Shane
Why Democrats Won’t Stop the War By David Sirota
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On the other side of the antiwar movement is a group of organizations and apparatchiks that have launched an operation called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) -- a coalition of mainly Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups, pooling cash and staff for "a major, multimillion dollar national campaign to oppose the president's 'surge' proposal to escalate the war in Iraq," as its website says.
Within the uprising against the war in Iraq, AAEI and its allies are the "professional" side of the antiwar effort. Consider them The Players.
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Washington's rules
Both the Protest Industry chanting on the Mall and The Players scheming in their downtown Washington offices are necessary parts of an effective antiwar uprising. The outraged rabble provides the boots on the ground that can pressure lawmakers in their local communities. And that popular ferment could be enhanced by a professional presence playing the Beltway's media game.
The crippling problem for The Players is the increasing difficulty of operating in Washington without being corrupted by it. As blogger Chris Bowers says, "In Washington, D.C., for those who run the government, the public is quite distant and faceless."
If the rules of Washington were written down, the first one would say: Anyone wishing to play its games has to sign up big-name political consultants who are perceived to have "influence." That buys you instant credibility with politicians and reporters there -- "those folks who write the stories, and appear on television and radio to talk about the state of play in Washington," as the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza says. "Like it or not, the opinions expressed by these people tend to set the parameters of the debate when an election year rolls around."
As a Washington pundit, Cillizza's analysis inflates his own importance. But as biased as he is -- and as much as his statement reeks of elitism -- inside the Beltway his self-aggrandizement is a religious doctrine that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This poses a problem for even the best-intentioned advocacy organizations in D.C. The same consultants they need to hire to play this Washington game and to influence these people who "set the parameters of the debate," are often simultaneously paid by the very politicians who should be in their crosshairs.
The result is that ideological organizations become fused to the partisan political structure they seek to pressure. Hot Pocket politics
Take the leadership of AAEI. The group is guided by Hildebrand Tewes, a consulting firm named for its original partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes -- both longtime Democratic Party operatives.
The firm is one of a new breed of companies that attempts to bring to uprising politics the ease of microwave TV dinners. Don't feel like making dinner? Throw a Hot Pocket into the microwave. Don't feel like doing the hard work of local organizing to build a sustaining, durable movement that lasts beyond the issue du jour? Put together a pile of money to hire a firm like Hildebrand Tewes and you can have your instant "uprising" -- one that provides about as much nutrition to your cause as microwaved junk food provides to your body.
While the firm is supposedly leading an independent antiwar uprising by pressuring politicians in both parties, about half its employees -- including the firm's two principals -- were staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the re-election arm of the same Democratic U.S. senators that the antiwar uprising now needs to pressure to end the war.
But the conflict of interest only starts there.
At the same time Hildebrand Tewes is working with AAEI, the firm is being paid by various Democratic politicians for its services -- Democratic politicians who have a vested interest in avoiding attacks from the antiwar uprising.
The consequences of such incestuous overlaps between party and uprising are best exemplified by Brad Woodhouse, the Hildebrand Tewes consultant leading AAEI. He came directly to Hildebrand Tewes after years as the DSCC's chief spokesperson and a mouthpiece for Democratic candidates. This supposed antiwar champion is the same guy who, as a campaign staffer, bragged to newspapers just before the Iraq invasion that the Democratic U.S. candidate he was working for, Erskine Bowles (N.C.), was more pro-war than the Republican candidate.
"No one has been stronger in this race [than Bowles] in supporting President Bush in the war on terror and his efforts to affect a regime change in Iraq," Woodhouse fulminated in the Charlotte Observer in September 2002.
Woodhouse is no anomaly. His history closely mimics how many war-supporting politicians suddenly changed their positions when the political winds shifted.
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), whose record on Iraq has been abysmal, has undergone an improbable transformation into an antiwar candidate. And former President Bill Clinton showed a special kind of retroactive courage when he declared last November that he had opposed the war "from the beginning." But it is the partisan conflicts of interest, not the hypocrisy, that pose the real problem.
You would think the central focus of any antiwar organization -- whether inside Washington or out -- would be on forcing Democrats to use their constitutional power to end the war to do just that: end the war. But you would be wrong.
Almost all of AAEI's "multimillion dollar national campaign" is being spent on TV ads or publicity stunts attacking pro-war Republican politicians up for reelection in 2008 -- people like Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), John Sununu (N.H.), Norm Coleman (Minn.) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the minority leader who Woodhouse spent years attacking at the DSCC.
These are Republicans who Democrats (and thus Democratic consulting firms like Hildebrand Tewes) want to defeat in order to retain control of the Senate, regardless of whether the war ends.
Relatively few AAEI resources, by contrast, will be spent on ads attacking Democratic House and Senate lawmakers who have either repeatedly provided the critical votes to continue the war indefinitely, or who have refused to use all of Congress's power to end the war.
Beyond its mission statement, AAEI does not even try to hide its partisan biases. In one classic display, Woodhouse used his AAEI position to defend Democrats when they refused to stop a war funding bill.
"We're disappointed the war drags on with no end in sight," he told Reuters in June of 2007, "but realize Democratic leaders can only accomplish what they have the votes for."
No mention of Democrats' ability to use their majority to vote down war spending bills or to stop any funding bills from moving forward so as to cut off money for the war.
If you believe this ultrapartisan allocation of resources has nothing to do with the fact that the people guiding the spending decisions are former employees of -- and are still being paid by -- Democratic politicians, then I'm sure George W. Bush has another war to sell you.
As antiwar Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) has said, the battle to end the war is "us versus them" -- not in terms of Republican versus Democrat, but in terms of the uprising versus the "Washington inside crowd that sets the parameters of this debate."
In February 2007, Feingold told reporters, "The Washington consultants -- especially those that were part of the previous Democratic administration -- come into a room with Democratic congressional leadership and tell them, 'Look, if you propose a timeline or you try to cut off the funding, the Republicans will tear you apart.' " But, Feingold continued, "The power structure in Washington [is] desperately trying to figure out how to explain why they made one of the biggest mistakes in the history of our country. And that's why you gotta go right at them."
But you can't "go right at them" if your uprising is led by a tightly knit consultant class that has dual loyalties and has been part of the problem from the outset.
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<http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3691/why_democrats_wont_stop_the_war/>