Well, it’s official now, to my chagrin as a citizen of Virginia who happens to share the surname of the Attorney General of that state. Jerry Kilgore has announced he will run for Governor of Virginia later this year, and he’s the odds-on choice for the GOP nomination.
But just days before his announcement, veteran Hampton Roads Daily Press columnist Gordon Morse penned a piece in the WaPo that not-so-delicately raised the big question about Kilgore’s candidacy. Entitled “Will Being There Be Enough?” Morse’s column aired GOP concerns that the candidate is not considered to be exactly the sharpest tool in the Commonwealth’s shed, as witnessed by his flailing performance in a preliminary debate with his likely general election rival, Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine.
While the title of Morse’s piece ostensibly refers to Kilgore’s unique position as a visible and independent statewide GOP elected official who served his time in the party and conservative cause, you have to assume there’s a sneaky reference here to the unlikely, idiot-savant politician Chauncy Gardiner of the Jerzy Kosinski novel (and Peter Sellers movie), “Being There,” as well. “Kilgore is game,” quoth Morse, “but someone must hand him the right script.”
As we speak, someone in the vast infrastructure of the Virginia or national GOP may be working on that script. “In the fall, we plant the seeds. And in the spring, the flowers bloom,” as Chauncy Gardiner explained the theory of supply-side economics.

Just before the election, I offered readers a list of Ten Magic Phrases designed to make them sound like political insiders, and promised to eventually publish a parallel list of terms aimed at helping aspiring young jiveasses sound like Washington Insiders. True, at the time I thought this might prove helpful to Kerry campaign alumni, instead of eager-beaver BC04 staffers fresh from vote-suppresion efforts in Ohio, but what the hell, a promise is a promise.
I should mention that I’ve picked up these tips at a respectable distance, having worked pretty hard to avoid becoming a Washington Insider myself. Yesterday marked my tenth anniversary of full-time work here in the Emerald City, and I’m proud to say I’ve never attended a Washington cocktail party, made anybody’s list of up-and-comers or even has-beens, eaten lunch at The Palm, or hung out in a Georgetown Salon. Still, you soak up a lot of this crap by simple osmosis, so here we go:
1. “This Town.” Washington, DC, is a city of more than a half-million people, and the center of a metropolitan area of about three million people. But Insiders invariably call it “this town,” as in: “Those of us who understand the real sources of power in This Town…” or “The word around This Town….” The terminology is intended to convey the Insider’s intimacy with the small, cozy network of fellow Insiders who actually pull the levers in “This Town,” and also to indicate membership in the Permanent Washington Establishment, as opposed to the shabby parvenus who come and go because, say, they are elected to the U.S. Senate.
2. “Downtown.” Another geographical Insider reference, which sometimes refers generally to The Executive Branch of the Federal Government, and sometimes specifically to The White House and its hyper-powerful occupants.
3. “Style Profile.” This refers to the ultimate goal of every Washington Insider, which is to be profiled in a big, fat article on the front page of the Washington Post Style Section. If given a choice, most Washingtonians would rather achieve a Style Profile than win a Nobel Prize.
4. “The Hill.” Short for Capitol Hill, meaning Congress. Subsidiary terms include “House Side” and “Senate Side,” which refer to entire neighborhoods, not just to the legislative chambers or their office buildings, as in the common Hill Intern greeting: “It’s Dollar Margarita Night at Red River over on the Senate Side.”
5. “Chairman’s Mark.” One of many magic phrases from the congressional arena, this refers to a first draft of a committee or subcommittee’s version of a bill, before “mark-up,” the formal drafting action. Getting hold of an pre-release copy of a “Chairman’s Mark,” or speaking knowledgeably of its contents, is a really big deal in Washington, usually legal tender for free drinks.
6. “CR,” “UC,” “Rule.” Just three of the magic parliamentary phrases that deal with congressional floor actions. A CR is a “continuing resolution,” a means of providing appropriations when, as is generally the case, appropriations bills are late or never finished. A “UC” is a “unanimous consent agreement,” which means regular business can be suspended to handle some quotidien chore unless a Member objects. In the House, The Rule represents the restrictions placed on amendments to a bill on the floor, with “closed rules” prohibiting amendments becoming wildly popular under that chamber’s current management.
