As a Veterans Day meditation, I thought it might be a good idea to take a fresh look at one of the most contentious subjects in intra-party discussions: How Democrats can clearly differentiate themselves from Republicans on national security issues without falling into the “weak on defense” stereotypes conservatives have spent many years and billions of dollars promoting.
To make a very long story short, there have been at least five basic strategic takes on this subject among Democrats in recent years:
1) Ignore national security as “enemy territory” and focus on maximizing Democratic advantages on domestic issues (the default position of Democratic congressional campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s).
2) Agree with Republican positions on national security to “take them off the table” and then seek to make elections turn on domestic issues where Democrats have an advantage (the Dick Gephardt strategy for congressional Dems in 2002 and for his own presidential campaign in 2004; also common among Democrats running for office in conservative areas).
3) Vociferously oppose Republican positions on national security (and particularly the use of military force) in order to convey “strength,” on the theory that “weakness” is the real message of conservative “weak on defense” attacks (a common assumption among bloggers and activists arguing that a single-minded focus on ending the Iraq War is a sufficient national security message).
(4) Oppose Republican positions on national security while focusing on Democratic respect for, and material support for, “the troops” and veterans, on the theory that a lack of solidarity with the armed services is the real message of conservative “undermining our troops” attacks (a common theme in the Kerry 2004 campaign and in post-2004 Democratic messaging).
(5) Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions (e.g., the 2002-2004 Clark/Graham “right idea, wrong target” criticisms of the Iraq invasion as distracting and undermining the legitimate fight against terrorists).
There are obviously variations on and combinations of all five strategies, and one could add two relatively marginal approaches: the “anti-imperialist” position that explicitly denies the value of a strong national security posture, and the occasional suggestion that Democrats should “move to the right” of Republicans by supporting military actions more fervently than the opposition.
This entire subject was brought to the forefront of the Democratic presidential contest over the weekend by Barack Obama’s well-received Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech, which, inter alia, criticized Democrats (implicitly, Hillary Clinton) for failing to maintain partisan differentiation on national security:

I am running for president because I am sick and tired of Democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security by talking and acting and voting like George Bush Republicans. When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say I voted for the war in Iraq or gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran or that I support Bush/Cheney policies of not talking to people we don’t like.

This rap is obviously a direct appeal to those Democrats who believe HRC is guilty of strategy #2, and also to those who favor strategy #3. But Obama also makes a gesture towards strategy #5 by going on to say:

I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century – nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

The hard thing about strategy #5 is that it’s complicated, requiring an overall vision of U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy that is difficult to sharply and simply convey while maintaining partisan differentiation. The tendency to simply substitute “diplomacy” for “use of force” in dealing with every conceivable security challenge arguably plays into Republican taunts that Democrats are allergic to the use of force, period.
But there is one national security topic on which Democrats have a built-in advantage wherein they could not only conveys “toughness” and seriousness on national security, but also rebut years of Republican attacks: military readiness. As Steve Benen points out today at TalkingPointsMemo, the “Clinton hollowed out the military” myth was not only a staple of Bush’s 2000 campaign, and a subtext of attacks on Kerry’s defense record in 2004, but is still being monotonously repeated by 2008 Republican candidates:

Bush has stretched the military to the breaking point, and Republican presidential candidates want to emphasize rebuilding the Armed Forces as part of their platforms. But to acknowledge the incredible strains on the current military is to implicitly hold the president to account for his irresponsible policies.
What to do? Blame Clinton, of course.

