Pelosi Travels to Syria; Candidates Release Fund-raising Numbers

RICH LOWRY: Well, it appears to be leading to a huge clash and a very high-profile, high-wire act on both side. It will be, in some senses, a replay of the government shutdown fight in '94 and '95, between the Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton, and it's just very hard to game out how exactly this is going to play out.

You know, there could be extraneous things happening during this crisis that affect the politics one way or the other. And that '94 and '95 period, it was Newt Gingrich's famous gaffe of exiting from the back of that plane he'd gone onto in Israel, and then complaining about it, which shifted around the whole politics of that shutdown fight.

So this is going to be a very volatile situation. It's a huge battle, and it's a big milestone that you have the majority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, now talking about actually cutting off the funding for the war if President Bush goes through with the veto, which would have been unimaginable three months ago. And it's just a sign of how far left the Democrats have gone on the war since the election.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, is one side or another -- we may not know who yet -- going to come out the clear winner, the clear loser of this?

MARK SHIELDS: No, we don't know. Just to clarify one point that Rich made, the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, has endorsed and co-sponsored the Feingold bill. And Russ Feingold calls for the orderly, safe redeployment of the American troops, that the president has to begin that.

There is constitutional authority for the Congress to end a mission, just as there is to begin a mission and declare a war or to end a war. Just Somalia, we did it in 1993. I mean, the Congress ruled that we would withdraw American troops from a failed and unpopular mission that lacked popular support.

We don't know where it's going to end, Judy. At some point, I still do believe that the solution lies with the Republicans.

And as you see somebody like John McCain struggle under the burden politically of his own identification with this war, I think that message is not going to be lost on other Republicans who know that popular support and opposition to that war is growing, popular support is eroding, popular opposition is growing, and that the appetite for the American people to continue it has diminished and diminishing daily.

RICH LOWRY: Well, it's a huge strain on the military and on the National Guard. There's no doubt about it.

And I think it will be judged a very severe historical mistake on the part of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that they didn't immediately start ramping up the size of the military in the wake of the attacks on September 11th.

It made no sense to have a military, you know, for the last five or six years that is essentially the same size of the military on September 10th, when we thought we were living in an era of unprecedented international peace.

And that's a mistake. And we've been paying the price for that, and these guys who have to go back for repeated tours are paying the price for it.

MARK SHIELDS: Rich is absolutely right. I would add that, in 2000, Dick Cheney and George Bush ran appearance after appearance before military audiences saying, "Help is on the way. Help is on the way."

This American military is about to be broken: We are talking about 90 percent of the National Guard units, according to an independent commission report last month, are unprepared, are unready for battle, in equipment and in training. They don't have the equipment to perform at home, let alone abroad.

We have, right now, a recruitment problem in the United States military. We have lowered the standards to the point we're taking people with drug problems, with criminal records, who aren't high school graduates. It's an enormous problem.

We're hemorrhaging manpower. And it is in large part because our Army is totally inadequate, because Don Rumsfeld and George Bush wanted to have this idea of a small, lean force that was totally inadequate to the mission they assigned it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Rich, just quickly, this is not having a bearing on the debate in Congress over deadlines and funding?

RICH LOWRY: The strain on the military?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes.

RICH LOWRY: I think it is at the margins. But let me go back to something that Mark said about the Republicans being key to this, from his perspective.

The thing that's been surprising to me is just how strong the Republicans in Congress have held. If you look at the votes, they've lost on the votes over the supplemental bill, it was just a handful. And, you know, given the conditions in Iraq, given what you're seeing in the polls, that's really an extraordinary thing.

Barack Obama just about as far ahead, raising a phenomenal amount of money, $25 million. He's right behind Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, McCain having difficulty. Has the presidential race reshuffled itself somehow as a result of this?

MARK SHIELDS: First, I think this is interesting, but it's not conclusive. And I just would caution my brothers and sisters on the press bus that, remember Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who out-raised everybody, broke all records, and never even made it to the New Hampshire primary.

So money is not determinant, and we shouldn't be declaring people winners or losers or in or out of the race.

That said, Barack Obama, two years in national politics, 100,000 contributors, $25 million, is truly remarkable, up against the Clintons, who have been collecting Christmas card lists of contributors since 1964, it seems, I mean, whether for the presidential library or the governor's race, whatever else, and it was quite impressive, as was Mitt Romney's on the Republican side.

John McCain, by way, broke the record, the record for giving in the first quarter of the year before, at $12.5 million and finished sixth and is somehow wounded.

JUDY WOODRUFF: He's sixth this year. How do you see these money reports, Rich?

RICH LOWRY: Well, I think Mitt Romney is the big winner in this sense: I think he had the most to lose without posting a big number, because he's had a terrible year. He's facing a potential existential threat to his candidacy looming on the sidelines in the form of Fred Thompson, who, if he gets in, will make it very hard for Romney to unite the right.

So it was very important for Romney to post that big number. He got a lot of good headlines out of it, and some early indications are maybe a bump in the polls, as well.

McCain, it just put an exclamation point to what we've known for a while now. He has lost his front-runner status in this race, and in a big way.

And on the Democratic side, you see Hillary, although she raised a lot of money and put up a good number herself, also is not quite the front-runner we all thought she was going to be, in fact, arguably not the front-runner anymore, if you define a front-runner as someone with an overwhelming advantage in the polls and establishment support and in the money. She doesn't have that anymore.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So he's saying some shuffling around of who the front-runner is?

MARK SHIELDS: I think, you know, perceptions are important, but I think John McCain has enough money. They all do. They have enough money to go forward from here. It isn't like somebody is going to have to close up their shop tomorrow, Judy.

And, you know, I think the reality is, with everything moving up to February 5th, and all those big states...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Of 2008, we should say.

MARK SHIELDS: ... of 2008, the primaries -- that, if anything, the early primaries of caucuses of Iowa, the primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada will be more determinant. They'll be even more influential in the outcome.