Sometimes Less IS More
How the Democrats Could Lose
Richard Cohen
By official count, The Washington Post’s 10th most e-mailed column of 2007 was published last June under the headline “How the GOP Could Win.” It said that the Republican Party would promote national security as the salient issue of the campaign, making a silk purse (victory in November) out of a sow’s ear (the quagmire in Iraq), and keep the White House for another four years. Increasingly, I think I might have been right.
It was Mitt Romney, the Harvard MBA, who left John McCain with what could be the winning business plan. In his campaign swan song, Romney used the two words you will repeatedly hear in the fall: retreat and defeat. Referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Romney said, “They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequence of that would be devastating.”
In my 2007 column, I compared this presidential campaign to that of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon. The parallels are in some ways obvious — the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, above all. What I could not have foreseen a year ago was how much more obvious the parallels would become. Back in ’72, the Democratic Party was split between doves and hawks, reformers and stogie smokers — even men and women. The result was a national convention that was boisterous, unruly and ugly to look at. It might, however, look like a tea party compared to what could happen in Denver this August.
At the moment, no one can figure how the Democrats are going to get a nominee. What the party needs is someone like George Mitchell, a senior figure of trusted wisdom who might be able to do what Howard Dean, the party chairman, clearly cannot — avoid the train wreck everyone can see coming. But barring either Mitchell or a miracle, neither Clinton nor Obama can garner sufficient delegates on their own. It might take a combination of superdelegates and a revote in Michigan and Florida — punished for holding unauthorized primaries — to come up with a nominee. By the time that happens, the Democratic Party will be one, huge, dysfunctional family.
In that 2007 column, I did not take the surge into account. Putting an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq has indeed made a difference. It has not won the war and it has not enabled American soldiers to come home, but it has dampened the violence there — notwithstanding the carnage on Monday. Overall, civilian deaths are down. Overall, military deaths are down. To that (limited but important) extent, the surge has worked.
When I mentioned 1972 and Vietnam to an important Clinton adviser, he pointed out that Nixon initially won in 1968 by saying he had a secret plan to end the war. That nonexistent plan was still apparently unfolding four years later. In addition, Nixon made opposition to war seem unpatriotic and defeatist. He exploited the war, exacerbating cultural divisions.
John McCain lacks Nixon’s raw talent for hypocrisy, so I don’t think he’ll go that far. But he will make his stand on the surge and it will be, for him, the functional equivalent of Nixon’s secret plan. McCain’s plan, he will say, is to win. The Democrats’ is to surrender. The issue, if he frames it right, will not be the wisdom of the war, but how to get out with pride.
McCain, of course, owns the surge. He advocated putting additional troops in Iraq way back when President Bush, deep into denial, was proclaiming ultimate faith in Rummy and his merry band of incompetents. McCain, in fact, oozes national security. His weakness is that he has too often advocated using — or bluffing — force (North Korea, Iran, the former Yugoslavia). With the deft application of just a little demagoguery, he can be made to look like Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), the deranged Air Force commander in Stanley Kubrick’s always instructional “Dr. Strangelove.”
You can see it all happening again: a Republican charging that the Democrats are defeatist, soft on national security and not to be trusted with the White House. And you can see the Democratic Party heading toward Denver for yet another crackup. This time, instead of McGovern, a genuine war hero (the Distinguished Flying Cross) caricatured as a sissy, the party will put up either a candidate who has been inconsistent on the war or one with almost no foreign policy or military experience. A year ago, it looked like the party could not lose. This year, it seems determined to try.
There are 2 Comments to "Sometimes Less IS More"
Hey thanks for the great blog, I love this stuff. I don’t usually read much into politics but with the election coming up (not to mention the dem primaries) and everyone going green these days I thought I would leave a comment.
I am trying to find more about the government and if they are going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol any time soon. Has anyone seen this pole on EarthLab.com http://www.earthlab.com/life.aspx . It said 75% of people think the government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol on Earth Day (when I took it). I also saw something on Wikipedia but it wasn’t up to date. Any other thoughts on where the government is going with this?
I am looking for more info on what candidates’ opinions are how are we are going to get closer to solutions. Drop a link of you see anything worth my time.
While I haven’t seen anything authoritive, and I’m certainly not an expert on this, I can give you my opinion.
Both Dem candidates do a lot of talking about going green, but in recent weeks have taken to hedging their bets on Iraq. This leads me to believe that neither is in a particular hurry to extricate the US from that war if it means giving up “American interests,” a codeword for oil. McCain seems intent on following the GWB school of thought: death before dishonor.
Petroleum will continue to be our country’s gold standard, and wars for the acquisition of it will continue. Otherwise, the price of oil will become so outrageous that nobody will be able to afford it. The only way this will change is if the pumps run dry, houses can’t be heated, and a general outcry is heard from the powerful on both sides of the aisle. Then, maybe an alternative fuel source will be sought after in earnest.
Maybe not, though. Big business runs this country, and as usual money comes first. The people and the environment will probably be left to suck hind tit.