Not Can They, But Will They?
Arianna is one of the great provocateurs of the digital age, but her first question in this discussion is actually less provocative than we need to be at this historic moment. She asks, "Will Democrats be able to make the case that the war in Iraq - a war McCain is passionately, almost perversely, committed to continuing - has made us less safe by taking our eye off the real terrorist threats?"
But of course they will be able to make that case. Polls, after all, show the American people already believes it and further, that they are waiting for a party to articulate a whole new national security strategy that redefines the very concept of "strength." For more than a generation, politicians and pundits have defined "strength" as fat white old men sitting in Washington's air conditioned offices ordering other Americans' kids into combat and phoning in air strikes against dark skinned foreigners. But the Iraq War has shown that such a definition of "strong" national security policy is, in fact, the definition of "weak" national security policy - one that makes us less safe.
The question, then, is not whether Democrats could make the case that "strength" includes better diplomacy, limiting military engagements, and defeating the ideas, ideologies and pathologies that actually fuel terrorism. The question is will they - and why haven't they already?
It gets back to the original concept of fear. Democratic politicians are governed by a fear of being attacked as "weak" in the old sense - weak for even questioning a national security strategy that has weakened the country. As I note in my new book The Uprising (apologies for mentioning another book for just a second here - we'll be doing a full TPM book club on The Uprising in July), that fear comes from what I call the McGovern Fable.
Since George McGovern lost in a landslide in 1972, warmongering conservatives inside the Democratic Party have constructed a story that says McGovern lost not because of Republicans' tactical brilliance, Nixon's dirty tricks, the GOP's Southern strategy, or Democrats' inept campaign that year - but because he opposed the Vietnam War (a theory that scholar Mark Schmitt has shown is factually absurd). This Fable has permeated internal Democratic Party politics and external media narratives for almost 4 decades now, with everyone from Joe Lieberman to the Democratic Leadership Council echoing its themes. The result is a conventional wisdom in Washington's Democratic circles that any politicians who represent the public's desire for change on national security will become the next George McGovern in 1972.
Of course, after Connecticut's Ned Lamont defeated Lieberman in the 2006 Senate primary, Democratic candidates stopped listening to this fear and began more frontally questioning the Iraq War and the Bush national security policy. And what do you know - they won Congress.
Now it is 2008 - and though the 2006 election empirically refuted the McGovern Fable, Democrats continue to refuse to use their congressional power to end the war. They remain under the spell of a fable that was crushed at the polls less than two years ago - a spell of fear.
Why is this the case? Well, there are many reasons. First and foremost, old habits die hard. When it comes to national security, Democrats have spent 3 decades behaving like kindergarteners victimized by a playground bully. But just as significant has been the failure of the antiwar uprising to demand courage. As I outlined in a recent nationally syndicated column, antiwar groups in Washington have spent their time and resources since the 2006 election attacking only Republicans on the issue of Iraq. Plagued by gross conflicts of interests, these groups have put their partisan agenda (aka. electing Democrats) ahead of the antiwar cause - and in doing so, have refused to demand anything from Democratic politicians, fearing they will be taken off much-valued D.C. Christmas card lists.
Will this change? I sure hope so - and with so many Democratic candidates signing onto the
I certainly share your doubt about the cowardly Dems willingness to go to the mat against the war. But I think you have to give anti-war types like me some credit for defeating Hillary. I can't say that I am overly optimistic about Obama, but I knew there was no hope with Hillary and at last the left side of the party has won the day, if only for a day. We've demonstrated that we can defeat establishment Democrats.
I noticed in particular my freshman Senator Amy Klobuchar who seemed to being taking the DLC party line for ever so long this session got the message on Obama. I think she heard plenty from the activist base on her votes for war funding and againt civil liberties.
The message needs to be not that we'll be marching in the streets, but that we'll be watching every vote and we won't be afraid to mount a challenge in the next primary to any office holder who ignores us.
June 9, 2008 8:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fear is such an effective campaign tactic that Democrats have to be a bit timid about appearing to disbelieve that our very existance is at stake in Iraq and Iran. All it would take is an arrest of another "shoe bomber" type of "terrorist", or an "intercepted message" from anyone with a Moslem sounding name, and American voters would again be scared half to death. Then any Democrat who had been treating the "terrorist threat" at all rationally would likely be defeated in the election this year.
It will take several years to ease the irrational fears the Repubs like to fan, before it will be politically safe for Democrats to acknowledge their rationality. That's a damn shame, but it is also reality.
June 9, 2008 11:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
All we need is a Democrat who has the guts to say "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Isn't the definition of courage the capacity to act bravely inspite of your fear? When did cowardice become a positive character trait?
June 10, 2008 7:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fear is a negative message, and as I recall from teaching Business Communications, a negative message has been shown to have at least ten times the impact of a positive message.
Getting elected is a numbers game. If you depend on messages to the public to motivate votes towards you, then making the voters afraid of your opponent should be ten times as effective as the opponent's efforts to offer a message of hope. Fear probably doesn't have that high an advantage, but it clearly has an advantage. The success of fear-mongers in politics when they oppose rational or hopeful candidates clearly shows that.
The professionals who are successful understand that calculus. The kibitzers from the blog gallery don't. The professionals do what they have to to win, and I frankly don't think that it is fair to call them "spineless" for that.
