How the Dems have Screwed Themselves

A reader writes:

Amidst rumors that Gen. Petraeus’s report on Iraq would be guardedly optimistic, President Bush recently spoke before an audience of veterans about the courage of Americans fighting there. Soon after, presidential candidates Clinton and Obama spoke before the same audience, and echoed the President’s sentiments. It seemed the President suddenly had the Democrats on the defensive. Is there really a difference between them? All three seemed to be singing the same song.

It was an odd moment for the candidates, especially Mr. Obama, who is generally adept at finding something original to say. But neither Obama nor Hillary were willing to point out the obvious, that if success in Iraq was a matter of military courage, we’d have won the war a long time ago. Really now, has any one ever suggested that we are having a rough time in Iraq because the troops aren’t up for the fight? What olive branch waving, folk-song singing peacenik has ever claimed that we are losing because Americans aren’t brave? None. Yet before an audience of veterans, neither candidate could be up front with the fact that it is the President’s policies, not the courage of our fighting forces, that are the source of our problems. Instead, both fell into echoing Bush’s post-card patriotism.

Thus, Bush managed to paint himself as the true friend of the military, essentially daring Obama and Hillary to be nay-sayers. But why did neither candidate point out that a President who commits our troops to a long-term conflict without a plan, is not their friend at all? Were the vets incapable of understanding that if a Commander in-Chief really cared about the armed forces, he’d be more careful about deploying them? Why are the Democrats so timid? Because they’re afraid of being misquoted and misinterpreted. Because, with some issues, it’s safer to utter platitudes and avoid trouble.

Americans claim to be tired of political slogans, and would like a little truth. But when a candidate tries to explain a point in measured, nuanced terms without overstating, and speaks knowledgeably, conveying a sense of balance, viewers get bored and change the channel. Every news programmer knows that lengthy paragraphs lead to ridicule, to accusations of being “wonkish,” and out of touch with the common man.

Last week, I heard a radio talk show featuring Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, a man I’m apt to disagree with about everything. However, on that day, the interviewer asked insightful, open-ended questions that allowed Mr. Huckabee to put his best foot forward, and give his ideas an honest airing. He actually sounded bright. He won’t get my vote, but after hearing him out, I have a bit more respect for him. That’s because the interviewer wasn’t trying to corner him into self-contradiction, or hang him on a fumbled sentence. Now if journalists could display a similar attitude towards all our candidates, we might learn what they really stand for.

The Dems are in the jam they are in because they have long ago sacrificed the notion of moral truth on the altar of abortion. They made the covenant with the devil the moment they decided that they were going to settle for pleasing images and empty rhetoric rather than for truth or justice. So now they are stuck. Having backed to the hilt a President whose complete contempt for the military and whose own moral vacuity was the defining feature of his Presidency (quote for me ten memorable words from the Clinton Presidency, not counting "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" "It all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" and "I loathe the military") and the problem becomes clear. The Dems (and particularly the Clintons) contempt for our troops and strained relationship with the truth is ingrained in the American psyche. The Dems desperately want to not be perceived as postmodern power worshippers. And so, President Bush can play that bogus patriot card even though, at a practical level, he is putting an intense strain on the troops in a misbegotten war founded on his complete disinterest in reality. He's gotten this far because he's been better at fanning flames of fear of Jihad and his supporters have been more skilled at accusing opponents of unpatriotism than the Dems have been at fanning flames of fear of Global Warming and accusing people of not caring about The Children. But nothing I've seen from either party indicates to me that they are serious. Katrina, our porous borders and the ongoing Bin Laden Show taught me that Bush is unserious about Jihad or homeland security. Gore's gigantic carbon buttprint makes clear that the Dems don't take seriously their scare tactic du jour. Politics has largely become a means of herding the largest number of TV viewers into various sheep pens through the use of loud air horns called "Hannity" or "Daily Kos" or "Rush Limbaugh" or Moveon. The idea of actual deliberation is almost lost to us.

Sooner or later, Americans will have to wake up and start paying attention to the virtue of prudence again. But at present we appear to be engaged in a vast experimental attempt to prove the accuracy of (IIRC) Plato's observation that, "If you will not have justice as king in your city, then you shall have pleasure and pain as your tyrants." Does anything in the current crop of candidates or the machinery of either party suggest to you that Prudence, Justice, Temperance, or Fortitude are criteria by which these pretty boys, con artists, and slickmeisters are being weighed? The only person to actually talk about ideas and the Constitution is routinely derided as a closet member of Al Quaeda for thinking that the Bill of Rights still means something.