At TPMCafe, Ken Baer says that whatever the ins and outs of Syria policy, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was wrong to travel to Damascus because it threatens to erode the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy. But I don’t think this is a rational concern. Ken draws the analogy to Jimmy Carter’s semi-freelance diplomacy during the 1994 North Korea crisis. But these two cases are not remotely comparable — Carter went to try to negotiate a deal in the midst of a tense diplomatic stand-off that risked slipping into war. To discuss these cases in the same breath makes no sense.
The simple fact is that senior members of Congress routinely go on trips abroad to meet heads of state and government. When they are sufficiently senior, their trips inevitably have diplomatic dimensions in addition to fact-finding ones. To make a distinction between fact-finding and diplomacy in a case like this is to misunderstand not only how congressional delegations do operate but how they should operate.
More generally, this sort of event itself is actually quite common in US history — trips by members of Congress take on more visibility when the president is extremely weak or discredited at home, both of which are the case today. President Bush’s self-immolation (and not just self-) on the domestic and international stages is his doing, not Pelosi’s. And there is no need for the Speaker to modulate her activity to take his invalid status into account.
There seems to be a real effort to salvage the Pelosi ‘story’ from its maculate conception as a Republican talking point. But I’m afraid it cannot be done. At the core it’s pure bamboozlement.
