Jim Fallows reconceptualizes our progress in the struggle against terrorism in an ambitiously researched, mostly optimistic new piece. In addition to characterizing the Iraq war as a propaganda victory for al Qaeda, he questions the paradigm of a "war" on terror, a metaphor that he suggests causes economic and military overreaction and plays into terrorists' hands by exaggerating their efficacy. Without raising the comparison explicitly, Fallows' provocative article actually raises the question of how an anti-alarmist strategy that rehearses Kerry's politically disastrous emphasis on fighting terrorism primarily through law enforcement, intelligence, and diplomacy could ever find favor in an American presidential election. He seems somewhat to recognize the unpopularity of those who place the term Global War on Terror in quotation marks, closing the piece with a high-minded suggested speech to reimagine the terrorism challenge. Unfortunately, the rhetoric is seemingly better suited to the Oval Office than the campaign trail.

The stubborn fact remains that the electorate is more inclined to trust those who advocate the dramatic projection of American power. Democrats who oppose the tactical grandiosity but not the democratic idealism of the hawks who took us into Iraq must think through not only a more judicious strategy that values at least some core of democracy promotion, but also the task of selling such a measured policy to an electorate that, under the Republican paradigm -- and neatly replicating the Cold War mentality -- enjoys the sense of being engaged in a great and necessary cause that requires ongoing war. Notwithstanding the unpopularity of the Iraq war, the aggressive prosecution of a symbolic battle in the larger "war" (such as the occupation of Iraq) retains enormous visceral appeal.

Inspired by fellow TPMCafe blogger Journalist3072: One of the most frustrating things about Senator Lieberman's attitude, which has begun to attract notice, makes it hard to feel too sorry for his plight, although I somewhat can't help myself -- his overweening sense of entitlement. In his own way, he's very well-intentioned. But I think Lieberman's sense of entitlement is largely of a piece with his equally blinded ideology. Because Iraq must not become a failed state and terrorist safe harbor, in this view, we must stay there. It's an a priori moral necessity -- therefore facts on the ground are irrelevant and can be portrayed in grossly misleading ways (Iraq is better than it was a year ago -- after all, they've had new elections!). The Taliban supported al Qaeda, which facilitated 9/11. We must learn from such mistakes -- Lieberman's right about that. But if we saw Iraq becoming a terrorist state after withdrawing, we could act in a more targeted way at any number of points in that progression. Lieberman would argue, Why withdraw and wait for that to happen? Well, for one thing, because in the meantime, the chaos largely abetted by our divisive, frequently abusive occupying presence has made Iraq a terrorist training camp already, which he apparently cannot quite perceive. He simply sees the necessity to take action to prevent a repeat of the Taliban's rise to power. His obsession with that strained parallel renders his thinking rigid and callous. (This is a lawyer and ostentatiously moralistic person who publicly commented about the travesty toward the rule of law and human dignity that was Abu Ghraib, that those who committed 9/11 never apologized--an absurd, offensive non sequitur that lowers the moral bar in ways that shame our heritage and could easily cheapen our reputation in the very war of ideas and values he elsewhere champions.)

His attitude toward the Senate reflects the same stubborn, morally charged sense of mission -- mitigating factors, arguments, facts, and evidence be damned (to raise them is to join "the far left" or some such). In this fight, too, it seems, to cut and run is an abomination. "I have a role to play no matter what anyone else says or sees. My presence is a moral imperative," or so he seems to be claiming. When you stop to think about it, the arrogance of his moral purpose, unmodulated as it apparently is by empirical analysis and moral conversation, bears far, far more resemblance to President Bush's decision-making style than has generally been appreciated.

There's something anti-intellectual about the reductive invocation of "national security" or "a strong defense" as justification for continuing a bloody, costly, globally despised war against elusive, shifting adversaries while a nascent civil war erupts around you, limiting your opportunities to act, and threats elsewhere intensify. It's important, I think, for anti-war advocates to use national security-positive language in critiquing the war and in outlining alternatives, including a more aggressive attempt to marginalize, capture, and kill terrorists rather than the populations that surround them, which only increases their numbers.

These ideas are not new, but the American people's intuitive trust of pro-war politicians seems to run deep, and the fact that simplistic Rove-style labels of 2002 vintage still carry weight is very telling.

Dems need vision if their heady but fragile '06 prospects are to cohere enough to make them real contenders on the political stage rather than perpetually scrambling to eke out victories come election season by pumping money into ads and last-minute GOTV drives at the expense of party-building. I've been developing a similar suspicion that one reason certain vicious right-wing media personalities can evoke such fury in us is the hidden sense that their rather demagogic performances, with their (shallow) coherence and sleazy, melodramatic appeal actually do move the terms of debate rightward while our genuinely productive proposals are routinely ignored.

Policy agendas are necessary and helpful and we have a good list this year, including homeland security funding, health insurance, and honest government. But it's not quite a vision. While I dislike the Third Way conclusions to which it is attached and am not thrilled with its text, President Clinton's old formula of "opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans" at least was pithy and really logically reducible to a uniquely Democratic vision that could be summed up in a single word, "community." There's much, much more to vision-building than sloganeering, not least of which are a coherent set of values and an interpretation of history and current events that provides meaning and context to the news. But sloganeering is important both as a political strategy and as a means of testing the import and integration of one's ideas and policy agenda and how well they cohere into a vision or philosophy for the future that transcends the exigencies of the current political moment.

Some progressives write off slogan work as insignificant, but often their ire would be better directed at the poor samples the Dems' political professionals have produced to date (as in, Together, America Can Do Better; or, Let America Be America again, which is only a slight improvement); these failures do not discredit the idea of messaging, but underscore its importance, and point to inadequate creativity, to excessive risk aversion, and to inadequate development of connections and priorities among the ideas defining the current progressive visions informing Democratic Party politics.