For Bush's New Direction, Cooperation Is The Challenge

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and an early advocate of the war, said Bush was wise to let Rumsfeld go, but he cautioned against reading into the decision any move by Bush to begin a withdrawal of U.S. forces. He said a hawkish shift in policy is just as likely as one that calls for the United States to begin to get out.

For there to be any chance at rebuilding public support, Kristol said, "Rumsfeld had to go. . . . For the sake of the war, he had to go. I don't interpret his going as a step toward withdrawal or redeployment," and he does not foresee Bush "looking for a way out."

Democrats said they expect to find many Republican allies on Capitol Hill in pushing Bush closer to their views.

"I know it sounds trite, but elections have profound consequence," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.). He said the president "would be absolutely not tone deaf but stone deaf" to ignore the meaning of Tuesday's elections, adding that Republicans "are not going to allow this president" to stick with the current policy.

Democrats have an agenda of issues other than the war that they will push at the beginning of the new Congress. The list includes raising the minimum wage, providing college-tuition assistance, letting the government negotiate with drug companies over prices for Medicare patients, and implementing the recommendations of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission.

But they recognize, as does the White House, that all those proposals pale in comparison to finding a solution to Iraq. Pelosi said yesterday that the election demonstrated the public's desire for a new direction, but she and other party leaders have been circumspect about exactly what that might entail, other than to begin withdrawing U.S. troops at some point.

Many of the party's newly elected House members campaigned on explicit platforms of withdrawing U.S. forces. Party leaders and prospective Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), will be under growing pressure to clarify their and the party's position in coming months.

Many Democrats now look to the Iraq commission chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) to find a solution that will satisfy both president and Democrats. Robert M. Gates, named yesterday as the next defense secretary, sits on that commission.

William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who served in the Clinton administration, said the experience of the Vietnam War should give Democrats a powerful incentive to cooperate with Republicans to develop a new policy. "This is a matter of great consequence," he said.

In the early 1970s, he said, Democrats ended up blamed for "ending an unpopular war in the wrong way. We paid a price for decades, and to some extent we're struggling against that legacy. The very worst thing we could do is repeat that mistake."