Power Without a Plan

In an editorialSleep Walking into the Gathering Storm the Washington D.C. Examiner looks into the future of a Democrat Congress (or at least the keeper of the purse The House). It appears to be a future with no direction.

WASHINGTON - “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” — Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, May 13, 1940

Midterm elections are when voters decide whether they made the right choices last time. And except for 1994, when Newt Gingrich led Republicans to their present majority status, voters have been largely satisfied. Since WWII, the average midterm gain in the House of Representatives has been just 25 seats.

But something feels different this time. In the most expensive mid-term election in U.S. history, leading national Democrats are conspicuous by their silence on the defining issue of our era: the war on terrorism. Instead of laying out their plans in detail for voters to assess, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have in recent weeks stepped back into the shadows and watched as President Bush has endured blow after blow from the mainstream media and other precincts of America’s almost-uniformly liberal and Democrat elites. When they should be proclaiming at least one great idea, these critics offer only a corrosive “Blame America, Blame Bush” litany of bitterness.

The result is Americans know too little of what Democrats will do should Tuesday’s voting return them to majority status in either or both chambers of Congress. In making Bush the focus of the campaign, however, Reid, Pelosi and company still cannot avoid this stark fact: America is under attack here at home and abroad by Islamic facists who killed thousands of us on Sept. 11 and who intend the deaths of millions more of us in the future.

So what is the Democrat plan for figghting this war? Other than abandoning Iraq no one knows. Why? Well the Democrats are fractured on this issue. In fact the Democrats are not even unified on the "leave Iraq" question. Quite a few of them vote with the Republicans on the issue.

A win for the Democrats in the House could divide the party. Permananently.

This would be quite entertaining if the lives of so many people did not hang in the balance.