Ever since it was released back in March, Darcy Burner’s
“Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq” has been gen-
erating an
impressive amount of national press coverage—especially for an
exit strategy put together by a Democratic congressional challenger
from the suburbs of Seattle whose power to help end the war is still
largely hypothetical.
In the past three months, discussion of the Burner plan has turned
up in the pages of the Washington Post, The Nation,
and The New Republic, and on MSNBC and the popular liberal
blog Huffington Post, among other places. Not bad for a politician who
was derided by opponents as a lightweight when she last tried to take
the 8th District’s congressional seat from Republican Dave Reichert in
2006.
The plan itself is certainly impressive, but the media attention is
coming largely because of the movement Burner’s 35-page document has
ignited among Democratic congressional contenders. So far, more than 55
Democrats running for Congress around the country have signed on to her
plan and wrapped it into their campaign platforms.
Burner, who is trying again this year to unseat Reichert, told me
recently that she developed the idea after becoming frustrated with the
lack of good answers to a simple question: How do we end the war in
Iraq?
“When it became clear to me that there wasn’t going to be an answer
forthcoming from Washington, D.C., I decided that I needed to do
everything I could to create an answer,” Burner said.
She got in touch with retired army major general Paul Eaton, who
served in Iraq and now lives here in Washington State, and he agreed to
work with her—”much to my surprise and delight,” Burner said.
Over coffees and breakfasts at Denny’s, the two hashed out their answer
to the question of how to end the war, and to the corollary question:
“How do we prevent a repeat of the mistakes we’ve made?”
Drawn directly from unpassed legislation and unheeded
recommendations, their proposals include: drawing down U.S. troop
levels in Iraq, refocusing on diplomacy and international alliances,
reasserting the authority of Congress to control war funding, restoring
habeas corpus for U.S. war prisoners, punishing war profiteering and
civilian contractor abuses, and weaning the U.S. off of Middle East
oil.
“We tried to build on the groundwork that had already been done,”
Burner told me. “The big problem that we have had is that we’ve never
had anybody look at this in terms of an answer to voters.”
Now Burner has an answer for voters and, perhaps more significantly,
a strong comeback to the inevitable questions about what she’s done in
the last two years to firm up her bona fides for serving in Congress.
It’s more than likely that Republicans will once again play the
experience card against Burner, a former Microsoft manager who had a
relatively short political résumé when she decided to
challenge Reichert in 2006. She came very close to beating him anyway,
but this time, with the “Responsible Plan” in hand, it seems likely
that the experience debate will play differently for Burner.
Imagine the campaign trail question: “Ms. Burner, what have you done
since your 2006 defeat to prepare yourself further for serving in
Congress?”
You don’t have to be a highly paid political consultant to imagine
the new answer: “I’ve been hard at work, with General Eaton, on a plan
that will end the war in Iraq in a responsible manner, bring our troops
home, and prevent this type of terrible strategic mistake from ever
happening again—which is more than I can say for my opponent, who
has spent his last two years defending Bush’s Iraq error and preventing
solutions to a terrible problem that has cost far too many American
lives.”
Smart politics. But here are the more difficult questions for Burner
to answer: With Democrats already controlling both the House and
Senate, why haven’t the ideas in her plan already been turned into
legislation? What does that say about her party and her feelings about
Democrats in D.C.? And why should voters expect a different result in
Congress two years after they installed a new Democratic majority
precisely because of their frustration with the Iraq issue?
Pinning her hopes on a Democratic president and an expanded
Democratic majority in Congress that includes her, Burner replied:
“Everything changes in January 2009.” 
