Scaredy-cat politics.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION - The element of fear in politics and policy

THE IRAQI WAR eventually will end, as all wars do. Plainly put: Pres. Bush's current strategy will succeed or fail; either way, the draw-down of American troops will begin. The Democratic Party swept the 2006 congressional elections due to the unpopularity of the war and impatience with the Administration's conduct of it. Presidents who find themselves in an unresolved and protracted conflict pay the price or, more precisely, their party does. This happened to the Democrats during the Korean War in 1952 and the Vietnam War in 1968. In both cases, a Republican president halted the fighting. Nonetheless, the Democrats came back into office in 1960 and 1976. Republicans simply did not have much else to offer after they had squelched those unpopular conflicts.

There is a lesson in this for the 2008 presidential election. The Democrats will need to have more to offer than simple opposition to the war in Iraq. That worked in 2006, but there are no guarantees for 2008. Even this early in the presidential election season, there are hints of trouble for the Dems. Most of their potential centrist-moderate candidates have left the field--Mark Warner of Virginia, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Tom Vilsack of Iowa. The only centrist that remains, at least at this writing, is Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, and how long will he be able to compete against the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama juggernauts? The other major candidate, John Edwards of North Carolina, seems to be determined to let neither Clinton nor Obama outflank him on the left. Waiting in the wings is Oscar winner Al Gore, the current darling of Hollywood and hardly a centrist.

No candidate will receive the Democratic nomination that is unacceptable to the party's left-liberal base. On the Republican side, the two leading candidates, Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain, are moderate conservatives who do not go down-line with much of the Republican Party base. Nonetheless, their desire to win seems to trump their concern with ideological purity. Giuliani and McCain appeal to independent moderates, a group that defected in a drove to the Democrats in 2006. A poll by Franklin & Marshall College showed Giuliani beating all Democratic contenders by a comfortable margin in Pennsylvania. No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania since 1948.

Where does this leave the Democrats? They hardly are without hope or resources. While Obama may have been the flavor of the month, all three of the...