Craig Crawford, who provides political analysis for the family of NBC channels and who used to be a staple of the Imus show, is also a columnist for Congressional Quarterly. He writes a piece today that looks at the recent Democratic debate and warns that the leading candidates might have come off sounding soft on terror:
Crawford says that the candidates are probably playing to the ‘peaceniks’ among their core primary voters, but the problem goes deeper than that. The problem is that the ‘peaceniks’ control the nominating process, and Democratic leaders are conforming their platforms and policies to those views. In other words, it’s not so much the rhetoric that’s weak; it’s the policies. Go to Obama’s website and try to find his plan for defeating al Qaeda. I’m not sure it’s there, since the few mentions of AQ don’t seem linked to any real policy statement. It doesn’t even warrant a mention in the page on ‘strengthening America overseas’ (which does include however, a plan for Sierra Leone). It doesn’t come up under “protecting our homeland,” either. How about Edwards? His site doesn’t spell out a policy on al Qaeda and the war on terror–although there’s lots on Iraq. That doesn’t really tell us anything though, since Democratic leaders remind us endlessly that Iraq and al Qaeda have nothing to do with each other. Further, Edwards has recently been cowed by his party’s base into dramatically ‘dialing down’ his language on Iran. Consistent with her comments at the Democratic debate, Senator Clinton’s ‘position paper’ on terror is more hawkish than her rivals. In her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, she said that we should increase troop levels in Afghanistan for the pursuit of al Qaeda. And with regard to Iran, she said that “Iran must not build or acquire nuclear weapons.” How to prevent it? We must “keep all options on the table”–including direct negotiations. But on this issue at least, even Clinton’s relatively moderate rhetoric is at odds with the direction of her party. We’ve chronicled before the push from the Democratic base to ever more dovish stances on Iraq. As the race for 2008 gets underway, the base is cheering those who dispute the idea that there is war on terror at all, and mocking the notion that we should fight until “every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” We all know that once they earn the nomination, presidential candidates from both parties do their best to move toward the center. So once one of these Democrats wins the party nod, the rhetoric will get somewhat tougher. But how much tougher can it get–particularly when a significant part of the party denies even the existence of a war on terror? Talking tough and being willing to use force are not the same as being better prepared to handle the terror threat. But which candidate will come across as more credible when one talks about the role of the military in disbanding terror networks abroad, and the other talks about the excesses of the Patriot Act?