For Democrats, talking about rebuilding the U.S. military in acknowledgement of an era of asymmetric warfare, and the limits on military power we’ve painfully learned in Iraq, is a good way simultaneously to draw attention to Bush’s assault on military readiness (a source of considerable ongoing grief within the military itself), to deride the national security “thinking” behind the Iraq War and the drive to war with Iran, and to identify with “the troops.” That doesn’t necessarily mean support for an increased defense spending or even an expanded active military. But it does clearly indicate that a Democratic commander-in-chief will pursue a defense strategy markedly different from the GOP contenders, who are still trying to win unwinnable wars (and perhaps start others) based on the “world’s sole superpower” illusion of the immediate post-Cold War period.
The political futility, and unprincipled nature, of Democratic strategies #1 and #2 on national security are pretty apparent by now. Strategy #4 is a good defensive measure, but often sounds evasive, and on occasion runs the risk of treating troops as victims rather than as heroes. Perhaps strategy #3 will work politically, but it’s hard to imagine a Democratic candidate getting through an entire general election campaign saying little or nothing about national security other than the desire to reverse every single decision made by George W. Bush. So strategy #5 might well be essential, as well as prinicipled (giving voters a clear idea of what a Democratic commander-in-chief would do, not just undo), and military readiness might be a good place to start a message of “differentiation with strength.”

At John Hopkins’s School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered a speech on foreign policy and partisanship that seemed designed to validate everything his Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him (and I count myself in this group, though not since his loss to Ned Lamont in Connecticut in the Democratic primary last year).
Press accounts reported that at some point (probably a post-speech Q&A) Lieberman said he might not support the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. But the speech itself pointed more than sufficiently in that direction. Its essence was to define a “muscular” FDR/Truman/JFK Democratic foreign policy, on which the two parties have repeatedly reversed roles, with Republicans currently “for” and Democrats “against.” Joe Lieberman himself, the speech suggests, seems to be the only consistent advocate for that tradition, emulating the brave example of Democrat-turned-Republican-advisor Paul Nitze, whose name is attached to SAIS.
I really encourage Democrats who have defended Lieberman in the past to read this speech. It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were “good” from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be “bad.” Democrats were “bad” from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were “good.” During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were “good” and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were “bad,” and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman’s running-mate Al Gore “good,” the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush “bad”). Both parties were “good” from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were “good” and Democrats turned “bad” (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely “bad” in opposing the war).
These judgments appear based on an interpretation of the “muscular” Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law–all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support. You’d also never know, since Lieberman never acknowledges it, that the leading Democratic presidential candidates don’t simply identify themselves with opposition to Bush on Iraq and Iran, but have offered their own detailed national security plans which take Islamic jihadism quite seriously as a threat.
In other words, Lieberman’s speech is less a rebuke to the “‘antiwar” Democrats who helped deny him the party’s nomination to the Senate in 2006, than a challenge to liberal internationalists whom he places on the wrong side of a choice between preemptive unilateralism and isolationism and chaos. This is one occasion on which so-called “liberal hawks” need to take the lead in repudiating Joe. As Sam Boyd at TAPPED suggests, in an essentially accurate if exaggerated view, Lieberman is saying “you’re either with Norman Podheretz, or with Noam Chomsky.”
Democrats who vehemently deny this false choice should be in the forefront of those vehemently denouncing Joe Lieberman’s latest descent into full-bore neoconservatism, which isn’t just about foreign policy, but about the wilfull subjection of every progressive instinct on every issue to the monomaniacal drive for warfare against every enemy, foreign or domestic.

Scott Helman of the Boston Globe reports from South Carolina on a wrinkle in the “electability” debate that especially affects Barack Obama: the strong belief of many African-Americans that their white fellow citizens will never elect a black president, at least any time soon.
Unsurprisingly, this feeling is particularly strong in the South, where such attractive African-American statewide candidates as North Carolina’s Harvey Gantt and Tennessee’s Harold Ford have succumbed to racially-charged negative campaigns.

“Personally, I don’t think he has a chance in hell,” said Leah Josey, a 20-year-old English major at Morris College, a Baptist school in Sumter. “All those white people? Come on.”
Such sentiments are prevalent among black South Carolinians, who are expected to make up nearly half of voters in the Democratic primary in January. Nearly a third of black voters surveyed in a statewide poll in September said white Americans would not vote for a black presidential candidate.

