Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/campaigns-launch-holiday-ads-dems-assess-year-in-power Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript As presidential candidates grappled with shifting polls and new strategies for a condensed primary season, Democrats in Congress squared off with a unified Republican minority over spending priorities. Analysts Mark Shields and David Brooks examine the week in the news. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: Mark, Senator Reid says that the president's been playing political games with war funding. How do you read it? MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Well, I mean, the president has rediscovered the fiscal sanity portion of the Republican brain, having put it on the shelf for seven years.And I think we've learned a constitutional lesson this past year, and the Democrats came in after being out of power for 13 years. Senator Reid is brand-new as a majority leader, as is Speaker Pelosi. And it's a lot tougher trying to keep it together in the majority.And under a constitutional system, it's always easy to stop things than it is to pass them. And I think the president has played that card and played it strongly. JIM LEHRER: What about specifically, David, the issue that Senator Reid talked about, that the president wanted $196 billion for the war, Afghanistan and Iraq, ended up getting $70 billion, and that was OK. It seemed to be OK with everybody. Why was it suddenly OK with everybody? DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: Well, I think people just wanted to get it spent. There are actual reasons why you want to have some sort of stability. They wanted more. They didn't want to have so many votes over in the near term.But I actually thought the end of the Senate ended up a lot better than it could have. We could have seen some real conflicts on energy, on the AMT, the alternative minimum tax, and on Iraq. We saw a little bit of the parties coming together.I thought we could have seen a lot more of that earlier in the term, and especially on the subject of Iraq. The Republican unhappiness with Iraq policy back six, eight months ago was high. And I thought Senator Reid and Mitch McConnell could have actually done something a little more of a bipartisan nature at the time, and they didn't.I think the big change since then has been the surge. And the surge has changed the circumstance. And I'm not sure either party has really adapted to what the surge presents as far as opportunities go. JIM LEHRER: Senator McConnell said that on the program the other night, that what really changed the attitudes in the Senate, at least, on Iraq, among the Democrats, was the surge worked. Do you agree? MARK SHIELDS: Well, the surge has worked in this sense, Jim. JIM LEHRER: In a military way? MARK SHIELDS: It has reduced violence. And, therefore, it has reduced the saliency and the urgency of Iraq as an issue to the American voters.But I found it revealing that in the most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC poll unchanged where the judgment, the overwhelming majority judgment of Americans, that the war was a mistake to go into, and three out of five still want American troops out of there in one year.