The problem for Democrats who still have room to maneuver on Iraq -- Dean, Braun, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton have been so strongly against the war that they can't credibly change now -- is that it's so hard to know where to go. Things could change on the ground in Iraq, as they did this week when two U.S. helicopters were shot down and more than 20 U.S. soldiers were killed. And things could change back home, as the polls suggest that they are beginning to do.

"It's just so hard to predict how this is going to turn out," said Blacker. "We don't know where we're going to be a month from now or two months from now or four months from now in Iraq. The numbers coming out now allegedly reflecting how the American people feel about these things -- the war, the casualties, the president's handling of the situation -- those numbers are pretty volatile and not clear. That provides these guys with next to no moorings in terms of how to position themselves."

That's not a problem for Howard Dean, of course. Before the war started, Dean lashed himself hard to an antiwar plank, and there's no letting go now. His clear message has energized the party's liberal base -- he leads in fundraising, leads in New Hampshire and is running neck-and-neck with Gephardt in Iowa.

Dean's campaign says the Democrats will never beat Bush by running Bush Lite. Taking a more centrist approach, the Democrats have lost the House, the Senate and the White House. In the last two months alone, the Democrats have lost three gubernatorial races. Dean's answer is to swing back to the Democrats' more liberal roots. In his stump speech, Dean sometimes envisions Karl Rove "rubbing his hands together and cackling" about the "liberal Birkenstock governor from Vermont who's going to run against us." But ultimately, Dean says, Democrats have to understand that "the way you beat George Bush is not to try to be like him."

For more centrist Democrats, the answer is equally as clear; it just happens to be the opposite one. In their eyes, a rabid antiwar, anti-Bush message spells disaster for the Democratic Party. Indeed, Will Marshall, whose centrist Progressive Policy Institute gave birth to many of the "New Democrat" ideas espoused by Bill Clinton, says that Dean's early success with an antiwar message is already threatening Democrats' chances in 2004. Marshall says the Democrats have to hope that their candidate in November is exactly the kind of candidate having such a hard time catching fire now: a Joe Lieberman, say, or a Dick Gephardt.

"Democrats are going to have to have a strong case about why they can be trusted to keep Americans safer," Marshall told Salon last week. "They've got to allay public doubts about facing down foreign enemies. And when it comes to using force and persevering through adversity, the obvious risk is that the public will get the impression that too many leading Democrats are calling for bugging out in Iraq."

None of the serious Democratic contenders is suggesting that the United States "bug out" of Iraq now. While criticism of Bush's handling of the war dominates the Democratic stage, Dean, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Lieberman and Clark have all put forth multi-point plans for internationalizing the war effort in order to lessen the risk to U.S. troops and the burden for U.S. taxpayers. With the exception of Clark's plan -- which he rolled out to decent press play this week -- the proposals are the stuff of policy papers buried deep on candidate Web sites, not front-page analyses in the New York Times.

For the campaigns, that's frustrating. "Gov. Dean announced his plan for postwar Iraq in April, and he expounded upon it in August," said Dean spokesman Jay Carson. "He's been talking about it since April. He's focused on the postwar world."

To some degree, it's just too early for the candidates to be heard. But there are other factors at play. The candidates' plans for internationalizing the war are generally vague and disconnected from reality; it's one thing to say that the United States should get the United Nations or NATO more involved, but it's another to explain how that might be done when the most likely U.S. allies have insisted -- repeatedly -- that they will not help.

Norm Kurz, communications director for Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said the candidates are having a hard time getting their Iraq plans across precisely because they are candidates. "As candidates, their views are considered to be somewhat politicized, and they're not given a fair and honest shake," said Kurz, whose boss stayed out of the Democrat race at least in part so he could remain a credible voice on foreign policy issues.

One way for a candidate to stand out would be to step back and look at the war on terror more broadly. The candidates thus far have been generally supportive of the war on terror while trying to carve out the Iraq front. Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, who teaches international relations at Boston University, says that may be the wrong approach. Democrats could be asking whether the right response to Sept. 11 was a war at all. Wouldn't it have been better to treat the attacks as the product of an international conspiracy, and then fight back through law enforcement?

If the Democrats focus on terrorism as an international conspiracy rather than as something to be fought by war, it would be harder for Bush to justify Iraq as the "central front" on the war on terror. Because there is no evidence that Iraq played any role in the Sept. 11 attacks, there's no reason to go after Iraq while chasing the international conspirators. Framing the issue that way, Bacevich said, the Democrats could make "the error of Iraq" appear "all that much greater."

Of course, there are ways the Democratic candidates could focus attention on postwar Iraq more clearly, too. On Thursday, Biden released a detailed proposal for Iraq that could bridge the gap between rhetoric and reality on both sides of the issue. It acknowledges the progress the United States has made in opening schools and hospitals and the like but explains that such progress is for naught if there isn't security to go along with it. Among other things, Biden calls on Bush to put more emphasis on securing ammunition dumps and to go to Europe, "call a summit, and ask -- ask -- for more help."

The Progressive Policy Institute has also put forward a serious counter-vision for the future of Iraq -- and for foreign policy more generally. Given its "third-way" origins, the PPI's "Progressive Internationalism" strategy not surprisingly aims between the "neo-imperial right and the non-interventionist left," arguing that Bush was right to invade Afghanistan and supporting the "goal" of removing Saddam Hussein but calling for much greater emphasis on the use of international organizations and coalitions.

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