This helps explain why Obama is running no better than even with, and in many polls, well behind, Hillary Clinton among African-American Democrats nationally, and also why he’s running behind her in South Carolina. And I’d have to say that anecdotally, Helman’s report comports with what I’ve personally heard from some African-American elected officials who express negative opinions about Obama’s electibility not as a fear, but as a bedrock conviction.

“Obama’s chief opponents are ‘Mr. and Mrs. He-can’t-win,’ ” said I.S. Leevy Johnson, a lawyer and power broker in Columbia who is active in Obama’s campaign. “You hear it a lot because historically that has been the case.”

Now it’s true that this sort of ambivalent feeling is common towards “pioneer” candidates. Elizabeth Edwards has not-so-subtly appealed to the fears of some women that Hillary Clinton would actually set back the cause of gender equality in politics by losing a general election. And going back a while, many Catholic opinion-leaders in 1960 openly opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on grounds that it would become a lightning rod for anti-Catholic prejudices.
But in the end, an overwhelming majority of Catholics did vote for Kennedy, and the question is whether the excitement of a viable campaign would dispel electibility concerns about Clinton among women and Obama among African-Americans.
Fortunately for Obama, by the time the primary calendar rolls around to SC, the question will either be moot, or he will have already demonstrated strong support in the exceptionally pale electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire. Just as JFK’s landslide primary win over Hubert Humphrey in profoundly Protestant West Virginia in 1960 helped dispel fears that he couldn’t win Protestants, an Obama win in Iowa would be hard to ignore. In general, if the millstone of African-American skepticism about Obama is as strong as Helman’s report suggests, and if he can dispel it, then Obama’s “upside” against Clinton in the South and in other states with large African-American populations may be higher than many analysts realize.

Back in April, I did a NewDonkey post noting a Robert Novak column that put the official Right-Wing imprimatur on the proto-candidacy of Fred Thompson. Indeed, the column was reminiscent of The Novak’s highly influential epistle back in 1998 designating George W. Bush as the “ideological heir of Ronald Reagan.”
Now the Dark One appears to have withdrawn the imprimatur from Big Fred, because of his “astounding lack of sensitivity on abortion,” as reflected in Thompson’s Meet the Press appearance last Sunday.
In Novak’s account, Thompson’s specific sins were (1) a blunt refusal to support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution, a longstanding demand of the Cultural Right that has been a staple of Republican Party platforms since 1980; and (2) an association with the idea that a reversal of Roe v. Wade might mean a “criminalization” of abortion.
The Prince is definitely right in his political analysis of the price Fred may pay for these comments; he should have known that sounding even vaguely reasonable on the “Holocaust” of abortion is something Republicans only dare essay in general elections.
But the sweeping nature of his excommunication of Thompson made me wonder anew about a Novak column a few weeks ago that read like a valentine to Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that California conservatives weren’t that worried about Rudy’s heresies on social issues.
If Fred’s off-limits for opposing a Human Life amendment, what should cultural conservatives think about a candidate who still supports legalized abortion in its entirety?
I don’t know quite what’s up with Novak, but his column on Thompson did offer one tantalizing hint of the current hard-right zeigeist. After demolishing Thompson, noting Rudy’s pro-choice stance, side-swiping Romney for his late-life conversion to The Cause, and dismissing Huckabee as a member of the “Christian Left,” the Prince of Darkness concludes:

That leaves McCain, no favorite of the right, but the major candidate with the clearest longtime position against abortion.

I don’t want to get into any conspiracy theories here, but it is interesting that Novak penned these words shortly after his fellow Opus Dei convert to Catholicism, Sam Brownback, endorsed McCain over the rest of the field.

Over at TAPPED, Dr. Tom Schaller has suggested that Barack Obama and John Edwards should supplement their attacks on Hillary Clinton’s policy positions by making a parallel political argument: that “the Clintons” presided over the destruction of the Democratic Party during the 1990s:

On her health care debacle and war vote, Edwards and Obama are making the case that she used bad policy and/or personal judgment, but they ought to try a new, politically-themed tack: Hillary and (they should be more careful here) Bill Clinton fought the Republicans but the GOP was stronger, not weaker, when they left office in 2001 than the Republicans were when the Clintons arrived in 1993.