7. “Columbus Day Recess.” In America, Columbus Day is a relatively minor bank-and-government holiday of special significance to Italian-Americans. In This Town, it represents a lengthy annual Congressional recess thanks to its proximity to both the beginning of a new fiscal year, and biennially, to Election Day. Definitely make and loudly announce your plans for the Columbus Day Recess early in your Washington tenure.
8. “CBO Baseline.” The most popular of many budgetary phrases, meaning the Congressional Budget Office’s annual estimates of present and future spending and revenues based on what would happen if, miraculously, Congress did nothing. “Out-Years,” referring to future budget estimates, is another nice phrase, as in: “That prescription drug benefit is pretty tasty for seniors today, but the out-year costs will be a bitch.”
9. “Hold Harmless.” This is just one example of thousands of cool Insider terms from the wonderful world of federal grant programs. It means a provision which ensures that no jurisdiction actually loses money when the funding formula for a program is rejiggered to benefit some constituency favored by Hill Barons or an Important Person Downtown.
10. “Meet.” Short for the most important weekly gabathon, “Meet the Press,” the Washington equivalent of Sunday School, as in “Didja see what Russert asked Frist on ‘Meet?'”
Ah, there are so many other Magic Phrases, and given the relative seclusion of my messy little office on The House Side, I’m probably a few years behind in the latest legerdemain. After all, WashingtonTalk does evolve. Ten years ago I would have included the term “A.A.,” short for Administrative Assistant, the then-universal term for congressional chiefs of staff, an appellation since discarded when Washingtonians realized the title had become a neologism for “secretary” throughout the private sector. And some once-Insider terms, including “K Street,” “West Wing,” and of course, “The Beltway,” have entered the common vocabulary via television and other popular media.
So: use these Magic Phrases judiciously, but never forget that Insiderdom is a circle constantly exerting centripetal pressure to exclude People Like You. Because there’s only enough air here to nourish a limited number of ever-expanding egoes.

Let me be upfront about this: I remain a fan of David Brooks for the simple reason that he is capable of a level of humor, and of sociological insight, that are rare in Washington, even if both those qualities have clearly suffered after his acceptance of the House Conservative spot on the New York Times op-ed page. His 1995 Weekly Standard piece, “How To Become Henry Kissinger” (available online, I am sad to say, only in an excerpted version unless you subscribe to The Standard) remains far and away the most screamingly funny send-up of the Washington Think Tank culture ever written. And nearly all his various ruminations on red-state and blue-state culture have been worth reading, even allowing for the methodological sloppiness and overstatement that so many of his rather humorless critics have exposed.
But Brooks has fallen into a habit that is once again on full display in his column today: drawing lines between the two parties, and between the Left and Right of American politics, that are distinctly remote from reality, in the apparent effort to make his partisan brethren seem more reasonable than they actually are.
I first noticed this habit back in 2000, when George W. Bush savagely despatched Brooks’ candidate, John McCain, and before you could say “revisionist history,” Brooks penned a puff piece (sorry, no link available here) on W. that essentially said he had adopted McCain’s “national greatness” message.
More recently, on the eve of a Republican National Convention that lionized Bush’s right-wing record, message and agenda, Brooks was at it again, in a lengthy and much-discussed New York Times Magazine feature that triumphantly outlined a future “progressive conservative” Republican ideology. The only problem was that about 98% of the delegates at the Convention would have violently rejected as godless liberalism most of the suggestions Brooks made.
And now, in his column today, Brooks draws a picture of “liberal” and “conservative” economic strategies from so great a height of generality that he doesn’t seem to notice, or doesn’t want readers to notice, that he’s not actually describing the options the two parties are offering to the American people.
“Conservatives have tended to favor the American model, with smaller government and lower taxes, but less social support” says Brooks, while liberals “have supported programs that lead to the European model, with bigger government, more generous support and less inequality.” In a nice ju-jitsu trick, Brooks winds up arguing that the only reason America can afford to continue programs “liberals” favor like Social Security is that “we have not been taking their advice for the past 50 years.”
Aside from the cheap shot of identifying conservatives with America and liberals with Europe, which indicates that Brooks may have the private vice of spending too much time watching Fox News, there’s the little problem that both of his characterizations of “conservative” and “liberal” economic theories are straw men.
