E Pluribus Unum

(cross posted at Daily Kos)

Let's stipulate that if the Democratic majority in Congress intends to introduce legislation to end the Iraq war in a meaningful, expeditious way, it will need to have 67 firm votes in the Senate and 290 firm votes in the House. That is the number of votes you need to be bullet-proof against any presidential veto.

Question: What kind of bill can get those numbers? Answer: We can only guess. But let's apply some political science to do a thought experiment and find some answers.

Look at the graph below:

Here's what the graph shows...

The vertical axis is the number of votes in the Senate; the horizontal axis is the content of the bill. Notice that the point on the left end of the horizontal axis represents the Feingold amendment; it got 29 votes. The right end of the horizontal axis represents the bill that Bush signed (and that everyone hated); it got 80 votes.

The good news? Somewhere between those two points is a bill, any bill, that might have gotten 67 votes without being a rubber-stamped blank check. The bad news? Congress is not a laboratory -- you can't move a slider switch left or right to calibrate the perfect bill.

That said, Jonathan Alter takes a crack at it:

I wish the Democrats had played tougher by including Rep. John Murtha's provision that any troops sent to Iraq would have to be better equipped. Bush privately promised to veto that, too, and they should have called his bluff. Vetoing a bill with no timelines, only a readiness requirement, might have been hard for the president, even if Murtha's amendment was, at bottom, a sly move to send fewer troops.

Fact is, with "67 + 290" votes in the bag, Bush can bluff til he's blue in the face.

P.S. Did the Dems fail on the first go round because, as Jane Hamsher put it, "the message machine is broken?" Maybe. Is our Iraq policy being determined, as Glenn Greenwald says, "by a complete myth?" Maybe.

Did we -- you and I -- fail to convince the public that de-funding the war would NOT put the troops in jeopardy? Yes. Or maybe it is an impossible task given the time we have to work with.

I do know that more than one liberal commentator (I'm talking to you, Keith Olbermann) used the Republicans' very language to make the Democratic case -- thereby flunking the task miserably:

[Y]ou, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don’t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.

Cute -- but ultimately not helpful, to say the least. Doesn't KO know that you never, never, NEVER use your opponent's language and frames to make your own case?

So shuffle the deck and deal again. But remember: it's all about the number of votes you can get for your bill. And you need to start with 67 in the Senate and 290 in the House.