Democrats stay focused on Iraq war

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - Democrats to President Bush: Nice try.

Leaders of the new majority made clear Tuesday that they would not allow Bush to use his annual speech to Congress Tuesday to change the subject from the troubled war in Iraq, even to pet Democratic issues such as the environment and health care.

Sen. Jim Webb, the Vietnam veteran who opposes the war and was tapped by leaders of his party to deliver a response, had a message for the troubled commander in chief: Bush and his Republican allies are no longer in charge of national policy, especially on Iraq.

"They don't have a plan," the freshman from Virginia, in office only 18 days, told reporters Tuesday. "What they have put on the table is more a tactical adjustment."

Democrats haven't agreed on a plan for Iraq either, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record) said the burden of finding a solution rests with the White House.

"The president is the commander in chief," said Reid, D-Nev. "We don't have the authority" to execute a plan for bringing American troops home from Iraq.

Their comments were part of the Democrats' effort to have the first, most frequent and last words on the president's annual address, which Bush will deliver in the most unfriendly congressional environment of his tenure.

In case that hadn't yet sunk in, Democrats launched a five-day series of speeches with an address Friday to the National Press Club titled, "The State of Our Union."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., even appropriated the key line in any president's annual speech.

"The state of our union is strong," she told the audience.

Every day since then, the Democrats have hammered home the message that achieving bipartisanship must be as much a part of Bush's agenda as proposals on the war, energy independence and health care.

"It will be clear to us whether he's ready to work cooperatively to do that or if he's saying, 'I'm the decider,'" said Pelosi, quoting Bush's famous retort on Iraq.

Seated in the gallery above the chamber will be a reminder of a key factor in the Republicans' loss of congressional control and the lone veto of Bush's presidency. Actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, will attend as a guest of Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., who is a quadriplegic, Langevin's spokeswoman said.

Both men have health problems that some scientists believe might someday be cured or treated by embryonic stem cell research. Bush last year vetoed a bill that would have allowed taxpayer money to speed up those studies, arguing that public funds should not be spent on research that destroys budding human life.

Fox then appeared in several campaign commercials for candidates that support the bill, sparking a controversy and helping tilt the election in the Democrats' favor. The House earlier this month passed the same bill by a margin far short of the two-thirds majority required to override a second veto.

As for Iraq, Webb said he's already dismissed Bush's plan for a short-term buildup of troops there.

"I don't particularly view this surge program as a change in strategy at all," said Webb, a Vietnam veteran.

"I don't see it as strategic, other than perhaps politically strategic," he said in a conference call Monday with reporters. "It's just a lot more flailing around rather than coming up with something specific that's going to end our involvement and bring better stability to the region."

Bush is expected to continue to argue that the current challenge is winning, and winning can't be done without his proposed increase of 21,500 troops in Iraq.

Democrats have been treading carefully around several traps in the run-up to Webb's official response, which he will deliver from the Capitol's paneled Mansfield Room. Party leaders gave him an outline of what it should include. "I pretty much decided to write it myself, but with the understanding that I am speaking for the Democratic Party," Webb said.

Whether to continue funding the war and Iraqi reconstruction is perhaps the most prickly question for Democrats.

Reid last week rejected the notion that Congress would withhold funds for the war in an effort to force Bush to end it. Pelosi's message was more nuanced. The war should not be "an obligation of the American people in perpetuity," she said on ABC's "Good Morning America" program last Friday.

She suggested Bush had political motives for the surge in troops, comments the White House called "poisonous."

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_on_go_co/state_of_union_democrats [link]