soldier making a split second decision defending his fellow service people where he went wrong. Ask the guy who rushed into the war on false pretenses where he went wrong. Ask Bush."
The Bushies are the Screw-Ups
"I'm sorry that you reporters can't get a straight answer out of the White House. I know that must be frustrating. But you'll have to stay after them until you do get one. The soldiers in the field are not the people who screwed up and hurt our country. The people who rushed us to war on false pretenses are."
Blame Bush
"Neither I nor any other veteran of Iraq deserves to be blamed or interrogated about any of this. To blame the soldiers for the difficult positions that the White House has thrust on them is cruel, wrong, and undermines our military. The blame for these obvious errors lies with the DOD, Rumsfeld, the White House, and above all the Commander-in-Chief."
Blame Bush for the litany of errors
"On the battlefield, we inevitably face difficult choices with imperfect information. War is hell, and it's messy. This is why we must be careful about using military force as a last resort. But soldiers should not be blamed for making difficult choices when their lives, and the lives of their fellow service people are on the line. The administration should be blamed for rushing into a war with bad intelligence, imcompetently ignoring the post-war planning, and failing to train Iraqis to take over, which has kept our soldiers in harm's way for far longer than we expected when this conflict began."
The White House has harmed our reputation, undermined morale
"The U.S. military has a well-earned reputation as the best in the world. We are the greatest fighting force the planet has ever seen, and we are known around the world as a nation that historically deployed its force by means that are both brutally effective and in keeping with morality, human rights, and the rules of war. Unfortunately our reputation has suffered because of the policies of this administration. We have adopted the tactics of repressive regimes that torture, and detain indefinitely without judicial process or right to counsel, and use unconventional, chemical weaponry on civilians. This has clearly undermined the morale of both the troops and the American public, and understandably so. As human beings, we were all horrified by the pictures we saw from Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004, shocked when we heard about secret prisons all over the globe, and disgusted when we heard that civiliams had been burned alive by White Phosphorus. Though the administration has found scapegoats for some of these matters, the blame does not lie with the soldiers in the field. It lies with the administration that developed these policies, and sacrificed our military, democratic, and human rights traditions to their ideological and wrong-headed foreign policy."
My ideal scenario is that all these guys campaign together with all of their service mates--like 100 Iraq war vets all on stage nodding as the democratic candidates provide every excruciating detail of the war and their first hand accounts of the White House's awful policies. They do like 50 stops all over Ohio and each of their districts in the summer and fall. They would get a ton of national coverage, and would provide an excellent opportunity to nationalize '06, with outside-the-beltway, anti-establishment candidates as the face of the party. And they would give the Democrats credibility on the war and national security that the have been so lacking over the past 3 years. All the senate hopefuls can show up at the stops with the Fighting Dems and essentially say "what he said." Because it has the potential to do so many good things for us, this is possibly our greatest asset over the next 12 months, we have to protect it very carefully. So we need to head this one off at the pass.