A party at war with its past, its time and itself . . . from today's New York Times Magazine . . . a bit disconcerting if you're a Democrat . . .
The Things They CarryBy JAMES TRAUB
January 4, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/magazine/04DEMOCRATS.html"A few weeks ago, I asked Howard Dean how, given his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq, he felt he could overcome the Democrats' reputation as the antiwar party. ''I think you're still in the old paradigm, which says that they're the party of strength and we're the party of weakness,'' Dean admonished me as I sat across from him on his campaign plane. The chaos in Iraq, he said, had upended the old stereotypes. In John F. Kennedy's day, Dean pointed out, the Democrats enjoyed the reputation as the party of resolution. ''I think this may be the year to regain it, oddly enough,'' Dean said. ''Oddly enough'' is right. It seems awfully unlikely that in the first presidential election since 9/11, against a president who has spent most of his administration carefully cultivating and reinforcing his role as commander in chief, the Democrats can regain the status as the party of national security, which they lost during the Vietnam War. But that is precisely what party strategists were hoping through the fall as American troops got caught in the mayhem of Iraq and the nation's standing in the world plummeted lower and lower. And they had reason to think so. A poll conducted in November by the nonpartisan PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 42 percent of Americans said that the president's handling of Iraq decreased the likelihood of voting for him, versus 35 percent who said it had increased the likelihood. Another poll taken around the same time found that a majority of respondents believed that President Bush is ''too quick to use our military abroad'' and that he practices a ''go-it-alone foreign policy that hurts our relations with allies.'' Earlier, Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling and policy organization headed by the consultants James Carville and Robert Shrum and the pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, published a study with the following conclusion: ''When Democrats put out a clear message on national security, it now plays Bush's post-9/11, post-Iraq message to a draw.''
"It's not just the war in Iraq that prompted these hopes of realignment; it's the Bush administration's penchant for bellicosity, its barely concealed contempt for the United Nations and for many of America's traditional allies, its apparent confusion about how to deal with North Korea. Even some traditional internationalist Republicans believed that the Bush administration had abandoned many of the central tenets of the last several generations of national security policy while squandering much of the global good will that came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And for the chief presidential candidates, or at least for Dr. Dean, for Gen. Wesley Clark and, intermittently, Senator John Kerry, the war in Iraq became the central metaphor for the larger failure of the Bush administration to make Americans feel safe in a deeply unsafe world -- the thin edge of the wedge that would dislodge ''the old paradigm.''
"When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ''I'm not betting on it, and I'm hoping against it, but there's no indication that I should be expecting anything else.'' What neither of us knew at the time was that Saddam Hussein was already in custody, having been seized about eight hours earlier. The following day, when Hussein's capture was announced, there were endless TV images of Iraqis dancing with relief and joy, and even the most intractable foreign capitals issued gracious congratulations. There was no way of knowing whether Hussein's apprehension might prove as transitory a success as the toppling of his statue, but suddenly the antiwar position seemed like a less marketable commodity than it had the day before. And the fear of some senior Democrats -- and a considerable number of freshly polled voters -- that the party hadn't disposed of the old antiwar bogy, but rather raised it once again, appeared all too well founded."
- much more . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/magazine/04DEMOCRATS.html(registration requuired)
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