The mainstream of American liberal economic policy has never been thoroughly “Social Democratic” in the European tradition; one of its hallmarks has been support of an “American Model” that combines strategic public investments that promote growth, along with relatively small “social supports” that prevent mass impoverishment and promote upward mobility, and the maximum degree of entrepreneurial freedom consistent with genuine competition and key social goods like a clean environment. That’s certainly where most Democrats this side of Dennis Kucinich want to take our economic policies today.
Moreover, the rise of the contemporary Conservative Movement in the U.S. has led the Right towards economic theories that abandon this “American Model” in favor of a monomanical commitment to lower taxes for high earners and lowering business costs regardless of the social costs–an “American Model” only if you think of Mississippi circa 1975 as a model for anything other than economic self-abasement. And to the extent that today’s conservatives can be said to embrace the true “American Model,” it’s via the deeply dishonest method of engaging in massive public borrowing to sustain a social safety net the public demands, and to finance strategically targeted tax cuts aimed at favored constituencies. Brooks spends a lot of time in his column deploring the huge level of public debt in European countries today. Exactly which party, and which end of the ideological spectrum, is associated with the happy accumulation of public debt in this country? It ain’t us donkeys, David.

The Papers of Record over the weekend had two items that cast a revealing light on the shifty reasoning behind the current conservative drive to ram “strict constructionist” judges through the Senate. In WaPo, George Will, through the device of putting unlikely words in George W. Bush’s mouth, argues that this drive is only incidentally about abortion; Roe v. Wade needs to be reversed, he suggests, not because it is likely to lead to the outlawing of abortions (he denies, in fact, that states would do anything of the kind), but simply because the decision was such an egregious affront to democracy.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Christian Right leader James Dobson is issuing threats to “red state” Democratic Senators to take them down in 2006 if they interfere with the GOP’s judicial nomination agenda. Indeed, Dobson promised “a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea” if Bush doesn’t get his wat in shaping the courts, and especially the High Court.
Now: does anyone really believe James Dobson gives a damn about theories of constitutional interpretation, judicial review, or the policymaking powers of state governments? Is it conceivable that if Roe is reversed Dobson will get out of politics with a deep sense of satisfaction, happy to trust the wisdom of the states on how to regulate abortion? Is there any doubt that Dobson would be the most avid supporter of judicial activism on earth if a future Supreme Court were to recognize the fetus as a human being shielded from destrution under the Equal Protection Clause? Of course not. He wants to criminalize abortion by any means necessary, and all the talk about “activist judges” is just a shuck.
I realize there are legitimate arguments against Roe‘s constitutional provenance; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for example, wrote about them before her own appointment to the Court. But there are not a few questionable decisions in the Court’s recent history, including, ahem, Bush v. Gore, and just about every opinion penned by Sandra Day O’Conner. But somehow these shaky decisions don’t lead to a relentless campaign to reshape the federal judiciary. That’s because the real issue here is abortion, and nothing else.
Pro-choice advocates frequently make the mistake of suggesting, and perhaps even believing, their opponents are motivated by generally reactionary social views at best or by savage misogyny at worst. Some of them may well fit that profile. But for the most part, serious right-to-lifers oppose abortion because they think it’s legalized murder, adding up to an ongoing American Holocaust. So they aren’t going to stop at overturning Roe v. Wade; and their ultimate aims include bringing the full power of the state to bear on physicians and women to stop every abortion for every purpose at every stage of pregnancy. And if you thought legalized abortion represented mass murder, you’d probably feel the same way.
I can’t completely explain why fundamentalist Protestants have joined conservative Catholics in taking this position. Catholic opposition to abortion is rooted in an Aristotelian natural law tradition that goes right back to scholasticism, and sola scriptura Protestants have to twist the Bible pretty hard to come up with much of anything on the subject. But it’s important to understand these are serious people who are deadly serious about their goals.
For that very reason, pro-choice Americans need to be highly strategic in how they deal with the current drive to outlaw abortion one step at a time. Don’t concede the “judicial restraint” argument by opposing every conservative judicial nominee regardless of his or her actual impact on the law. Don’t help serious right-to-lifers disguise their agenda and win unwitting allies by treating every proposal to marginally (or in most cases, symbolically) restrict abortions as though they represent a fundamental threat to the right to choose. Don’t demonize Democrats who fail to meet some absolutist litmus test. And do keep your eyes on the prize: the basic right to choose, which for the foreseeable future is going to be challenged as never before by people who haven’t for a moment forgotten their ultimate goals.

