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The idea that the Democratic Party was categorically opposed to the Iraq War in 2003 is a fiction that was created some years later to dunk on Bush for his bungling prosecution of it. While there was certainly some opposition, a good number of Democrats supported it (40% in the House and over 50% in the Senate). Even the so-called "liberal media" didn't mount much opposition. There was a call throughout the early '00s for a "liberal alternative" to the big conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, most notably evidenced by the brief existence of Air America Radio. MSNBC threw their hat into the ring with Phil Donahue. In the run up to the war, Donahue's show was cancelled because the network couldn't stomach his opposition to the war. They claimed it was because of low ratings and cited the fact that his numbers never got anywhere near O'Reilly's, which was true, but he still had the highest-rated show on the network. As someone who was politically conscious at the time, I distinctly remember that being anti-war was seen as a somewhat extreme position; once the war actually started, anti0war protestors had the same cultural status as the pro-Hamas protestors on college campuses do today. Mainstream opposition really only started once the war was going badly and the administration didn't have an exit strategy other than doubling down. While the 2004 election was seen as a referendum on the war, Kerry was quick to criticize Bush over getting us into it but he didn't act like he had an exit strategy, and, IIRC, he specifically said he wasn't going to withdraw a la Howard Dean. Full-scale opposition didn't really crystalize until the tumultuous fall of 2005 put Bush in the doghouse within his own party and bashing him over Iraq became acceptable among Republicans (who essentially adopted the 2004 Democratic position), giving Democrats enough cover to call for actually ending the fiasco.
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