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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Yes, the Democrats have serious problems. But without 9/11, they still would have trounced Bush and the Republicans.
Nov 7, 2002 | In the days and weeks ahead, as the Democrats try to make sense of the Bush-GOP train that just ran over them, there will be an orgy of soul-searching unmatched since Mao ordered Capitalist Roaders to engage in "constructive self-criticism." The worst Democratic Election Day debacle since at least 1994 is certain to inspire a torrent of accusations, recriminations and proposals. Some will say the Democrats lost because they no longer stand for anything. Others will blame their lackluster candidates and poor party leadership. Others will whack the Democrats for failing to get their message out. Still others will complain that the Democrats simply lack the GOP's killer instinct. And so on.
All of those criticisms are valid. The party is intellectually moribund and "triangulated" to death; its leaders are timid, mealy-mouthed nonentities. It's a mess that needs a thorough house-cleaning. But before Democratic voters jump off a cliff en masse or decide to register as Whigs, they need to take a deep breath and repeat this mantra:
It's the war, stupid.
Without the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush and the GOP -- presiding over a terrible economy, embracing far-right positions that put them out of step with most Americans -- would be toast right now. Tuesday's results were an anomaly, a classic case of the nation rallying around the president during wartime. Bush's popularity remains high, and his hard-driving campaigning in the election's last weeks appears to have tipped the scales. But take away his commander in chief's mantle, and Emperor Bush has no clothes.
Bush entered office having lost the popular vote in the most dubious election in American history, and he has exactly zero achievements to point to since then outside of pushing the "annihilate the Taliban" button, an action that hardly required the wartime leadership qualities of a Churchill. His massive tax cut brought joy to the hearts of anti-government zealots like Grover Norquist, but it did virtually nothing to help ordinary Americans and it will hamstring the economy for years to come. His heavy-handed unilateralism and moralistic hectoring has squandered the global goodwill Americans enjoyed after the terror attacks and has taken relations with key European allies like Germany and France to postwar lows. His obsession with Iraq and reactionary Middle East policies threaten to kick that hornet's nest open, with unforeseeable consequences. On issues from the environment to abortion rights to medical marijuana to corporate accountability, he has staked out positions well to the right of most Americans.
Under normal circumstances, and especially for a midterm election, this would not be a winning hand, no matter how lame your opposition. But on Tuesday, the desire of Americans to support a wartime president trumped everything else. "Don't you know there's a war going on, mister?" pretty much summed up the GOP's pitch. And even if the Democrats had come up with a better message or better candidates, that message probably would have prevailed.
Many Democrats, particularly those from the left wing of the party, blame their defeat on their party's failure to oppose two things: Bush's tax cut and his proposed war on Iraq. The two issues are completely different, however. As to the tax cut, the truth is that had the Democrats opposed it, they probably would have been defeated even more soundly than they were -- although I believe they should have done so anyway, sacrificing short-term pain for long-term gain. Tax cuts are kryptonite to the Democratic Party because they are popular with voters, and Republicans know this. But sooner or later, voters are going to realize that virtually all the benefits of the GOP tax cuts are going to a tiny handful of plutocrats and giant corporations -- and when that happens, it would be helpful if the Democrats have staked out a position distinguishing them from Republicans. In the short term, however, opposing the tax cut would not have helped stop the GOP and indeed would likely have made the rout worse.
The Iraq war is a different story. A principled Democratic resistance to Bush's plans to invade Iraq would probably not have affected the outcome of the midterm election. Osama simply gave Bush and the GOP too much of an advantage: The fear and confusion sown by the terror attacks made it difficult for most Americans to distinguish between different threats from the Arab world and led them to rally around the president. But the Democrats should have fought back anyway, for a variety of reasons. Opposing the Iraq resolution would not have hurt the Democrats nearly as much as they feared, and perhaps not at all. It would have weakened Bush by raising doubts about his leadership of the "war on terror" -- the one area where voters trust him -- and about whether that peculiar "war" actually exists. Above all, it would have broken through the congealed, "patriotic" bipartisanship that the Democrats have spinelessly engaged in since 9/11 -- a supine posture that has allowed Bush and the GOP to completely set the agenda and limit the terms of national debate. By buying uncritically in to the war on terror as defined by Bush, the Democrats implicitly accepted that the commander in chief was the gold standard of patriotism, wisdom, judgment and all the other virtues that wartime leaders must be believed to embody. Once they did that, trying to criticize him was like swimming against the current.