There are plenty of other political lessons we learned in 2004, but I think I’ll conclude with what we learned about our dear ol’ fightin’ donkey, the Democratic Party.
On the plus side, we learned we could get through a tough general election battle, after a fractious nominating process, with extraordinary unity. It wasn’t always easy, but we made it look that way.
We learned it was possible to use technology to create a whole new, decentralized, small-dollar donor base, reducing an advantage the GOP has had in small-dollar funding for a generation, and enormously increasing the overall amount of money available to our candidates. The diversification of the party’s financial base also reduced our dependence on big-money sources ranging from corporations to trial lawyers to unions, without significantly diminishing these sources.
We learned Democrats could at least begin to compete in the “new media” sources of political commentary and advocacy previously dominated by conservatives, ranging from radio to cable TV to the Internet and its boisterous spawn, the blogosphere.
And we learned that Democrats could win younger voters. Although there were not enough of them to make a big difference this year, Democratic strength in the younger cohorts of Americans is a good and important sign for the future.
On the minus side, we learned that self-identified Democrats no longer outnumber Republicans for the first time since the New Deal.
We learned that a lot of the negative perceptions of the Democratic Party that we thought had gone away during the Clinton administration were simply dormant.
We learned that all the excitement, enthusiasm, and money generated by the Dean/MoveOn/Blog phenomena of 2003 are not necessarily transferable into votes.
We learned that we could use a new generation of pollsters and campaign consultants.
And we learned that Republicans have now gained a geographical advantage in the country that undoubtedly gives them an edge in control of state governments, of the U.S. Senate, and (indirectly, through redistricting) of the U.S. House, and a strategic advantage in presidential campaigns as well.
The post-election analysis among Democrats has been relatively free of recriminations (though the brewing campaign for the DNC chairmanship threatens to change that happy situation), with the main divide separating those who think the party needs to significantly change to become competitive in broader parts of the country, and those who think we just need to raise more money, excite more activists, and attract more Hispanic voters, and things will be just fine.
While most Democrats agree that we should now become (in Washington, at least) a loud-and-proud opposition party, there is less consensus about the positive message Democrats should stand for. And some of us, especially at the DLC, are worried about (a) the tiny investment we are making as a party on new policy ideas–we’re basically all living off the policy thinking of the Clinton administration; and (b) the relative lack of interest in the current intra-party debate about Democratic state and local elected officials, who deserve at least as much attention as grass-roots activists and Washington consultants in plotting the course forward.
It’s been a painful but instructive year for this Donkey, and for all of us. And may we toast the New Year with a prayer for unity, imagination and courage.

At my age, and after a lifetime of changing perspectives on just about everything, there aren’t that many rituals that take me right back to early childhood, other than the passion of Election Night and the feeling of renewal that accompanies Easter Morning in every variety of Christian faith.
But then there’s New Year’s Day, when every single atavistic southern chromosome in my body drives me to a television to watch college football.
It surely ain’t what it used to be. In those pre-ESPN, pre-BCS days of my childhood, you would get in front of your black-and-white television with its three channels right after a gut-busting lunch of turkey and ham, and switch back and forth (without benefit of a remote) between the Sugar and Cotton Bowls. After a brief break from eating still more wonderful and non-nutritious food, you’d tune in to the Rose Bowl, followed immediately by the prime-time Orange Bowl, which would usually end at about midnight. There was no “championship game” unless a traditional bowl was lucky enough to get a number one/number two matchup, and no trophy presented on national TV.
Us serious college football fans were dimly aware at the time that there were big monetary stakes involved in these New Year’s games (with the Rose Bowl being the richest), but none of us could have told you the payoff for a particular bowl within a hundred grand, which was real money then. And there were no–repeat, no–corporate sponsorships of bowl games, no Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, much less bowls named completely for the sponsor like the ludicrous Continental Tire Bowl (it’s a small miracle that small children will not be exposed this year to a Viagra Bowl, but just wait).
