Last night President Bush, at a fundraiser in the suburbs of St. Louis, attacked Democrats for “waving the white flag of surrender” in Iraq, even though they haven’t. And he slammed media for exposing secret intelligence programs, even though they haven’t.

Peter Baker writes in today’s Washington Post:

Bush’s tone has turned tougher as he appears at more political events. At a Washington fundraiser this month, he said it was important that lawmakers “not wave the white flag of surrender” without asserting that any of them were actually doing so. In his appearance in this St. Louis suburb, he said directly that some Democrats want to surrender, adopting the more cutting approach of his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

(Bush was in Missouri to raise money for Senator James Talent, a reliable Bush sycophant, who is closely trailing his Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill. Talent has three times the campaign war chest that McCaskill has, Baker writes, so please send McCaskill a donation if you can.)

Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe that Bush is successfully changing the subject. Vennochi notes, first, that General Casey’s noble and sensible “withdrawal” plan is pretty much the same thing as the Democrats’ reckless and cowardly “cut and run” plan. Bush has downplayed this lack of distinction by saying troop presence would be “based upon conditions on the ground.” Which by now we all know means “based upon political expedience.”

But this week the White House seized upon the New York Times‘s story about the SWIFT program as their means for changing the subject. By stirring up unwarranted hysteria over the Times story, Bush is changing the subject of the nation’s political discourse away from Iraq (which is, um, not a happy place) to the preferred topics of terrorism and treason.

Bush condemned the report as “disgraceful,” administration officials piled on, and the political right joyously joined the chorus. Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, accused the Times of “treason.” The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times also reported on the financial tracking program, but most of the vitriol is aimed at The New York Times, whose parent company owns The Boston Globe. …

…Overreaching allowed the conservative news and talk show radio circuit to churn once again over what they label the left-leaning media. These patriots of the political right are constantly reminding us that US troops in Iraq are defending our liberty. Yet, they demonstrate amazing disdain for one critical piece of liberty those troops are defending — freedom of the press.

Overreaching also accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish. It turned attention away from Iraq and from Casey, his troop reduction plan and its conceptual parallel to the Democrats’ proposal.

Vennochi sites the Bryan Bender article on the actual non-secret status of the program.

At the Washington Post, Charles Babington and Michael Abramowitz echo Vennochi.

Senior administration officials say the president was outraged by articles in the New York Times and other newspapers about a surveillance program in which the U.S. government has tapped international banking records for information about terrorist financing. But his comments at a Republican fundraiser in a St. Louis suburb yesterday, combined with new moves by GOP congressional leaders, showed how both are working to fan public anger and reap gains from the controversy during a midterm election year in which polls show they are running against stiff headwinds. …

… Republican House leaders introduced a resolution yesterday condemning leakers and calling on the media and others to safeguard classified programs. … Republicans said the resolution will allow their members to register support for Bush’s anti-terrorism efforts and the anger that many feel toward news organizations. They said it also is designed to force House Democrats to stand with the media or Bush’s criticism of it — a choice many would prefer to avoid.

Democrats are drafting their own resolution but conceded the Republicans probably won’t let them vote on it. This is an example of why a Democratic majority in the House would be a good thing.

House Republicans are in full-tilt pander to the base mode. They’ve trotted out an “American values agenda” that’s a potpourri of every social wedge issue they could think of — guns, abortion, gay marriage, human cloning, flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, plus some tax cuts. Gotta have those tax cuts.

“Family, faith, patriotism and hard work bind us together as Americans. Our laws should reflect those priorities,” said Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Meanwhile, Democrats work on proposals to raise the minimum wage and a reform the Medicare prescription drug program designed to lower costs and close gaps in coverage, even though these items don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing as long as Republicans control Congress.

Now, if I were a Democratic political consultant I’d suggest that the Dems make an all-out effort to draw the distinction between them — serious about governing, working on real nuts-and-bolts issues like making Grandma’s prescription drugs a little more affordable instead of junk issues like flag burning and cloning, for pity’s sake. But that will be hard for the Dems to do, because too many of ’em are still voting with the bleeping Republicans. Arianna Huffington writes,

Yesterday’s Senate debate on flag desecration showed that Democrats are as clueless as ever about who they are and what they should stand for. Case in point, Hillary Clinton’s ongoing attempt to rebrand herself as a red state friendly DLC Dem by supporting a bill that would have criminalized flag desecration while still holding on to her liberal bona fides by voting against the Constitutional amendment banning it.

Are we all agreed that Senator Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee in 2008?

And it wasn’t just Hillary. Kerry, Biden, Boxer, Durbin, Kennedy, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Obama, and Shumer all also voted against the amendment but for the criminalization bill because, according to the Times, “Democrats who voted for the [bill] in effect bought themselves the right to claim that they had voted against flag desecration, potentially inoculating themselves against possible charges of lacking patriotism in a general election campaign.” In other words, they earned the right to declare that they actually voted against flag desecration before they voted “for” it (by voting no on the amendment). Yep, that’s exactly the kind of pragmatic thinking that “wins elections for Democrats”!

Naturally, Anne Kornblut at the New York Times turned this into a story about the “rift” in the Democratic party.

The divergent views of her position reflect a broader rift in the Democratic Party over whether the key to electoral success rests in winning over centrists or by drawing clear distinctions with Republicans by staking out unapologetically liberal positions.

