Dan Rather

"If the president chooses to escalate the war, in his budget request, we want to see a distinction between what is there to support the troops who are there now."

In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to political division. Red states versus blue states; tick-tight presidential elections; narrow margins in the Senate — these all speak to a nation closely split on some of the major questions of our time. And now that President Bush has unveiled his new plan for Iraq, expect to see yet another fault line develop in our political landscape, between those who are running for president in 2008 and those who are not.

Last week, your reporter wrote about the challenge newly empowered congressional Democrats will face in balancing politics with the need for sober assessment of the president's proposals for Iraq. I also wrote the following about Democrats in Congress: "They might not be able to change or overrule the president's preferred course (except by the unlikely exercise of Congress' power of the purse, an option that various Democratic leaders have ruled out pre-emptively) ..."

That was the view from last week. Before the ink could dry on that sentence, though, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on CBS' Face the Nation, congressional purse strings in hand, to say, "If the president chooses to escalate the war, in his budget request, we want to see a distinction between what is there to support the troops who are there now." She drew a contrast between the House she now leads and the Republican Congress that, she said, had given the president a 'blank check' for Iraq.

Congressional power

Speaker Pelosi did take pains to say, on the issue of funding, that Democrats "will always support the troops who are there" already in Iraq. But whether or not the White House would or even could distinguish between war funding needed for troops already in Iraq and the additional troops that President Bush wants to send, it was interesting to see how certain Democrats reacted to Speaker Pelosi's assertion of congressional power.

There was, for example, this from Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, who has announced that he will run for president in 2008: "You can't go in like a Tinkertoy, and play around and say, 'You can't spend the money on this piece and this piece.'"

Democrats are quickly learning that the share of power their party gained from the 2006 midterm elections may be a mixed blessing as they try to gain the White House in 2008. While Sens. Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each jockey to become the new face of the Democrats, they are having to contend with the fact that the Democrats already have a new face — and it belongs to Speaker Pelosi. Increasingly, they will feel the pressure to either embrace the speaker's actions and words, or distance themselves from them.

Either way, there is a potential price to be paid. To throw their lot in with Pelosi means surrendering control of their individual messages; to draw distinctions between their views and Pelosi's might put at risk the agenda that Democrats rode to victory in 2006.

Only a couple of weeks in power in Congress, and already the Democrats look like a party caught between two elections. Their ability to navigate this tough terrain, while divining what voters want and trying to deliver it, might well determine the ultimate chances of whoever eventually emerges as the party's 2008 nominee.

And regarding the question of the moment, the Democrats' quandary may have been stated best by Sen. Obama, when he asked, "Do we have a scalpel, as opposed to a blunt instrument, to force the president's hand?" As the likely '08 candidate said, in answer to his own question, "We're going to have to figure that out as a Congress."