Tomorrow morning, I will not be able to follow the exact ritual of my childhood, because my team, the Georgia Bulldogs, will be playing at 11:00 a.m., in a bowl named after a certain pseudo-Australian steak house known for its inspired variation on the traditional southern onion ring. I probably won’t bother with the later bowls, just as my interest in the March presidential primaries has lagged unless the outcome happens to matter.
But for at least three hours, I will join my distant cousins and red-and-black-state compadres in watching every play from the money-stained, corporate-dominated Outback Bowl, making barking noises where appropriate. This will signal my own recognition of the continuity between the year passed and the year ahead, and the importance of ritual in coping with an era that seems dangerously evergreen.

Washington’s Secretary of State (a Republican) has now officially certified Christine Gregoire’s election as Governor by 129 votes following a hand recount of ballots, the last stage in the state’s process for recounting votes in a very close election. But losing GOP candidate Dino Rossi, who had taken to calling himself “Governor-elect” after holding infinitesimal leads prior to the hand recount, is not accepting the certified results, and is demanding a new election.
There was nothing shady or unexpected about Gregoire’s taking the lead after the hand recount. Most Washington counties use optical scanners, a voting method which, despite its many virtues, tends to produce a significant number of counting errors, usually to the detriment of Democratic candidates. A few weeks ago, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox told me she was certain Gregoire would ultimately prevail for that very reason.
As for Rossi’s refusal to concede, there is, of course, a great deal of irony in the inability of a Republican candidate to accept a Republican certification of an election. As I am sure we all remember, George W. Bush’s success in the 2000 post-election legal wrangle owed a great deal to his campaign’s decision to treat certification of the results as a “final victory,” and to denounce the Gore campaign’s efforts to secure hand recounts as an attempt to overturn the results.
In this case, we not only have a certified result, but a certified result following a hand recount, so Rossi is hardly entitled to bitch. I recommend that Washington Democrats speedily begin referring to Governor-elect Gregoire as “Governor,” and to her vanquished opponent as Dino “Loser” Rossi. Sauce for the geese, sauce for the gander.

Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about “cultural issues,” but in this post, I’d like to take on the subject more systematically.
There’s been a less-than-illuminating back-and-forth debate on the importance of “moral values” in the 2004 elections that’s been going on since November 3. Some observers saw that “moral values” was the single most important factor cited by voters in the Edison exit polls, and went stampeding off into a variety of colorful hysterics about the vast gulf in weltanschaung between “red state” and “blue state” Americans.
Others then noted both the vagueness of this category, and the unnatural importance assigned to it by the exit-poll practice of dividing up other issues (e.g., national security and domestic governance) into smaller categories that diminished their apparent significance. But these same observers often stampeded off into ridiculous overstatements of the irrelevancy of cultural issues, typically by arguing they were no more significant this year than in 2000–which is a bit like saying that baseball salaries aren’t too high because they didn’t much go up over the last twelve months.
The first step towards clarity about “moral values” is to distinguish the two very different ways in which this term is typically used: (a) the relative ability of politicians to frame their biographies, their principles, their agendas, and their messages in terms that convey a distinct sense of the values that matter more to them than personal power and ambition; and (b) a set of concerns about “moral issues” which typically touch on various perceived threats to “traditional values,” including the nuclear family, parental and social authority, personal responsibility, the strength of faith communities, and in general, the belief in the ability of Americans to perceive and enforce clear standards of “right” and “wrong” behavior.
There is a pretty strong consensus among Democrats today that we need to do something to strengthen the party on the first definition of “moral values.” And that’s a very good thing. As a coalition party, Democrats have to try harder than the ideologues of the GOP to articulate the values that unite them, even as they sometimes disagree on policy positions or political strategies. And as the party of public sector activism, Democrats inherently have a more complex agenda and message than the ostensibly anti-government Republicans, and have to try harder to avoid the gobblydegook language of government programs and policy nuances.
This should not be a matter of simply wrapping Democratic policy positions in “values language” or, God forbid, “God Talk.” What’s needed is a re-engineering of Democratic message to place values first, policy goals second, and programmatic ideas third and last. And for those of you who think of the DLC as unprincipled, poll-driven opportunists, I will mention here that we have been conducting values-based message and agenda training for state and local elected officials for seven years, pushing literally hundreds of Democrats, many of whom had no prior relationship with us, and some of whom disliked us going in, into rethinking their basic principles, uniting around values and big policy goals, and then developing an ideas agenda aimed at reflecting those values and implementing those policy goals. In many cases, these Democrats came up with policy positions the DLC would not necessarily agree with, but we didn’t care (please note this, Kos, since you consistently claim the DLC is determined to impose some ideological litmus test on the party).