I don’t think they’d have to stake out “unapologetically liberal positions”; I think they could make a distinction by staking out positions on real issues instead of phony ones. But they can’t do that if there’s no clear distinction to draw.

Zack Exley writes in The Huffington Post that the American people are being misunderestimated by both parties, and that people — even red state people — are ready to follow leaders who offer substance instead of sound bites.

It’s stating the obvious to say that Democrats have been triangulating themselves to death. However, I guarantee you that we will wind up doing it one more time if our candidates don’t make a quantum leap this cycle and present America with a big, credible, challenging way to save itself — on the environment, as well as other issues.

Of all recent presidential hopefuls, McCain does the best with that kind of rhetoric. “People want to work for something greater than themselves.” However, his free market dogma guarantees that he and all other Republicans of this era will always come up empty on specifics. And empty rhetoric doesn’t work in this area. People do yearn for something greater than themselves, but they are very good at sniffing out the difference between something worth real sacrifice and nice-sounding lines written by a Senate staffer.

I suspect Exley is right, although it’s hard for me to tell from here in New York what’s going on in the rest of America.

When I still lived in Missouri, for example, it seemed to me Missouri voters were more pragmatic than ideological. I remember back in the 1970s some “tax reform” interest group that was probably a front for something else got a referendum on the ballot that would have repealed sales taxes on food and drugs. This was about the same time that California voted in the infamous (and ruinous) Proposition 13 to cut property taxes, and “supply side” tax cut theories were the new new thing. But Missouri voters defeated the referendum by a wide margin, as I recall. They figured the reduction in revenue would either cause the state to go broke, or the state legislature would just raise taxes on something else. Leave well enough alone.

So, I think, even in the Rush Limbaugh Age there must be a lot of voters, even in red states, who are ready to listen to substantive ideas about how to make the government work again instead of fluff and nonsense about flag burning.

But in our current political culture, it would be just about impossible for those substantive ideas to ever reach the voters. As soon as any proposal comes out of a Democrat’s mouth, Republicans in Congress find a way to mock it, and then the entire VRWC echo chamber twists and spins the proposal to death, so that only a cartoon version of the proposal reaches the ears of voters. What happened to Rep. John Murtha’s redeployment proposal is a classic example. Thus, empty theatrics trump substance, time and time again.

Jonathan Alter has a plan.

Anyone who dares criticize President Bush’s Iraq policy is a “cut-and-run” Democrat. The White House’s object here is not to engage in a real debate about an exit strategy from Iraq; that would require acknowledging some complications, like the fact that Gen. George Casey, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, believes it’s time to start bringing some troops home. The object is instead to either get the Democrats tangled up in Kerryesque complexities on Iraq—or intimidate them into changing the subject to other, less-potent issues for fear of looking like unpatriotic pansies.

These are the stakes: if Rove can successfully con Democrats into ignoring Iraq and reciting their laundry list of other priorities, Republicans win. It’s shameful that the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in nine years and that thousands of ailing Americans will ultimately die because of Bush’s position on stem-cell research. But those issues won’t get the Congress back for Democrats. Iraq can.

I suspect he is right.

You would think it would be the GOP running away from the war. Instead, in gamblers’ parlance, Republicans “doubled down” on Iraq. After the good news about Zarqawi’s death, they bet that by uniting behind Bush, they would shift the blame to the squabbling Democrats, even though the Democrats have no power at all to change—or even affect—policy on the ground. Rove’s notion is that strong and wrong beats meek and weak.

Ah, yes. President Bush is always wrong, but he’s wrong with such resolve we’re supposed to admire him for it..

It almost worked. It looked recently as if Democrats were so fearful of being cast as war weenies that they would change the subject. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid & Co. held a press conference on the Democratic issues for the fall that barely mentioned Iraq. Hillary Clinton tried to focus on a lengthy list of worthy issues that, except for the mistreatment of veterans, had little to do with the war.

Yep, that’s our crew of spineless wonders in Washington. Yet Alter sees a ray of hope.

But then, some Senate Democrats got smart for a change. They recognized that the party out of the White House doesn’t need a detailed strategy for ending a war, just a general sense of direction. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, his plan wasn’t any more specific than “I will go to Korea.” When Richard Nixon was asked how he would end the Vietnam War in 1968, he said he had a “secret plan”—and got away with it. So now 80 percent of Senate Democrats are united behind something called the “Levin-Reed Amendment.” The details of it (begin withdrawal without a firm timetable for getting out completely; diplomacy with the Sunnis; purging the Iraqi military and police of bad guys) are less important than that they finally came up with something.

Of course parrying “cut and run” with “Levin-Reed” won’t suffice. But Sen. Joe Biden’s riposte to the GOP’s symbolic roll-call votes—”The Republicans are now totally united in a failed policy”—is a start. This isn’t rocket science. Unless things improve dramatically on the ground in Iraq, Democrats have a powerful argument: If you believe the Iraq war is a success, vote Republican. If you believe it is a failure, vote Democratic.

Dems, Alter says, should get up every morning, look themselves in the mirror, and say “It’s not about us. It’s about them.”

Go for it, Dems.

See also: Sidney Blumenthal, “House of Shame.”