L. Sandy Maisel Sunday, March 11, 2007

Consider first the leadership problem facing Senate majority leader Harry Reid and speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Each is trying to find a position on the war in Iraq that can unite their party caucus. Only if each succeeds will they face the equally daunting task of finding a position on which senators and representatives agree.

Virtually all Democrats in the Congress agree that the war in Iraq is a serious problem and that President George Bush bears responsibility for the problem. And there the agreement ends.

Some Democrats want to begin withdrawing from Iraq now. Others want to rescind the 2002 resolution that gave the president the power to go into Iraq.

Nearly all feel that the president's 21,500 troop surge will not achieve its goal. Some want to deny him the funds for those troops. Others want to set restrictions on the troops he may send to Iraq. Still others want to suggest how the president should be restricted but say that he can send the troops in any case, just so long as he asks for a waiver and admits that he is sending ill-equipped or unrested troops on his own authority.

Pelosi and Reid will be judged on their ability to find common ground among these seemingly irreconcilable positions. But they must do so holding virtually no authority over the independently elected representatives and senators they have been chosen to lead. Reid could even lose his one-vote majority if Connecticut's Joe Lieberman takes umbrage with too strong a position and switches to the Republican party. The powers of the speaker and the Senate majority leader are largely persuasive. Those holding the two positions cannot impose sanctions on their charges; they cannot kick them out of the caucus. And while they might be able to threaten to withhold support for a recalcitrant member in a future election, few fear such retaliation.

So Pelosi and Reid muddle through, leading as best they can, struggling to find the elusive policy that can command a majority.

Compare their positions to that of President Bush. Generals do not support the position he favors; he fires the generals and replaces them with others who do. Congress objects to his proposal to send more troops into Baghdad; he says he will do so in any case. The states' governors ask him what will happen if the surge idea does not work; he and Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace reply that failure is not an option. End of conversation.

The Washington Post and ABC News expose the deplorable conditions in which the wounded from Iraq are treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center; the general in charge is fired and replaced by the man who oversaw the creation of those conditions. After his role is exposed, he too is relieved of duty. The president's reaction is to establish a bi-partisan task force to investigate how this came about. He is praised for swift action.

United States attorneys around the country do not prosecute those who the administration or Republican political leaders feel should be prosecuted -- or they prosecute too zealously those who GOP leaders feel should be given more slack -- and those U.S. attorneys are fired or forced to resign. The Attorney General says simply that he has lost faith in these particular U.S. attorneys. End of case.

The president has had the power to handle these situations correctly all along. That is the nature of executive power, why it is fundamentally different from the power of legislative leaders.

Political ethicist Dennis Thompson talks about the need to affix moral responsibility in a democracy, even in situations when it is not clear who is directly responsible for an action. By Thompson's analysis, Pelosi and Reid escape moral responsibility, because they do not have the power to cause a different result.

President Bush, on the other hand, is responsible for not having a Plan B in Iraq, for not assuring that our troops who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated with the utmost care, for fostering the partisan political climate that led to misuse of power in the Department of Justice.

He did not cause these problems, but he could and should have prevented them and bears the ultimate moral responsibility for each of these situations.

L. Sandy Maisel is director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College.