Joe Lieberman on the Democrats
November 8th, 2007 at 09:37am Mark Noonan
Yep:
In the weeks and months after September 11, Democrats and Republicans put aside our partisan divisions and stood united as Americans. As late as October 2002, a Democratic-controlled Senate voted by a wide bipartisan margin to authorize President Bush to use military force against Saddam Hussein.As the Iraq war became bogged down in a long and costly insurgency, however, and as President Bush’s approval ratings slipped, Democrats moved in a very different direction—first in the presidential campaign of 2004, where antiwar forces played a decisive role in the Democratic primaries. As you may recall, they also prevailed in Connecticut’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary last year.
Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.
Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there.
Part of the explanation for this, I think, comes back to ideology. For all of our efforts in the 1990s to rehabilitate a strong Democratic foreign policy tradition, anti-war sentiment remains the dominant galvanizing force among a significant segment of the Democratic base.But another reason for the Democratic flip-flop on foreign policy over the past few years is less substantive. For many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy isn’t pacifism or isolationism—it is distrust and disdain of Republicans in general, and President Bush in particular.
Really, that is all there is - no rationality, no convincing alternative policy…just a hatred of a party in general and a man in particular. So ingrained is this hatred that there was actually a proposal to impeach Vice President Cheney this week…which, if you are a lunatic Bush-hater, would be the first step on the path to impeaching President Bush, ’cause you don’t want to remove Bush and get stuck with the even more evil Cheney, right?
As Senator Lieberman points out elsewhere in his speech, President Bush’s overall war policy is decidedly liberal - in the sense that our goal is to bring liberty to a benighted area of the world. President Bush was able to adopt this policy because he is not a conservative - not in the sense that, say, William F. Buckley is a conservative. While a man of conservative instincts (especially on life issues and matters of taxation), President Bush is really just a center/right American politician…akin, in a lot of ways, to the center/right governing ideas of an Eisenhower or, to a lesser extent, the center/left ideas of a Truman. In other words, President Bush is just a regular American - not of the left, but not too right, either. And yet he is hated with a white-hot passion on the left. Why should this be?
Quite honestly, it is Florida, 2000. First and foremost, the people of the left have not forgiven President Bush for winning the 2000 election. To this day they will mindlessly repeat the laughable falsehood that the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Bush; that Gore would have won a recount in Florida, if he had only been allowed to try. There is a great deal of mercilessness in American life these days - an unwillingness to forgive, a definitive desire to see everyone paid out to the last penny for what they have done. In my view, this is the result of a rise in paganism and barbarism in the American body politic - elements very strong in the left, but not unknown on the right.
Joe Lieberman hopes his Democrats will recapture their past glories and become, once again, defenders of American ideals. I fear that he will be disappointed - but we do need to change the dynamic of our political debate; we need to figure out how to get the poison out of our system, lest it destroy us eventually.
Entry Filed under: War on Terror