I’m not arguing that there’s anything unique about our approach, but Democrats of all stripes should undertake something similar, as a matter of principle and of political survival.
But it’s the second definition of “moral values”–the one that deals with what we think of as “cultural issues”–that hangs fire among many Democrats.
The case for trying to improve Democratic performance among voters worried about “cultural issues” is pretty obvious: we are consistently losing millions of voters, especially white non-college educated men and women, whose economic interests would normally indicate support for Democrats. And to those who argue that only a hyper-populist economic message can win these voters back, the big counter-example is Bill Clinton, who won them in both 1992 and 1996, in no small part because he was able to deal with cultural issues more directly and sensitively, without in any way abandoning progressive policy positions.
What did Clinton do that Al Gore and John Kerry couldn’t do on cultural issues? He did two simple things: (a) projecting a message that acknowledged the legitimacy of cultural concerns, and found common ground, as in making abortion “safe, legal and rare,” and defending both gay rights and the right of states to define marriage; and (b) directly addressing concerns about cultural threats to the traditional family by advancing a limited but family-friendly agenda of proposals (derided by pundits at the time) like expanded family leave, youth curfews, school uniforms, and V-chips. And had the issue fully emerged during his presidency, there is almost zero doubt that Clinton could have found a way to support public partnerships on social projects with faith-based organizations in a way that honored religious communities’ contributions without abandoning separation of church and state.
Simply emulating Clinton’s approach would be a good first step towards de-toxifying cultural issues, but in today’s more polarized and mistrustful atmosphere, Democrats must do more. And the obvious place to start is by extending the routine Democratic demand for corporate responsibility to the entertainment corporations which purvey the sex-and-violence saturated products that emblemize the threat to traditional culture so many Americans perceive.
The unwillingness of many Democrats to “go there” is strange but pervasive. Some, of course, simply view Hollywood as a reliable source of campaign contributions that must not be criticized, a cynical approach that reinforces every conservative stereotype about the party. Others change the subject by claiming that any effort to promote some self-regulation of entertainment products amounts to censorship or even repression, as though the utterances of Paris Hilton, as opposed to those of Joe Camel, merit judicial protection. And still others resist the very idea of “compromise” with the yahoos who watch reality shows three hours a night but profess to deplore the hellbound direction of American culture. (History, of course, shows repeatedly that the most culturally threatened people are those who are complicit in the tranformation of culture from what they honor to what they desire).
It’s not that hard for Democrats to identify with, and reassure, culturally threatened Americans that they live in the same moral universe, and that they are vastly superior to the GOP in their ability to manage change–economic, cultural, and geo-political–in a way that reflects our common values and respects our differences. But we can’t do that if we continue to deny or minimize this problem, or pretend that cultural concerns are a fool’s substitute for material matters.
The lesson we learned in 2004 is that our obtuseness on “moral values”–in both the senses discussed above–enables a cynical and in many respects immoral GOP to pose as the cultural champion of people they fully intend to betray. And continuing to let them do that is the ultimate, damning judgment on the “moral values” of Democrats.

The next stop in the discussion of lessons learned during this painful Year of Our Lord 2004 is the subject of Democrats’ difficulties in projecting a strong and confident message and agenda on national security.
There’s a reasonably broad consensus among Democrats on the importance of this problem for the Kerry campaign, though (a) there are still those who believe Kerry should have largely conceded the issue to Bush and just hammered away at the economy and health care, and (b) there are even more (perhaps four out of five supporters of a certain Doctor) whose idea of a “strong and confident” security message was to simply and loudly oppose the invasion of Iraq. At the other end of the consensus are those, for whom The New Republic has been the major post-election sounding board, who think security dwarfs every other Democratic handicap, and who argue for a forceful repudiation of non-interventionist and “soft multilateralist” views as a threshold requirement for Democratic recovery.
