That "pushback" might just be working

When the New York Times can't even be bothered to spin for the Dems on their problems with coming up with a coherent Iraq strategy, you know they're in trouble:

...with President Bush's popularity down, Democrats sense a good opportunity to pick up House and Senate seats next year. Although they take credit for injecting the idea of troop withdrawal in the debate, the idea of a quick pullout does not seem to be a winner with voters.

A new poll by The New York Times and CBS News finds that most Americans agreed there should be a timetable to withdraw troops. But 36 percent said that if their representative called for immediate withdrawal, they would be less inclined to vote to re-elect him in November. Twenty-one percent said such a request would make them more likely to vote for a candidate; 40 percent said it would have no effect.

Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group, said the rift over Iraq highlighted a long-running dilemma for Democrats, how to appear tough on national security while appealing to their antiwar base.

"Karl Rove couldn't have choreographed it any better," Mr. Wittmann said. "This is the dilemma that the Democrats see. Their base is inflamed against the war. The war is unpopular, and yet if they call for a precipitous withdrawal, they only play into the hands of the Republican Party, which wants to depict them as the party of retreat."

The article goes on to contrast Howard Dean's recent defeatism and Nancy Pelosi's support of the Murtha cut-and-run plan with a speech Joe Lieberman made on Tuesday, in which he made the rather sensible statement that "in matters of war we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

You can bet that went over reeeeeal well with some of the more, um, "reality-based" Dems:

...some of Mr. Lieberman's fellow Democrats were aghast.

"How dare he ask us to support the president of the United States who has literally bungled this war?" asked Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, who founded a group in the House called the Out of Iraq Caucus.

Hey, there's that good old "loyal" opposition for you. I mean, really, it's just beyond the pale to expect members of the party on the other side of the aisle to support the president of their own country during wartime. Tacky, if you asked me.

It's really a shame we didn't have Maxine's perspective during, say, the Battle of the Bulge, isn't it?

Meanwhile, back at West 43rd Street, we catch up with someone who apparently has an almost admirable disdain for the polls:

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Democrats did not need a unified message on the war. Mr. Emanuel said Democrats would earn credit with voters simply for jump-starting the debate.

Hmmmmm...sounds familiar.