The Dems must satisfy their base without alienating the rest of the country. Russ Feingold’s censure bid isn’t the smartest way to do that.

Eleanor Clift in Newweek writes:

Republicans finally had something to celebrate this week when Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called for censuring George W. Bush. Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft. It’s brilliant strategy for him, a dark horse presidential candidate carving out a niche to the left of Hillary Clinton. The junior senator from New York is under attack for being too soft on Bush and the war, and most of the non-Hillarys are to her right. There is a vacuum in the heart of the party’s base that Feingold fills, but at what cost? His censure proposal looks like a stunt, “the equivalent of calling for a filibuster from Davos,” says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. To win in ’06, he says, “Democrats need to take the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.”

Just as John Kerry’s belated effort to stop Judge Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court failed to rally his fellow Democrats, Feingold’s move toward censure has been received like a foul odor, sending Democrats scurrying for the exits. Only two of his colleagues, Iowa’s Tom Harkin and California’s Barbara Boxer, signed on as cosponsors. And for good reason. The broader public sees it as political extremism. Just when the Republicans looked like they were coming unhinged, the Democrats serve up a refresher course on why they can’t be trusted with the keys to the country. Nor could it have come at a better time for a Republican Party still battered by bad news in the polls. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC survey, released earlier this week, shows that Bush’s job approval rating at its lowest ever—37 percent—as a majority of Americans lose confidence that the Iraq war will end successfully. The same poll shows a significant uptick in the country’s willingness to accept a Democratic Congress, with 50 percent of those questioned saying they would prefer the party to control Congress. Thirty-seven percent say they want it controlled by Republicans.

The Democrats’ dilemma is how to satisfy a restive and angry base without losing the rest of the country. “If someone proposed stringing up Bush like they did Mussolini, that would have a lot of support in the base of the party, too,” says a Democratic strategist. “But it’s not smart.” Democrats want the November election to be a plebiscite on Bush’s job performance, not a personal vendetta. “Republicans will rally round him if they think it’s a personal attack just like we did with Clinton,” warns the strategist.

Feingold has a reputation for being a principled politician who often takes positions at odds with his party. He didn’t give Senate leader Harry Reid a heads-up about his censure motion, and Democrats were caught off-guard. What the country saw wasn’t pretty, Democrats dodging and weaving and Republicans loving the whole sorry spectacle. With everything souring for the Republicans, the only thing that can rescue them is a foil, and Feingold’s call for censure offered that, at least for now. Conservative radio hosts were raising the specter of impeachment should the Democrats take over the House in November, a call to arms for the otherwise demoralized GOP base.

The joy among Republicans could only be matched in the blogosphere, where liberal Democrats cheered Feingold—a synergy that prompted the DLC's Wittmann to speculate that the right and left are codependent. But the political mixing and matching provide only a brief respite from the real politics that will determine each party’s fortunes in November. Congressional insiders say if the election were held today, the Democrats would capture 18 to 23 seats in the House. They need 15 to regain the majority. Things could get better by November, or worse, depending on your perspective.

There is talk of a possible October surprise to revive the GOP’s standing, and the fact that the biggest military air assault in Iraq since the war began came the day after Bush sank to 33 percent in a Pew poll had some Democrats suspicious. “Is it an attempt to prop up his numbers?” asks the Democratic strategist. “It’s probably not fair to think that, but it shows where we are in this presidency.”

With the war about to enter its fourth year, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, held a seminar on “Next Steps for U.S. Policy” that featured a keynote address by former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. “I favor a decision by the U.S. to leave Iraq,” Brzezinski declared. “I would ask the Iraqi leaders to ask us to leave,” he explained, adding he would talk with them first privately and “treat them as adults, not colonial wards.” He sees two parallel wars in Iraq, one is the insurgency, which is consolidating and widening, and the other is the growing sectarian violence. “We are engaged in a war of attrition,” he said, and unless the Bush administration puts in 500,000 troops—the number it would take to crush the opposition—U.S. policymakers need to make “a very cold judgment whether staying the course is likely to be more or less damaging to U.S. interests.”

Brzezinski, a hawk during the Carter administration, has emerged as a hero among progressives frustrated by their party’s unwillingness to take a stand. Democrats have been “silent or evasive” on the war, he said, offering no alternative, which is “a form of political desertion.” If Democrats don’t want to talk about censure, they could change the topic in an instant with a credible exit plan from Iraq.