Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and John Dickerson take a stand

Should Democrats want to win the mid-term elections? Will the debate over torture and a scofflaw White House help Republicans?

According to the leading online opinion journal, maybe yes and maybe no, but definitely one or the other or another.

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg tackles the issue of whether or not Democrats should want to win control of one or both chambers of Congress in November, and whether or not a loss for Republicans would be a victory for conservatives. Political correspondent John Dickerson addresses the question of whether the Republican-Republican battle over how to pay lip service to the Geneva Conventions while enshrining the elimination of habeas rights for US prisoners held abroad, preserving the president’s god-given right to order people tortured if he feels like it and immunizing administration officials from liability for war crimes committed to date is good for Republicans.

Along the way, Weisberg takes a swipe at the evidently absurd notion that Howard Dean’s strategy for building an effective Democratic presence in every state will be good for the party’s long-term prospects.

One of the more infuriating tendencies of the press during the past five years in particular has been to accept the proffered narrative on an issue and then discuss the dynamics of the issue within the framework of that narrative. With the “debate” over torture, the narrative is maverick Republicans, led by John McCain, standing up to the White House in defense of all that’s good and holy. Rarely do mainstream institutional reporters and commentators break out of the narrative to say, “Of course up isn’t actually down, which places the details of any argument over this issue somewhere between meaningless and insane.”

Dickerson is operating solidly from within the “torture/anti-torture” narrative in his examination of the electoral impact McCain’s quarrel with the White House might have. His piece was published before the eventual Senate-White House “compromise” was announced, and his thrust was the politics of the alleged conflict rather than the content of the proposed McCain bill, but even with those caveats there are no good reasons why Dickerson could not have devoted a line or two to explain that what McCain and his cohort put forward was only slightly less inimical, in both the moral and legal sense, than the Bush proposal. The single question that could dispense with the notion that any actual good could come of this clash of Titans, regardless how the politics play out, doesn’t figure into the piece: how on earth do you compromise about torture?

(You can find a concise summary of what the Senate bill now allows in the way of torture here — you have to view an ad to read the article — and you can find a prediction that McCain & CO. would cave here, from a guy who should be writing for the national magazine of his choice.)

Dickerson eventually arrives at the conclusion that the McCain-Bush conflict will either help Republicans or prove politically revenue-neutral unless the back-and-forth stretches out over weeks, which we now know didn’t happen. He also accurately predicts a meeting of minds and mutual kissie-kissies from Bush and McCain.

Again, though, the question of who gains and who loses — and whether or not Republicans gain, it’s clear that Democrats, by not taking a stand in the quarrel, lose — is addressed within a context that can only be described as bizarre: how much torture, and how much freedom from responsibility for committing war crimes, should the beacon of the free world build into its legal code.

And even that question isn’t the end delimiter: the president is, as he has repeatedly said and as Tony Snow reiterated to BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer this morning, perfectly at ease with ignoring any provisions of whatever legislation he thinks impinge on his prerogative to do exactly as he damned well pleases. Stay tuned for the signing statement.

Here’s a sample of the kind of clarification Dickerson might have included in his story.

The McCain bill would insulate administration officials and other government employees from prosecution for war crimes, it would preserve the withholding of habeas rights from detainees in US prisons outside US soil, it would remove US adherence to the Geneva Conventions from court oversight, and the president has in any event repeatedly asserted the right to ignore the intent of any legislation dealing with national security. Regardless the political outcome, then, it’s likely that the legislation will erode the Geneva Conventions and that president Bush will cross his fingers when he signs it.

Weisberg’s effort is just a classic thumbsucker. In short: some (named) Republicans are distancing themselves from the administration and openly hoping for a mid-term train wreck in order to restore purity to the conservative movement. No Democrats, or at least none Weisberg names, are wondering if winning will put them in the position of being responsible for whatever atrocities the administration inflicts upon the country and the world during the next two years. Both camps — assuming the second camp exists — are wrong because “[b]oring though it may be to say, the real winner in the November election will be the winner.” (Unmentioned goes the fact that the disaffected Republicans backed the administration to the hilt for years, until well after the public opinion tide shifted.)

Thank you, Dr. Science. Were it not for the gratuitous snark directed at Dean, the story would be wholly unremarkable other than for its banality. Here’s the Dean comment.

There may be some buried urge for a strategic setback in Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean’s “50-state” theory, whereby the party invests its resources to build up long-term organizational strength in places it can’t win in 2006. Dean has been battling over this strategy with Rep. Rahm Emmanuel and Sen. Charles Schumer, who are leading Democratic efforts to reclaim the House and Senate, and who want the DNC to spend its money on get-out-the-vote efforts, the way the more rational Republican National Committee does. But in fairness to Dean, defeat is merely the likely outcome of his plan, not its actual object.

In other words, Democrats should take a short-term, top-down approach in every election from now until eternity rather than building, as those clever Republicans have done, a kick-ass locally-based national machine. No, let’s put that off until 2008. No, wait: we have to pump the money into Hilary’s campaign. 2010, then. No wait, we have to pump the money into mid-term races because of the mid-term slump effect. 2012, then: No wait: we have to pump the money into re-electing the Democratic president (or electing one because Democrats got their asses kicked in 2008). No, wait: no, wait: no, wait …

That’s a bit of wisdom torn straight from the Democratic Leadership Council playbook, which also advocates the Joe Lieberman approach to bipartisanship: “See the Republican. Be the Republican.” (You don’t hear it a lot these days, but Joe Lieberman has been a DLC poster boy for nigh on two decades now, and they’re still experiencing major separation anxiety.)

Weisberg limits his writers to a single-column length page. Sometimes that’s a shame, as when Fred Kaplan or Jack Shafer get on a roll and then pull up abruptly at 1,000 words. With Weisberg, it’s a page too much.