Dems Fail to Surrender Activists Not happy

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) abruptly reversed plans to compromise over Iraq legislation with Republicans after a meeting in New York where antiwar leaders pressured him to be more aggressive in ending the war.

The meeting on Monday, which was not publicly announced, showed the acute pressure that Democrats face as they try to convince this increasingly restive group that Democrats are doing everything they can to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq more quickly than President Bush wants.

Less than a day after Reid met with several leaders of the antiwar movement in New York, he and other Democratic leaders took a hard line against wooing wavering Republicans to their anti-war cause. “We haven’t found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president,” Reid said Tuesday.

Reid’s session in New York came as he and other congressional leaders were trying to maneuver between two conflicting political goals: Enlisting enough support from Republican lawmakers to force the Bush administration to change its strategy, without compromising so much that anti-war activists will complain of a sell-out.

At the meeting, Reid reportedly tried to explain his limitations and pleaded with anti-war leaders to keep their energies focused on Republicans, not Democrats.

The Reid mission reflected the paradox bedeviling the anti-war movement. It is powerful enough to command constant care-and-feeding by the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates and congressional leaders. But so far it has proven largely impotent in forcing policy changes. But Democrats are now starting to do more than just patronize the movement, as Reid indicated Tuesday.

If Reid stands firm to his Tuesday pledge, he may begin to satisfy an increasingly impatient anti-war movement. Five years after the congressional vote authorizing Bush's march to war, opponents still have had only mixed success in mobilizing a mass protest movement.

Impatience rising, some activists are urging that Democrats who are not aggressive enough in confronting Bush on Iraq themselves be challenged with primary opponents or third-party candidacies in 2008.

“People are feeling like we invested all this time and money in changing the political equation and where has it led us?” said former congressman Tom Andrews, leader of Win Without War, a member of the anti-war coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI).

Polls show majorities agree with anti-war leaders that the war was a mistake and that troops should come home soon.

But unlike during the Vietnam era, when the size and strength of street protests gradually grew over time, the Iraq war initially produced massive demonstrations that have since petered out. On Saturday, only about 20,000 gathered for what was billed a major peace march.

Despite millions spent and a season of action dubbed “Iraq Summer,” September arrived without the dam breaking Bush’s Republican support for a continued indefinite presence in Iraq.

That’s not how it was supposed to go