E&P: You'd never know it...the public favors withdrawals...

Polls, Pundits and Pols

You'd never know it from some of the reporting and bloviating on the debate over an Iraq withdrawal, but all major polls show that the public favors withdrawals, with strong support for a timeline or total pullout within a year.

By Greg Mitchell

(June 22, 2006) -- The new efforts by Republicans in Congress, and in the media, to use Iraq to their advantage by branding Democrats as favoring a "cut-and-run'" policy, has received wide coverage in the past week. Often pundits, and even reporters, have suggested that this is working, because Americans are not in favor of a "hasty" withdrawal. Democrats are in shambles, they report, as they fear that proposals for setting a timetable for withdrawal put forward by Sen. John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha will prove disastrous for the party in the November elections, due to the alleged unpopularity of this stance.

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It's one thing when polls are dismissed, ignored or twisted by political or media spinmeisters. But when journalists in their news stories do it, it is downright misleading.

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They produced a front-pager on the Republicans' unexpected confidence on this issue, and declared: "Some polls show a majority of Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake, and pollsters say independent voters are particularly open to the idea of setting some sort of timetable for withdrawal, the very policy Democrats have embraced and Republicans are now fighting."

The fact is, not "some" polls, but virtually every major poll shows that American have long declared that going to war against Iraq was a mistake.

And far more than "independent voters" are drawn to withdrawal. Every major poll reveals that a majority of Americans advocate withdrawals from Iraq, with large numbers wanting this to be quite speedy, and most wanting a full pullout in a year or so (Kerry's idea) or by the end of next year.

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http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002726568&imw=Y

Stephen Schlesinger
06.22.2006

Karl Rove's Biggest Mistake

The guru of the Republican Party, Karl Rove, fresh from skirting an indictment in the Valerie Plame case, has manically plunged back into the political game again. He is up to executing one of his oldest tricks -- using his venerable playbook of turning a weakness into a plus. Somehow he has convinced the entire Republican Party that the Iraq war is a winner in the 2006 Congressional elections, not a loser.

This I gotta see. With polling data showing for months that the American people oppose the war, Karl Rove is going to apparently single-handedly make "cut and run" into the slogan that defeats the Democrats this Fall? This is up there with his Social Security crusade that turned out to be such a great success last year. Let's hear Rove convince the parents of the two US soldiers who were tortured and killed earlier this week or the relatives of the four American soldiers slain yesterday in Iraq -- or the American public which has watched this repeated mayhem for months now -- that the Bush plan to stay indefinitely in Iraq is the answer to this forlorn, mistaken war. Sacrificing more American troops simply to uphold Bush's honor no longer computes in a conflict that now has lasted (since 9/11) longer than the American involvement in the entire second World War.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schlesinger/karl-roves-biggest-mista_b_23550.html