Perhaps the first step we should take in properly assessing the security issue is to recall that this has been a persistent problem for at least a quarter-century. Anyone who didn’t live through the Carter administration as a news-watching adult can barely imagine the extent to which the last pre-Clinton Democratic president became identified with U.S. weakness and futility. The botched hostage rescue attempt in 1980 was the absolute nadir in modern American military and diplomatic prestige. And in the 1980s and through the First Gulf War, Democrats were divided on national security issues, while Republicans got (unearned) credit for the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and a series of easy military victories in Granada, Panama and Iraq.
Bill Clinton did a lot to lay to rest the post-Vietnam legacy of weakness and division of the Democratic Party on security matters by deploying military force, though the Kosovo intervention was the only action that resembled the previous administrations’ relatively cost-free victories.
But frankly, and this is important to remember today, the American people did not much care. You probably have to go back to the mid-1930s to find a time when the U.S. population was so resolutely uninterested in world events as it was in the 1990s. Mark Penn did a survey for the DLC in 1997 that used a technique called “conjoint analysis,” which aimed at discovering which options in policy positions in four broad areas (economy, role of government, “values” and international affairs) most determined the decision to vote for one candidate over another. To our shock (and, as Democratic internationalists, our dismay), Penn found that there was virtually no position on international issues, encompassing national security, foreign relations, and trade, that could “turn” a voter. And this disinterest was not simply a matter of post-Cold War fatigue or “isolationism:” political and economic freedom appeared to be sweeping the globe with little or no direct involvement by the U.S. government or military. Aside from Kosovo, the “national security” debates of the Clinton era generally revolved around exactly how fast to pare back defense spending, along with relatively marginal arguments about military pay, base closing decisions, and a few weapons systems.
So: when it is said that “9/11 changed everything” in terms of the political importance of national security, we should remember that the sense of disjunction was partly attributable to the remarkable, and historically anomalous, 1991-2001 era it replaced. In many respects, the country returned to its pre-1991 psychology, which included persistent doubts about the national security credentials of the Democratic Party. And that’s the background–raised in even higher relief by a 2002 cycle in which Democrats kept trying to change the subject to domestic issues–against which the impact of national security on the 2004 presidential election must be assessed.
At an analytical level, John Kerry did a creditable job of handling national security issues, especially towards the end of the campaign when he consistently blasted the administration for an Iraq adventure that distracted from the war on terrorism, essentially adopting the Bob Graham-Wes Clark “right idea, wrong Arabs” approach of opposing the war on national security grounds. But he never achieved the simplicity of the Graham-Clark message, in part because of his own wandering views on Iraq, and in part because the other elements of his national security agenda sounded like a Foreign Service School master’s thesis, which a lot of fine detail but little in the way of a clear overarching theme. And that’s where Bush and his allies really nailed him as a guy who had trouble making decisions about national security without an extraordinary number of qualifiers. The “87 billion” issue was devastating because it offered what appeared to be a simple choice of supplying the troops or not, and Kerry came across as a guy who couldn’t satisfy the commander-in-chief qualification of decisiveness on national security, running against an incumbent whose message was that he would never think twice about using force when he thought it was necessary to protect the country and its interests.
Mesmerized no doubt by polls showing increasing public doubts about the wisdom of the Iraq war, Kerry’s advisers pushed him to exploit that weakness at every stop. In the end, however, the folly of the admninistration’s Iraq policy did little or nothing to undermine public faith in Bush’s record on fighting terrorism generally, and that, not Iraq, was the ball game on national security. At a subrational level, many Americans who were disturbed by the course of events in Iraq–and retroactively, by the deceptions Bush used to get the war going–probably sized up Bush as follows: some Arabs killed a lot of Americans; Bush killed a lot of Arabs, and whatever else happened, there were no more attacks on the United States. Kerry’s critique of Bush’s record never adequately addressed those feelings, while reinforcing Republican claims that Kerry would be another Jimmy Carter, all talk and deliberation, but little or no action in difficult cases.
Now that we are past the “first-post-9/11” presidential election, and the original decision to invade Iraq is becoming less relevant to the present situation, are Democrats over the worst of their national security handicap? Can they unite around a credible and distinct message and agenda that convinces a majority of Americans they can be trusted to defend the country decisively, but more intelligently than the bellicose and unilateralist GOP?