Also at TAPPED, Dana Goldstein doubts that actual Democratic voters will be persuaded by a political narrative of the 1990s that doesn’t accord with their own memories. I agree.
But the discussion of the political viability of Schaller’s hypothesis avoids a more fundamental question: Is it true?
This question isn’t just a matter of historical interest. Schaller is faithfully expressing a revisionist take on the 1990s that has become an article of faith in many Left-netroots circles, with an implication that is of immediate importance to Democrats. The idea is the Clinton-style centrism was an electoral as well as an ideological disaster, producing at best two less-than-majority presidential wins at the price of the erosion of Democratic support in congressional and state elections. The 2006 Democratic comeback, according to this theory, proves that a more base-oriented, left-bent Democratic strategy is the key to a long-term Democratic majority.
But what really happened to Democrats in the Clinton years? And why?
The first essential step in answering that question is to isolate the effects of the 1994 Republican landslide. In the three Clinton administration elections after that (plus some off-year state elections), it’s hard to argue there was any significant erosion of Democratic support. After the 1994 elections, there were 204 Democratic House members and 47 Democratic Senators. After the 2000 elections, there were 212 Democratic House members and 50 Democratic Senators. Between 1995 and 2000, Democrats made a net gain of one governorship, and a net loss of one state legislative chamber.
So the case for Clinton’s disastrous effect on the Democratic Party’s national standing–if you are willing to overlook or minimize his two presidential wins–really comes down to the one calamitous election of 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats, 8 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 18 state legislative chambers.
There are, of course, two divergent narratives that hold Clinton partially or wholly responsible for the 1994 debacle. One often heard on the Left is that his support for deficit reduction and NAFTA, and an insufficiently progressive health care plan, “discouraged the Democratic base” and gave Republicans a victory by default. Another, often heard among party centrists, is that Clinton disappointed voters–most notably 1992 Perot voters–looking for a “different kind of Democrat” with unpopular early-term positons on gays-in-the-military and fetal tissue research, and above all, a decision to devote much of his second year in office pursuing what looked like a vast new health care entitlement instead of welfare reform.
Aside from the inherent improbability that Clinton’s brief record in office could have alone produced this kind of adverse landslide, the intensity of the pro-GOP wave in state elections undermined both blame-Clinton narratives. After all, Democrats had managed to hold their own at the state level through periods of national GOP victories in the 1980s, and going back further, even in the vast Nixon landslide of 1972. Something deeper must have been going on that had little to do with Clinton or perceptions of “Clintonism.”
The two theories most often accepted by analysts at the time were (1) an unusually toxic “wrong-track” feeling in the electorate, which helped boost both Clinton and Perot in 1992, was taken out on the dominant congressional and state party of the previous two decades; and (2) a slow but steady realignment of the two parties on sharper left-right ideological lines finally “flipped” conservative Democrats towards the GOP, and reduced split-ticket voting, particularly in the South, where the 1994 losses were particularly large. Ephemeral circumstances, particularly a record number of U.S. House retirements and a pattern of racial gerrymandering in the South, intensified both effects in U.S. House races.
It’s entirely possible that structural issues that Bill Clinton had little control over, and administration policies he did control, both played a role in the 1994 debacle, just as it’s possible that both “blame-Clinton” interpretations had some truth with respect to different categories of voters. But it’s hardly a simple story, and hardly provides any clear ideological direction for Democrats today, much less an effective talking-point against Hillary Clinton.
What about the one Clintonian episode that obviously did have an impact on post-1994 dynamics, the Lewinsky scandal? Aside from the fact that the scandal had no obvious ideological underpinnings, other than to bond Republicans to a hard-right cultural message, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in the end, the scandal didn’t hurt Democrats, unless you believe that’s what kept Al Gore from being inaugurated as president. In that connection, Schaller’s post suggests that the political case against the Clintons includes the “legacy election” of 2000, wherein their failure to “fight” for Al Gore made a crucial difference. Well, it’s hard to “fight” for a candidate who is doing everything possible to distance himself from you, and one of the most commonly heard complaints about the Gore-Lieberman campaign at the time is that it largely refused to deploy Clinton or his record.
Schaller makes one additional argument in his post that bears some discussion: The Clintons failed to build the sort of ideological institutions (e.g., CAP, Media Matters) necessary to combat the right-wing uprising of the 1990s. For one thing, the White House itself was a stronger pro-Democratic message-purveyor than any private-sector institution could have ever managed; indeed, it was the loss of the White House that made the construction of an alternative infrastructure so important. And for another, Clintonians have played a pretty conspicuous role in the Bush Era progressive “noise machine” scene. It’s a bit hard to cite John Podesta’s work as evidence of a general Clintonian lack of interest in institution-building.
All in all, I think Dr. Schaller’s barking up the wrong tree, but he is certainly fostering an important discussion of a set of beliefs about the recent political past that lurks just under the surface of most intra-party disputes.