We need to change the basis for that calculus, but since it appears to be a basic in-born characteristic of human beings to react more strongly to fear than to positive and (none-emotional) rational messages, I am not at all sure how. Emotions really, really matter in political decision-making.
June 10, 2008 11:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
My prediction: The issue in this election isn't going to be the bad Iraq decisions of 2002 and 2003. Frankly, they're water well under the bridge by now, and what happened in Iraq between 2003 and early 2008 is about to be overshadowed very quickly by what will be happening in that region this summer and in the fall.
Nor is the issue going to be the "real terrorist threat". There hasn't been a terrorist strike in the US since 2001, and most Americans pretty much get it by now: the "terrorist threat" is the most overhyped crisis since the "missile gap", and in good part a corrupt government racket and swindle.
The issue is going to be a global security and economic crisis that is taking shape right now. While Democrats have been arguing for many weeks about such important issues as whether it is fair to make fun of Hillary Clinton's pantsuits, or whether Barack Obama is too black, not black enough, or just the right shade of blackness, events abroad and at home have overtaken the debate.
The key issue of this election is going to revolve around the fact that ordinary Americans are now getting pounded in the a** at the gas pump by the global energy economy, and the rapacious and crooked robber barons who own it, and pretty soon the public is going to be spitting mad, loaded for bear, and ready to lash out at anyone and everyone they might take it in their heads to hold responsible: Opec, the oil companies, Arab royals, Venezuela, environmentalists - anyone ... someone.
The US is in the middle of a rapidly escalating global competition for oil as the petroleum era hurtles toward what very well may be its violent global conclusion, with strained supplies failing to match accelerating demand, with living standards falling suddenly among the most vulnerable, with powerful importing nations fanning out around the globe to acquire and shore up strategic assets and relationships with exporters, with speculation inflating prices and injecting dangerous volatility into the market, with vast amounts of wealth flowing into the pockets of those fortunate few who have abundant supplies of critical resources, and with the likely plowing of those petrodollars back into military expenditures worldwide.
It is entirely possible that the US and/or Israel will have launched an attack on Iran before the election, which will further drive up oil prices and also provoke an Iranian response, and which might then in turn raise calls for even more aggressive intervention in the Middle East.
Now which party is going to be the first one to get a clue, and respond to this gathering storm by moving beyond stupid calls for superficial tax holidays or aloof overemphasis on the long term agenda?
June 10, 2008 12:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Both parties know that what you wrote is correct. Neither party sees any advantage over the other party in talking about it as the Presidential election grow nearer.
Bush has the power to make a new war against Iran occur, and that power is politically powerful here in the U.S.
What happens in the Middle East does not matter to the conservatives except for how American voters react to it! That is key to understanding what the Bush/Cheney administration will do.
Since it is actions in the Middle East (not talk)that will make the biggest conservative-controllable effect on the voters in November, don't expect either party to talk about Iran much. The "superficial tax holidays or aloof overemphasis on the long term agenda" is offered to the voters in that context. The Bushies can act unilaterally, the Democrats can't stop them. Don't expect either side to discuss the issue in advance.
Without a real ability to change the action decisions, the Democrats are not gong to discuss it. Because of the anticipated opposition that might stop them, don't expect the Bushies to discuss it in advance. That's a prescription for "stupid calls for superficial tax holidays or aloof overemphasis on the long term agenda."
June 11, 2008 12:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
what will be happening in that region this summer and in the fall.
And what happens in December, viz the expiration of the UN Security Council figleaf that covers (disclaimer:florid metaphor alert) the scrofulous genitalia of the occupation.
Perhaps a successful collateral attack upon the occupation and the pending "Iran adventure" might be a call from Obama for an Iraqi referendum "Should we stay or should we go" (if we stay there will be trouble, if we go...you know the song).
Let the Status of Forces agreement be on the *ballot, with a proviso that its failure means that the Iraqi people are freed of our yoke.
(A position virtually identical O'Reilly's!)
*"Freedom's on th'march."
June 10, 2008 1:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
War and economy are related. That's the link Obama must make clear.
June 10, 2008 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
David,
You describe the idea that McGovern lost in 1972 because he opposed the war as a myth. But Democrats won in 1974 and 1976 in part because of their opposition to the war, a fact swamped by the Republican self-inflicted wound of Watergate.
What was important after that was that the conservatives created the myth that opposition to Vietnam was a political career killer for Democratic politicians, and because of the right-wing ability to create that myth and because of the inability of Democrats to counter that myth, it became true for Democratic political careers.
The conservatives won the long-term war of political myth-making. What has changed now so that they won't do so again?
June 10, 2008 11:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
War has consequences for the economy, but it is foreign policy that is directly linked to when and under what circumstances we go to war. It is a mistake for Obama to emphasize the economic consequences of the war in Iraq to the neglect of engaging the American people on the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force.
June 11, 2008 9:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Great analysis; totally agree that Dems have allowed themselves to be bullied. What thoroughly torques me is that they've allowed themselves to be bullied by preening creeps like Commander Codpiece and his FiveDeferrments sidekick. Jeebuz!
The antiwar movement has a choice: it either submits to being yet another special interest, or it decides that it's going to be a galvanizing force around which other issues -- social justice, the environment, etc, -- can coalesce.
June 12, 2008 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink