Democratic Insecurities

Four years later, Gephardt is gone as minority leader, McAuliffe is gone as Democratic chairman, the economy is growing, Rove is still at the president’s side, and Republicans have picked up seats in the House and Senate in two consecutive elections. In both 2002 and 2004, voters told exit pollsters that the war on terror was a top concern. And voters, while disapproving of the president’s handling of Iraq, continue to give him sizable support when it comes to the fight against terror in general.

Unsurprisingly, then, at the 2006 gathering of the Republican National Committee on January 20, Rove said that national security again topped the list of issues in the midterm elections. Rove emphasized Iraq (“We hear a loud chorus of Democrats who want us to cut and run in Iraq.”), the Patriot Act (“Republicans want to renew the Patriot Act–and Democrat leaders take special delight in proclaiming they’ve killed it.”), and the administration’s warrantless domestic surveillance program. (“President Bush believes if al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they’re calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.”) His rhetoric was unapologetically partisan.

How will Democrats defend themselves against this line of attack? I spent most of last week speaking to Democratic congressmen and strategists, and still don’t know the answer. Most think national security and foreign policy will count for a lot less this year than in the recent past.

“The 2006 election won’t just be about national security,” Rep. Dan Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat, told me. Donna Brazile, the former Gore campaign manager, said she wouldn’t “bet the kitchen sink on one issue.” Former Clinton adviser Dick Morris wrote in an email that “unless Bush fails–and there is a new terror attack on the United States–or the Democrats succeed in emasculating the Patriot Act and the NSA wiretapping–security will not be the major issue in 2006.” And a New York-based consultant with close ties to Hillary Clinton said that “there are other issues–corruption, some of the economic issues–that may take precedence.”

A second line of argument is that national security may work against the Republicans. That depends, of course, on whether the major issue on Election Day is the war in Iraq, on which Democrats maintain an advantage, or the war on terror, on which the GOP trounces the opposition.

Thomas Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, thinks 2006 will be “the first test of whether the country has moved against the Republicans on Iraq, wiretapping, and so on.” Schaller suspects such a move has occurred. One Democratic foreign policy analyst suggested the Bush foreign policy coalition, made up of “Wilsonian” idealists and “Jacksonian” nationalists, may be in a state of collapse. The New York Democrat told me, “The president doesn’t have the credibility on this issue that he did four years ago.”

To one independent, however, all this sounds like wishful thinking. The Democrats have “done more damage” to their national security credentials “in the last three months than in the last 20 years,” Marshall Wittmann, a fellow at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, told me. Wittmann pointed to Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, which was seconded by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Howard Dean’s statement last winter that “we can’t win” in Iraq; Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s telling activists he was proud to have “killed the Patriot Act”; and the party’s sometimes hysterical response to the NSA surveillance controversy. Wittmann jokes that top Democrats suffer from “Bush-Tourette’s Syndrome”–their hostility to all things Bush causing spontaneous, damaging outbursts. “They believe that Bush is the major threat,” Wittmann says. “There’s a certain sentiment that we’re not engaged in a war on terror.”

Wittmann may be overstating the case. And yet it is true that many Democrats now simply trivialize or ignore the national security issue. In their new book, Take It Back, former Clinton advisers James Carville and Paul Begala acknowledge that “we Democrats have a national security problem”–only to turn around and call the Iraq war a “brain fart,” and facetiously suggest recruiting College Republicans to send to Iraq. “Maybe we should let them form their own divisions,” the two write. “The Fighting Frat Boys or the 102nd Trust Funders.”

Historian Rick Perlstein, in his widely touted The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America’s Dominant Political Party, asserts that “recent failures in Iraq point out just how threadbare the old stereotypes about wimpy Democrats and muscular Republicans remain,” arguing instead that his party’s recent losses stem from its abandonment of “economic populism.” Political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, in their acclaimed book Off Center, devote only a few paragraphs to national security, writing that the central question facing America today is, How have Republicans “managed to keep the divisive aspects of their domestic agenda”–which is to say, tax cuts–“from distracting public attention from . . . post-9/11 themes?”

There is evidence that some Democrats believe the party’s security deficit to be a problem. Last Wednesday, a political action committee called Band of Brothers held a rally at the National Mall where the 50-plus veterans running for office this year as Democrats protested the alleged “Swift-boating” of Murtha. The idea behind Band of Brothers is that biography trumps policy; that an antiwar candidate might assuage voters’ concerns about terrorism because he (or she) is a veteran. But this approach has not yet borne fruit: witness the recent political failures of Max Cleland, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, and Paul Hackett, the antiwar Ohio Democrat who (barely) lost to Representative Jean Schmidt in a special election last summer. This year, Hackett is running for the Senate. “You could call it a strategy from weakness,” said political scientist Schaller, referring to the Democrats’ veteran recruitment efforts.

Another approach looks for issues where Democrats might claim to out-hawk Republicans. Rep. Christopher Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, suggests that his party address the White House’s inability to follow the strictures of the 9/11 Commission, which continues to issue “report cards” on American homeland security efforts. Van Hollen further suggests that Democrats should push to contain the spread of nuclear weapons through bulk purchasing of old Soviet warheads, and tack to the right of the administration on Afghanistan. In an interview, Van Hollen criticized the White House’s plan to reduce the number of American troops there. “We need to make sure that Afghanistan does not become a failed state,” he said.

There is little debate, even among Republicans, that today’s political landscape favors the Democrats if national security is off the table. The issues that remain–the clumsy design and implementation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, accusations of corruption stemming from the investigation into the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, cuts in entitlements, energy prices–all work against the president and his party. And even if national security stays on the table, it is no sure bet that the GOP is better off.

Voters are sophisticated enough to understand that a vote for a representative or senator will have no discernible effect on U.S. foreign policy, over which the president wields so much control. One Republican consultant told me that the danger for Bush is the perception that Iraq is, for lack of a better term, a “no win war.” The consultant pointed out that a similar perception hurt incumbent presidents Truman in 1950 and 1952 and Johnson in 1966. Moreover, recent polling shows a growing discontent with the status quo–a discontent that can only harm the party that controls Congress.

But any landscape is subject to storms and earthquakes. When Rove addressed the RNC in 2002, leading members of both parties thought the dominant issue of the midterm elections would be the economic downturn. Back then, President Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the war on terror was limited to the rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan. By October, however, Bush had embraced a new domestic security department–thereby trapping Democrats beholden to public employees’ unions–and had introduced a bill authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

The Democrats were split. Eager to return to safe ground, they evaded the core issue of which party is best equipped to wield American power, and the Republicans made historic gains. Cautions the New York Democrat: “The election is never when you want it to be.”

Matthew Continetti is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.