If it's the winter of Republican discontent, it must be the autumn of Democratic haymaking. With the recent indictment of former vice-presidential aide "Scooter" Libby and nearly 60 percent of respondents in a recent national poll saying they believed the White House misled the country in the run-up to the Iraq war, Democrats are poised to pounce, if recent reports from Capitol Hill are any indication.
And you can thank the Man from Searchlight for it. Democrats selected Harry Reid as Senate Minority Leader after last fall's third consecutive ground-losing election cycle. "As the Senate runs headlong into another campaign year, that decision appears to have paid off for Democrats," reports National Journal's online news service, CongressDaily. "In close to a year as his party's leader, Reid has transformed the Caucus into an organized opposition party."
Reid has done this, apparently, both by tightening grip and loosening reins. While giving his colleagues room to differ with him on some issues, and thus earning their loyalty, he has consolidated message-setting in his office, ending the practice of developing party positions by committees and task forces, according to the recent CongressDaily report. Perhaps most important, the "war room" he set up in his office to compete more effectively with the GOP's finely tuned communications machine has seen a year of successes. CongressDaily attributes to other senators' aides the conclusion that "Chief of Staff Susan McCue and Communications Director Jim Manley have used his 'war room' of press secretaries, speech writers and Internet political operatives quite effectively."
Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen points to the White House's failed Social Security overhaul as an example of the successes coordinated in part by the "war room," known formally as the Democratic Senate Communications Center. "The president's proposal wound up going nowhere," says Hafen.
Although the Republican threat to invoke the so-called "nuclear option" to end Democratic filibusters in the Senate was blunted by an a bipartisan agreement brokered by moderates, Hafen says the DSCC helped muster public sentiment against the GOP initiative. An April report in the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill bears out Hafen's assertion. After top Senate Republicans met to discuss the DSCC's apparent success in marshaling public opinion on the filibuster issue, an aide told The Hill: "I think there's a realization that this particular [Democratic] effort has to be countered and they're in full-scale attack mode ... I think that people know that we've got a serious problem here."
Reid hired Manley from Sen. Edward Kennedy's staff to head the "war room" last December. Stephanie Cutter, formerly with Sen. John Kerry's campaign, joined in the spring "to coordinate outside liberal groups and Senate Democratic policy and communications staff in the fight over the nuclear option," according to The Hill.
The DSCC's eight-person operation is part of Reid's office and is paid for through his office budget. Hafen said it has "no separate set-aside budget" and added, "We don't release [office] budget numbers."
Despite being in the Minority Leader's office, the DSCC "is designed to be a resource for the entire Democratic Caucus." Every day, it distributes "talking points" to the 45 Senate Democrats on the issues du jour, from Iraq policy to Supreme Court appointments. It gets the message out to progressive media outlets and bloggers, too.
When Reid invoked Rule 21 two weeks ago to close the Senate and draw attention to its stalled investigation of prewar intelligence, he effectively blunted Republican attempts to divert attention from criticism of the war, said Hafen. The "war room" played its part by helping to counter Republican charges that his move was a "stunt."
Modeled somewhat on the Clinton campaign "war room" of 1992, the DSCC is the first effort of its kind lodged in a Senate office. Republicans have criticized it as a tax-funded partisan operation but, as Hafen noted, "They have the White House."