First of all, I want to thank Lila Shapiro at TPM as well as Matt Dallek, Todd Gitlin and Andrei Cherny for their posts this week. It's been a great discussion.

I wanted to sum up with one of my big takeaways from working on Live from the Campaign Trail - the extraordinarily powerful role of political stereotype in our campaign discourse. "Liberal tax-and spenders," "GOP isolationists," "blame America-firsters" and "extremists;" these are just a few of the overarching political caricatures that have come to define American politics in the 20th century. We've become so inured to these short-hand characterizations that many of our political debates on the campaign trail are spent either inoculating politicians from them - or perpetuating them. To be sure, flippant political characterizations are nothing new in American politics. In the forty years after the Civil War, there was hardly a Republican politician who missed an opportunity to wave the so-called "bloody shirt," of Democratic rebellion. In the 30s, 40s and 50s Democratic politicians pretty much ran against the ghost of Herbert Hoover and the perception of Republican heartlessness and isolationism that Franklin Roosevelt helped perpetuate.

In 1948, the deeply unpopular Harry Truman got re-elected running not against Thomas Dewey, but instead a caricature of GOP iniquity. He derided his opponents as reactionaries, compared them to fascists, said they had "a calculating machine" where their heart should be, warned that their victory would lead to a return of "the Wall Street economic dictatorship" and on and on it went. Of course, as we all know: it worked. Truman's shocking victory led Walter Lippman to joke that of all of FDR's campaign win, 1948 was certainly the most impressive!

To this day, so much of how we think about politics is caught up in stereotype.
I was reminded of this fact recently when I did one of my initial book events. It was at a bar in New York called Retreat. When I sent out an e-mail about the event, several of my Republican friends wrote back to say how fitting it was that I was having my book talk at a bar named for the Democratic approach to foreign policy and national security over the past 40 years. (Unfortunately it seems Wave the White Flag and Surrender were not available!)

Of course, my friends were joking, but there is something obviously to this.. The notion of Democratic "weakness" on national security is so ingrained in our national discourse that the perception has become more powerful than the reality. Even though most Americans favor withdrawal from Iraq and oppose the war, they continue to think John McCain will be better on Iraq and national security in general.

To contradict slightly what Matt Dallek wrote earlier, I think much of this perception began in 1968 and the growing influence of the anti-war wing of the party.

Both Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy ran on an anti-war platform moving the party further to the left and even though Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination ("was given" might seem more accurate since the Vice President never actually entered a single primary) it wasn't until he called for a bombing halt in Vietnam in a September 30th speech in Salt Lake City that the liberal wing of the party began to coalesce behind his candidacy.

Of course, in the end Humphrey lost, but from a political perspective the doves in the Democratic Party were in the ascendancy and it was little surprise when their superior organizing skills and grassroots efforts led liberal Senator George McGovern to the Democratic nomination in 1972.

Of course, the speech he gave at the 1972 Democratic convention and his subsequent call for American troops to be home 90 days after his election as President solidified the image of the Democratic Party as "weak" on national security. This is not to say that McGovern may not have been correct (although his views were not shared by the majority of voters) but the perception die was cast - and Democrats have been battling against it for 40 years.

In the late 60s, Democrats were "dirty hippies;" in the 1970s, they were peacenik McGovernites, in 1984, they were "blame America-firsters;" in recent years, "cut and runners." The words may have changed, but the argument has not - Republicans are tough, Democrats are not.

It's small wonder that in May 2004, as the presidential campaign was beginning to gather steam, an unnamed senior Bush Administration official was asked to comment on the dilemma John Kerry faced in criticizing the handling of the war in Iraq. His response, "It's never stopped being 1968" for Democrats. A more telling description of Democratic vulnerability on national security issues is difficult to imagine. And of course, George Bush ran against 1968 as much as he did John Kerry.

But increasingly, the tide is shifting as Democrats are demonstrating a new assertiveness on a host of national security issues from Iraq to fighting terrorism. The extent to which Democrats can battle Republicans on the issue of national security will be a telling sign of how significantly the political ground has shifted on the campaign trail.

In American politics when one political party is able to shift the narrative on a politically vulnerable issue it can often signal a true realignment. When Republicans were able to cast themselves as populists in the 60s and 70s it took away the Democrat's huge advantage with working class Americans. No longer were Republicans seen as being out-of-touch and heartless. Spurred by the white backlash and the growing conservatism of American politics, Democrats were tarred as the party of big government, "tax and spend" the "coddling of criminals" and devotion to liberal special interest groups. It wasn't until the 1992 campaign and Clinton's brilliant convention speech (as well as his incredibly effective Sister Souljah speech) that allowed the party to begin neutralizing this damning political caricature. But of course the retreat meme continues.

Come the Fall one can expect "cut and run" attacks on Democrats to escalate (we've already seen John McCain make what are basically traitorous claims against Barack Obama) but this might be the first presidential campaign since the 60s in which national security could be a push, or even a net plus for Democrats. If Democrats can go into the Fall with the confidence to talk about foreign policy and national security issues without being afraid of GOP counterattacks we might truly be on the verge of a long-term political realignment.