I wrote yesterday about the significance of Paul Weyrich’s endorsement of Mitt Romney as an indication of Cultural Right determination to stop Rudy Giuliani. But ol’ Rudy certainly offered his own rebuttal today, with the announcement that his candidacy was being endorsed by the Rev. Pat Robertson.
In an interview with Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post after the endorsement, Robertson seemed to embrace the idea that cultural issues just aren’t that important right now:

Robertson said although he and Giuliani disagree on social issues, those disagreements “pale into insignificance” when measured against the import of the fight against global terrorism and radical Islam. “We need a man who sees clearly how to deal with that issue,” said Robertson.

Since the other Republican candidates (other than Ron Paul) ain’t exactly doves, this sure looks likes a repudiation of almost everything Robertson’s ever said about the importance of abortion, gay rights, and other cultural issues. I mean, it’s one thing to say you’ll be loyal to the ticket if Giuliani is the nominee. It’s another to endorse him as your own candidate.
I’ve tried to think of a Democratic analog for the unlikeliness of this particular endorsement, and the best I can come up with is Cindy Sheehan joining Hillary Clnton’s campaign out of admiration for her energy proposals.
To be sure, Robertson’s pretty long in the tooth, and doesn’t have anything like the political clout he used to enjoy before the Christian Coalition imploded. But as a symbol of social conservative surrender to Rudyism, he’s pretty important, and it will be a bit tougher now for his colleagues to publicly contemplate a third-party campaign against Pat’s candidate.

