Democrats fear voters more than the enemy

Peter Beinart:

In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam chronicles Lyndon Johnson's absolute terror of appearing soft on communism. Having seen fellow Democrats destroyed in the early 1950s because they tolerated a Communist victory in China, Johnson swore that he would not let the story replay itself in Vietnam, and thus pushed America into war. The awful irony, Halberstam argues, is that Johnson's fears were unfounded. The mid-1960s were not the early 1950s. The Red Scare was over. But because it lived on in Johnson's mind, he could not grasp the realities of a new day.

In this way, 2008 is a lot like 1964. On foreign policy, many Democrats live in terror of being called soft, of provoking the kind of conservative assault that has damaged so many of their presidential nominees since Vietnam. But that fear reflects memories of the past, not the realities of today. When Democrats worry about the backlash that awaits Barack Obama if he defends civil liberties, or endorses withdrawal from Iraq, or proposes unconditional negotiations with Iran, they are seeing ghosts. Fundamentally, the politics of foreign policy have changed.

There are two big reasons. First, Americans are not particularly scared, at least not about military threats. Since Vietnam, the more frightening the world has appeared, the better Republican foreign policy attacks have worked. In 1979, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan suddenly made the world look much more dangerous and contributed mightily to Ronald Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter. Similarly, in 2004, the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks was still fresh. According to exit polls, 19 percent of voters said that terrorism was their top issue, and they overwhelmingly voted for George W. Bush.

Today, by contrast, the share of Americans citing terrorism as their primary concern hovers around 4 percent. Unless dramatic overseas events intervene, Americans will feel significantly less afraid in November than they did four years ago. In that way, the election of 2008 will be less like 1980 or 2004 than like the election of 1976, which took place after Vietnam and amid detente with the Soviet Union, or the election of 1992, which came after the Cold War ended. In both of those elections, Republican foreign policy attacks fell flat.

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When Democrats have won in those elections it was because of the success of Republicans in diminishing the threats to the US. I think much of Bush's problems in recent years come from the success of his efforts in defeating the enemy.

There is no way Democrats would be so concerned about terrorist privacy rights in the weeks after 9-11. Nor would they have been so concerned about the discomfort of the enemy when it came to getting information about pending attacks. In fact they would have been haranguing the administration and blaming them for not doing enough to stop those attacks.

Now in the comfort of the quite that was produced by these aggressive efforts the Democrats are lashing out at those who made the quite possible. Second guessing is one of their popular sports these days. They are determined to returned to the failed policies of the past where lawfare let some of the enemy evade justice and gave away our intelligence secrets.

Beinart seems to think that Demcorats should take advantage of this quite to steal an election so that those failed policies can be put back in place. That would only make this war last much longer and make it more costly.