Who Has No Plan?

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

President Bush's foremost political liability going into the mid-term elections is that the American people aren't happy he took the nation to war in Iraq and don't believe he has a way out.

In other words, they think Bush made a mess and has no idea how to clean it up.

Now, in what may be the ultimate show of Karl Rovian chutzpah, Bush is righteously attacking Democrats for not having a plan to clean up the mess he himself made.

It's a classic Rove technique to attack his opponents' strengths from a position of weakness -- no matter how deficient his own candidate's position may be.

But in this case, the public seems to have already reached some pretty definite conclusions.

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll , only 26 percent of Americans think Bush has "developed a clear plan for dealing with the situation in Iraq." A resounding 69 percent don't believe he has a clear plan at all (not to mention a good one.)

And while Democrats have not united behind any one course of action in Iraq, the public does seem to have a pretty good idea about what they'll do if they take control of Congress.

Some 41 percent think Democrats will try to decrease the number of troops in Iraq, and another 40 percent think Democrats will try to remove all troops from Iraq. That's 81 percent in all who seem convinced that Democrats will try to reverse Bush's "stay the course" strategy, and start bringing the troops home.

(The rest is here.)