There are real grounds for optimism here. At the level of policy elites, there’s not a lot of disagreement among Democratic foreign policy thinkers about the road forward for America, even if there remain disagreements about the road that led us to Baghdad. Early this year, the DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, helped put together a manifesto entitled Progressive Internationalism that presented a tough, smart, clear foreign policy strategy for the country that was highly critical of Bush without succumbing to defeatism in the war on terror or ignoring the real differences that will continue to cause problems between the U.S., our traditional allies, and multilateral organizations. A very broad array of Democratic foreign policy gurus signed onto this document. It’s probably a good first draft for Democratic unity on international issues going into the next election cycle.
But on the other hand, there are differences of opinion among Democrats–especially among party activists–that go deeper than Iraq. As University of Maryland professor and long-time DLC advisor (and, for the record, a vocal opponent of the decision to invade Iraq) Bill Galston has often pointed out, when asked if they believe U.S. military power is, on balance, a force for good or evil in the world, Americans endorse the positive view by a four-to-one margin. But the vast majority of the 20% who take what might be called the Michael Moore position are Democrats. This is the reality that led Peter Beinart in his now-famous post-election essay to argue that Democrats will never shake their reputation of weakness, irresolution, and yes, even anti-Americanism until they decisively repudiate this point of view, even if it means intra-party heartburn.
Now, it’s possible that after another four year of governance by George W. Bush that 20% figure will rise to something approaching an electoral majority (though it almost certainly will not do so in places like the South). And it’s also possible, as Noam Scheiber argued in his response to Beinart, that Michael Moore Democrats will loyally support an overall foreign policy they don’t necessarily agree with in the broader interest of getting rid of the incompetent warmongers of the GOP. But unsettling as it is, this is a subject that will require continued, honest debate among Democrats over the next two-to-four years.
The main lesson we learned on national security in 2004 can be summed up by the warning Bill Clinton provided Democrats nearly two years ago: given a choice, Americans will support candidates who are strong and wrong over those who are (or who appear to be) weak and right. In George W. Bush, we had the perfect example of strong-and-wrong, so it’s clear the continuing weakness of the Democratic Party on national security had a lot to do with his re-election.

Happy Holidays to everyone, and to my co-religionists, Merry Christmas.
Down here in Central Virginia, it’s a relatively peaceful holiday, though the peacock nearly froze last night; the water pump from the spring went out for the second time in a month yesterday (potentially the result of sabotage by a jealous wannabe land owner); and my kid’s new dog devoured a ham bone intended for the beanpot.
Also late yesterday afternoon, I was sent on an essential supply run to the one place in the region still open: yes, that pariah of all left-thinking people, Wal-Mart, packed right up until closing time with less-than-prosperous looking folk trying to squeeze five toys for their children into a four-toy budget. It was a good illustration of the tangled morality of “low-road” retailers: which struggling families benefit, and which suffer, and who has the scales to measure it all? I certainly didn’t as I struggled to the parking lot loaded down with a small bag of loot and a large bag of guilt, with not an economist in sight to make me feel definitively better or worse.
In any event, despite my strong antipathy to Christmas commercialism and greed, I’m happy with my own haul of presents: Bruce Chilton’s Rabbi Paul, Michael White’s From Jesus to Christianity, Jessica Stern’s Why Religious Militants Kill, Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and one CD, Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose, which combines the skills of two of my favorite country and rock ‘n’ roll talents (the latter, of course, being Jack White). I got yet another book, entitled Enslaved by Ducks, a humorous account of a man’s gradual servitude to family pets, but can’t find the author’s name because the dog’s already destroyed the cover and the title page.
I’ll continue my posts on political lessons learned in 2004 tomorrow or so, but now it’s time to pack up all the wrapping paper I bought from various school fundraisers over the last year and decide whether to assuage my residual Christmas guilt by taking them twenty miles to the county recycling bin.
BTW, in entitling this post with the abbreviation “Xmas,” I’m reminded that an earlier version of the right-wing campaign to convince Christians that secular humanist jackboots are about to kick down their doors and smash their Christmas trees occurred during my childhood, when certain religious figures claimed “Xmas” was an effort to take “Christ out of Christmas.” It was years before I realized that the “X” was for the Greek letter “Chi,” an early Christian abbreviation of “Christ.”