A Democratic hack friend of mine thinks GOP Senate candidate Mike McGavick should come out against the Iraq war, saying it would be a brilliant political move. However, McGavick seems to have a better idea: Criticize the Senate’s role in U.S. military policy, but not U.S. military policy itself.

In an article published earlier this week in Vancouver, WA’s daily, The Columbian, McGavick exploits incumbent D Senator Maria Cantwell’s hazy position on the war. Meeting w/ the Columbian’s edit board, McGavick questioned Congress for giving Bush a blank check. His criticism is obviously a dig at Sen. Cantwell…

But cleverly enough…he frames the issue not as an anti-Iraq-war position, but as a process issue that, de facto, casts Cantwell in a failing role.

Here’s the Columbian’s write-up of McGavick’s spiel:

McGavick takes stand Wednesday, June 14, 2006 By KATHIE DURBIN Columbian staff writer

Congress has ceded too much power to the executive branch of government and needs to reassert its authority to help set the terms of war, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike McGavick said Tuesday during a trip to Vancouver.
‘I think it’s become too easy for this nation to go to war,” he said. “We backed our way into war.” In a meeting with The Columbian’s editorial board, he said the way the nation went to war in Iraq in 2003 and in Vietnam in the 1960’s undercut the “unified resolve” needed to hold the American people together in wartime.
The legislative branch has failed to defend its authority to declare war under the War Powers Act and scarcely debated the Bush administration’s new policy of pre-emptive war, McGavick said. That’s dangerous, he said, in a time when the United States has the “unilateral destructive power” to take over another nation “in a day.”
“I don’t like the stew we’re mixing,” he said. “I don’t see anyone on either side discussing this, and it distresses me enormously.”
McGavick appeared to distance himself from the Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq war and he declined to criticize Cantwell for her stance on the war, calling her vote to give President Bush the authority to go to war “courageous.” That vote has cost Cantwell support from those opposed to the war within her own party.

However, McGavick spokesperson Elliott Bundy told me this afternoon that McGavick is not against the war in Iraq and accused the Columbian of spinning the article to make it appear as if he was. Bundy says McGavick thinks, “setting a time table is wrong. The least moral option is withdrawing troops ahead of establishing democracy in Iraq.”

I interviewed McGavick about the war last month, and indeed, he said he supports the war in Iraq and says he would have have voted for it. He thinks removing Sadaam Hussein was important in the war on terrorism.

Bundy says McGavick’s criticism of Congress is not a criticism of the Iraq war, but a “forward looking position” about establishing a “much more extensive role for Congress.”