A Warning Repeated

Peter Brown, who is the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, has a bit of cautionary advice for the politicians in Washington playing politics with the troops in Iraq. He repeats something that Bill Clinton said in 2002 and warns that it is still pertinent.

Yet, Democrats marshaling opposition to Bush's plan might do well to consider the words of the former president, who is their smartest political strategist.

After the 2002 election, Clinton had an explanation for those who did not understand why Bush and the Republicans had picked up congressional seats. The GOP victories that year, in which national security was a big issue, were the exception to the historical record of the president's party usually losing seats in mid-term elections.

"When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right," Clinton said.

Simply put, Clinton was suggesting that just because voters think a Republican president has messed up this war, doesn't necessarily mean that they will vote for the other party to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

That is because the number one criterion Americans have in picking a president is that he (and it is not coincidental that until now it has been a he) be a "strong" leader.

Clinton's wife is the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. It is also not coincidental that until recently, Sen. Hillary Clinton had been less critical of the Bush policy than many of her Democratic colleagues in an effort to strengthen her national security bona fides.

But given the building pressure within her party, and the need to avoid alienating the activists who hold great sway in the nomination process, she too has been stepping up her criticism of the Bush policy.

I will repeat something I have said on several occasions. The electoral victory in November was not a mandate for the Democrats to lose a war. Brown's warning echoes that message. It would be a good idea for the politicians to think about that in the coming days.