While candidate endorsements rarely move actual votes, they are sometimes influential in signalling the acceptability of this or that contender to particular constituencies. And that’s definitely true with respect to the GOP candidates for president, who are all struggling to lay claim to what’s left of the party’s once-invincible conservative factions.
Yesterday Mitt Romney got the nod from a especially significant validator of his conservative bona fides: the ultimate Right Wing War Horse, Paul Weyrich.
In case you’re not familiar with Weyrich, he’s been the great instituton builder for the Right over a period of three-and-a-half decades. He played the main role in snagging Coors family money to create the Heritage Foundation and the less-well-known but very important American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is sort of the Johnny Appleseed of bad state policy ideas. Weyrich is generally credited with giving the late Jerry Falwell the name “Moral Majority” for that briefly influential group. And more recently, he helped set up the Council for National Policy, the Cultural Right’s politburo.
For all his contributions to the Right Wing Noise Machine, Weyrich himself is a crotchety maverick forever finding fault with the GOP”s fidelity to The Cause. He has been among those threating to take a dive or go third party if Rudy Giuliani gets the Republican presidential nomination. And so his endorsement of the Mittster will be widely interpreted as signalling a Stop Giuliani effort that brushes aside concerns over Romney’s Mormonism and late-life conversion to cultural conservatism.
Elsewhere on the endorsement front, Michael Shear has a very entertaining front-page article at the Washington Post today running through the presidential preferences of the Bush family. While virtually everyone in former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s political operation seems to be involved in Romney’s campaign, two of his sons have take the famous name elsewhere. George P. Bush, the bilingual heart-throb generally expected to be the next vehicle for the Bush Dynasty, has joined the Big Fred Machine. But Jeb Bush, Jr., has just endorsed Rudy.
Endorsments aside, you’ve got to figure that Jeb Bush, Sr., is looking at developments in the Republican presidential campaign with a strong feeling of What Might Have Been. Universally considered the smarter, tougher and more ideological of the Bush scions, Jebbie lost his Heir Apparent status in 1994, when he narrowly lost the Florida governorship while W. narrowly won in Texas. His brother’s train wreck of an administration made another Bush presidential run in 2008 a political impossibility. And though Jeb’s name used to come up often as a possible Veep candidate, the desire of Republicans to use the anti-dynasty card against Hillary Clinton has all but eliminated that sort of talk.
When you look over the deeply flawed Republican presidential field, and watch conservatives like Weyrich struggle with their bad options, you have to conclude that if the former governor of Florida were named Jeb Smith, he’d wipe up the floor with these bozos and cruise to the nomination. Irony of ironies, The Name has turned out to be more a curse than a blessing for Jebbie.

Believe it or not, the next decennial round of congressional and state legislative redistricting activity is just around the corner. It’s actually been a factor in the huge amounts of time and money the two parties have poured into Virginia’s legislative elections, where the state senators elected today will still be in office when redistricing occurs (Democrats have a good shot at retaking the senate).
I’ve published a brief piece at the DLC’s Ideas Primary site on the many lessons learned from the last round of legal and political jousting over redistricting. The bottom line is that the environment for redistricting reform isn’t particularly good in most states, despite the green light federal courts have given to political gerrymandering.

Atlantic magazine has made available an advance copy of a December article by Andrew Sullivan about Barack Obama. And whatever you think of this convoluted piece, it does nicely capture two very different takes on why the Illinois senator might be a “transformative” politician.
Sullivan begins by tying Obama’s post-baby-boomer rap, and his apparent appeal to Republicans, to a narrative of recent politics in which all the polarization is illusory:

The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.

Sullivan’s follow-up account of the “minor” policy differences between the two parties leads to the equally ridiculous, if more familiar, claim that polarization is purely the product of inflated baby-boomer cultural conflicts. And therein lies his initial argument for Obama, as the post-boomer candidate who could resolve all the petty, artificial differences between Ds and Rs. This High Broder case for Obama is hardly new, and hardly persuasive.
But Sullivan goes on to make an international case for Obama that’s a lot more compelling:

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

In general, Sullivan’s piece captures the MSM fascination with Barack Obama in its two basic dimensions: Obama as transcending American conflicts, and Obama as transcending America’s conficts with the world. My own view is that Barack Obama can acheive the former mission only if Americans begin to care about the latter.

We all know that George W. Bush’s promises in 2000 to become a “uniter, not a divider” have been broken over and over again. And moreover, his Texas-based claims of interest in bipartisanship have been limited to “my way or the highway” inducements to Democratic surrender.
The one, and only one, truly bipartisan initiative Bush engaged in was the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, based largely on prior moderate Democratic proposals, and relying heavily on support from Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller.
NCLB has been steadily bleeding support from local-control Republicans and anti-testing Democrats, and from all sorts of folks unhappy with the administration’s serial refusals to keep its funding promises.
Today’s WaPo has a solid summary by Peter Baker about the current landscape of support for and opposiition to NCLB. Given this administration’s history, the fact that any progressive Democrats are willing to renew support for NCLB is a good indication that they are looking beyond the doomed Bush presidency, and are trying to salvage a few things from the wreakage.