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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Waffling and ambivalent during the war debate, Democratic leaders -- including presidential contenders John Kerry and Howard Dean -- say they'll muzzle themselves completely once the bombs start falling.
Mar 13, 2003 | Democrats have a brand-new dilemma over the looming Iraq invasion: What should they say -- especially the half-dozen or so camped out in Iowa right now, crusading for the '04 presidential nomination -- once war breaks out?
Even some antiwar Democrats are insisting they won't criticize the Bush administration once the fighting begins. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who's staked out a complex pro-disarming Saddam, anti-unilateral-war approach to the mess, says he'll hit the mute button immediately. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a more unequivocal war opponent than Kerry, told the Boston Globe he's not sure he'll keep it up once the shooting starts. War critics like former Sen. Gary Hart and Florida Sen. Bob Graham may postpone official announcements of their candidacies if war begins, as expected, in the next couple of weeks. Only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Sen. Carol Mosely-Braun, who are not given much chance of winning the nomination, have had the courage to tell reporters that they'll stick with their antiwar message come war.
This timidity is Reason No. 392 for the political question vexing Democrats right now: Why is it that polls show President Bush losing the '04 election to an "Unnamed Democrat," but beating all the Democrats who are currently in the race? Everyone knows this president is supremely vulnerable. He's plundered the surplus and pushed an economic policy that has arguably worsened the recession. He's angered most of our allies and is now on the verge of a potentially disastrous war whose rationale changes every day. His poll numbers dip almost daily, too.
But Bush can still probably beat any of the Democrats lined up against him, because no one yet has shown the charisma or the courage to break out of the pack. And otherwise admirable candidates like Kerry and Dean seem to be faltering in this early test of political integrity.
There's no denying the war presents a tough political riddle for Democrats. Every freshman pundit knows that Republicans are perceived as the national security party, so the nation's worries about war could very well help the president. That's widely used as the excuse for why the Democrats were creamed in the '02 midterm election last November. But in fact, the Democrats' worst political problem is the perception that they don't stand for anything, and their waffling on an antiwar message only confirms that. As a wag commented, there was more heated debate about the war in the Turkish parliament than in the U.S. Congress.
Kerry's waffling is at once more understandable, and more outrageous. The decorated Navy officer turned Vietnam Veterans Against the War leader knows one of his most valuable political assets is his stature as a guy who went to combat, running against a guy who dodged it. (Bush, you'll recall, served -- sporadically -- in the "Champagne Unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, named because it attracted other rich kids trying to duck the Vietnam War.) So Kerry explains his decision to stay mum once war begins as a gesture of solidarity with America's fighting men and women.
"It's what you owe the troops," Kerry said in a prepared news statement. "I remember being one of those guys and reading news reports from home. If America is at war, I won't speak a word without measuring how it'll sound to the guys doing the fighting when they're listening to their radios in the desert." If only Kerry remembered how he felt once he got home from Vietnam, when his worst fears were confirmed that the war was a huge mistake. (It would also be nice if he remembered there are gals, not just guys, on the front lines today.) He seems to have forgotten the question he is most famous for, the one he asked a U.S. Senate committee in 1971, demanding they shut the Vietnam War down immediately: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
The veteran Kerry knows better than most politicians how crucial it is, for our troops maybe more than for the rest of us, that we never put American lives on the line for the wrong reasons; that we only fight wars that are absolutely unavoidable. That's what we owe the troops. Here's how he put it to rapt Iowa Democrats in January (as captured by Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect): "The United States of America should never go to war because it wants to go to war; it should only go to war because it has to go to war."
As Kerry well knows, clearly this is a war Bush wants to fight, not one we have to fight -- at least not immediately -- and we're marching ahead now for reasons the president has only incoherently explained to the rest of the world. If the war is wrong today, it will be wrong the day fighting starts, it will be wrong the next day, and it will be wrong every day we're at war after that. If Democrats censor themselves once war begins, when will their silence be broken?
