If you want to know the decrepit and immoral state of conventional wisdom in DC, check out Stuart Rothernberg's piece on the supplemental vote.  Rothenberg is part of the forecaster-consultant complex, bumping up races or downgrading them, thereby helping the party committees determine which seats are in play.  He has a well-known beef with Chris Bowers specifically and liberals in general, mocking Howard Dean and the idea of a 50 state strategy until the 2006 wave election occurred.  Rothenberg is not a Republican and he isn't particularly an ideologue right-winger, but he does believe in conservative ideas.  In that, he's a lot like Rahm Emanuel, Steny Hoyer, and Ken Salazar.  He's center-right, the ultimate Beltway pundit, bad at his job but good for the money centers.  So it shouldn't be a surprise to read his latest column on how terrifically Democratic centrists played the war vote, and how they will benefit tremendously from giving Bush another blank check.

Now that the dust has settled on the Congressional vote on the supplemental appropriations bill and on the ruckus that anti-war opponents of the bill kicked up, it's time to assess the political implications.

First, Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill played the issue like a Stradivarius. They forced a vote on a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, putting Republicans on record supporting the status quo and President Bush, but allowed a subsequent vote to "fund the troops." That gave their own Members from swing districts the opportunity to demonstrate their support for the military.

From a purely political point of view, Democrats had their cake and ate it too. Yes, the war is unpopular, and opposing it is a no-brainer. But the one thing Democrats need to avoid is looking like themselves during the 1970s and 1980s -- weak and unwilling to support America's men and women in uniform. Yes, they've spent the past few years speaking the right words on national security and the armed forces, but if they had refused to pass a spending bill, they would have at the very least opened themselves to attack from the GOP.

So, in ignoring the demands of the party's left, Congressional leaders have kept their party right where they want it -- against the war but also against terrorists and for the troops.

To truly understand how ignorant this is, just take a look at this pretty graph put together by the Washington Post last week.

The Democrats lost twelve points among independents and eighteen points among liberal Democrats, leading to an overall slide of ten points.  From a twenty four point lead in leadership over Bush in April, the Democrats now sit at parity with him.  If you are politically craven, this was a terrible move.  I don't actually think the Democrats who voted to fund the occupation are that craven; Mark Udall genuinely believes that people who opposed a blank check for Bush want to deny medical care to our troops.  And Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel genuinely want to defer to Bush on leadership and initiative in Washington.  They voted for what they wanted, and got it.  But as a political matter, and whether it was 'good' for Democrats as a whole, well, that's hardly a Stradivarius.

Rothenberg continues.

Why take a chance alienating swing voters when the party already made its point by sending the president a deadline bill that he vetoed?

Anti-war critics of the Democratic Congressional leadership have nowhere else to go, both now and in November 2008.

Liberal bloggers apparently are angry with Democratic Rep. Mark Udall's vote for the supplemental, but they'll support him in next year's open-seat Senate race in Colorado. Similarly, the 2008 Democratic nominee for president will be more appealing to anti-war liberals than the Republican nominee will be, so the Democratic Party risks very little, at least at this point, in disappointing its most ideological, confrontational element.

Why take a chance alienating swing voters, Rothenberg asks, completely oblivious to the fact that this vote cost Democrats ten points among independents.  We're already seeing rural voters turn against the occupation, and towards the Democrats.  It's bizarre that this guy is a forecaster, a nonpartisan political analyst, but it's also important to know that this is where the conventional wisdom comes from.  

Note also the contempt for the left, for people who want to end the occupation in Iraq.  Where are we going to go, if it's not for Mark Udall in Colorado or Hillary Clinton in 2008?  Well, I can say that this energy is going to translate either into primary challenges or into apathy, but it won't go into helping this party leadership much longer.  I'm going to encourage primaries as much as possible, because what they want is for us to go away.

I have to say that Udall's probably going to regret attacking progressives at a certain point.  I hear he's mad at us, which prompted his angry, irrational, and vicious response to our criticisms in the Denver Post.  That bipartisanship isn't going to work so well for his race for the Senate, as Zappatero helpfully points out.  Udall's going to have to run hard against Iraq, and essentially disavow this vote.  He's going to be questioned with 'well if you were against the war why did you vote to fund it?'  And his explanation, that he supports the troops by giving money to Bush, will sound a lot like John Kerry's 'I voted for the $87B before I voted against it'.  In fact, expect to see that clip used in GOP commercials.  Whatever Udall gives as an explanation won't work for anyone's vote except Stuart Rothenberg.

Democrats who are not named Udall, Emanuel, or Hoyer would do well to ignore people like Rothenberg in the future.  'Forecasters' like him are quite terrible at their job, give useless and counterproductive information that cherry-picks data to confirm a preconceived hypothesis, and generally encourage bad faith politics within the Democratic Party.  Oh, and let's leave aside the fact that occupying a foreign country like Iraq and killing thousands of people is against the ten commandments or something.  I mean, Stuart Rothenberg, Rahm Emanuel, Steny Hoyer, George Bush, and Mark Udall did.