Lieberman is taking the sort of "muscular" approach centrists like Marshall advocate. Adam Kovacevich, a Lieberman press aide, said the Connecticut senator has been absolutely consistent in his statements and his belief that "removing Saddam from power was and remains a good idea," and that "the world is a safer place with Saddam gone."

"There's no question about that," Kovacevich said. "The senator felt that Saddam Hussein posed a significant threat to our security, and without a doubt we're better off that he's gone. To the extent that President Bush is now squandering the fruits of our victory in postwar Iraq, that's why we need a new president."

The trick, of course, is convincing the voters. And for that, the candidates will need not just their own powers of persuasion but the help of their party as well. But with the Democrats so completely out of power in Washington, there's relatively little that the party's leaders can do to help launch a coordinated assault on Bush. With minority status in both the House and the Senate, Democrats can't control the agenda, can't launch meaningful investigations into Bush's misuse of intelligence or the outing of Valerie Plame, can't even demand meaningful compromise on Iraq-related legislation.

When Bush came back to Congress this fall with his request for $87 billion in funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats attempted to separate the reconstruction funds from the funds needed to support troops. Republicans refused. The Senate attempted to convert some of the reconstruction grants into loans. The House-Senate conferees struck the provision. Together with fellow Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy and Patrick Leahy, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd proposed an amendment that would have withheld some of the Iraq reconstruction funds Bush sought pending further approval of Congress -- approval that presumably would not come unless Bush could show that he was making serious efforts to internationalize the Iraq war and recovery. It didn't make it into the final bill.

Through Republican strong-arming and Democratic acquiescence, members of the House and Senate were left with a final vote on an all-or-nothing, support-the-troops-or-don't proposition. They supported the troops, leaving Bush free to proclaim that he has bipartisan support for his war. Bush got everything he wanted -- plus half a billion more. The Democrats got virtually nothing except political cover.

In Daschle's view, the loss wasn't for a lack of effort. "Daschle argued strenuously that the money for reconstruction was not structured correctly and that the administration doesn't have a plan for moving forward," said Ranit Schmelzer, communications director for the Democratic Senate leadership. But the reality, Schmelzer concedes, is that the Democrats "don't have the votes in the House or the Senate."

As a result, she said, Daschle had no choice but to support the package as it came out of the House-Senate conference. "He feels strongly that because our troops are there, we need to provide them the resources that they need," she said.

Defeated and probably a little embarrassed, the Democrats let the final version of the $87 billion package sail through the Senate on a voice vote Monday. Many Democratic senators weren't even there; only Byrd was heard to shout out a "No."

And even when the Democrats start to get some traction on Bush's foreign-policy failings, something always seems to get in the way. Over the last several weeks, the media has begun to report on the difficulties that the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission has faced in wrangling necessary documents out of the White House. The White House was beginning to look defensive, like Bush might be hiding the answers to those "what did he know and when did he know it questions" about pre-attack intelligence.

But just as those stories began to take hold, the Republicans fired back with one of their own. Somebody found -- or stole -- a memo in which a staffer for a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee talked about ways the Democrats could use the committee to underscore questions about Bush's misuse of prewar intelligence on Iraq. The memo was leaked to conservative commentator Sean Hannity, and within hours the Republicans were in full attack. Never mind that the memo had apparently never been distributed. The Democrats -- not the Republicans -- suddenly stood accused of playing political games with intelligence.

The Democrats were distracted and -- once again -- frustrated. "People in the country are concerned about the fact that maybe they didn't get the whole picture going into Iraq," explained a staffer for a senior Senate Democrat. "But now what we're hearing about is a manufactured issue, a smokescreen by the Republicans."

Since the days of Newt Gingrich, the Republicans have become skilled at getting the goods on the opposition party and then dishing them out to the O'Reillys and Limbaughs of the world. The Democrats have never been as good at the art, and they don't have the same kinds of friends in the media willing to go 24/7 with the Republicans' flaws. As former Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart told The Hill this summer, "the conservative right does a much better job of feeding the media beast facts and arguments that make their case."

The Democrats are trying to remedy that. Former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta has been working with other Democrats to create platforms and positions that make sense for Democrats -- and to open a new think tank, the American Majority Institute, that would help feed the press and the public a more steady diet of progressively oriented facts and views.

It remains to be seen whether voters -- or enough of them, anyway -- will be interested. If Sept. 11 brought the country together, events since then have torn it back apart. A "report" released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press shows Americans are more polarized along partisan lines than ever before. The Pew polling revealed that "political polarization is now as great as it was prior to the 1994 midterm elections that ended four decades of Democratic control in Congress." Worse still, the Republicans and Democrats among the electorate have become "more intense in their political beliefs" than they were then.

For Democrats who need to appeal to their party faithful, carve away at the president's poll numbers, and then put together a winning message in 2004, the polarization of the populace makes a difficult task even more daunting.

"There's been a ratchet toward the antiwar left in Iowa as a result of the Dean surge, but the good news is that a lot of the swing voters and moderates aren't paying attention yet," said the Progressive Policy Institute's Marshall. "But the candidates have got to be careful, because you can't say one thing now and then strike a diametrically opposed position next November."

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