Category: Politics

Have The Democrats Abandoned Democracy?

Ronald Asmus, a former advisor to Bill Clinton writes that the Democrats seem to have lost sight of their own foreign policy ideals:

Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy must be turning in their graves. Using U.S. power to promote freedom and democracy was central to their foreign policies and legacies. Even Jimmy Carter, a far less successful Democratic president, can be proud of making human rights a major U.S. foreign policy objective. And Bill Clinton’s interventions in the Balkans and drive to expand NATO were all about consolidating democracy in Europe’s eastern half. There was a time, not too long ago, when Democrats were proud of their track record on democracy promotion — and rightly so.

Is the party of Wilson abandoning Wilsonianism? Why have we gone mum on an issue that is so central to our own foreign policy heritage and past triumphs?

As usual, Asmus blames Bush — but this time rightly so. Because Bush has taken up the cause of democratic advancement, the Democrats don’t want anything to do with — despite the fact that it was supposedly one of the core values of the Democratic Party.

I’m more cynical than Asmus is — I believe that the Democrats have absolutely no principles anymore other than the naked exercise of power. They’d sell their mothers to take the White House in 2008 and expand their power in Congress — and given the meltdown of the Republican Party, they probably won’t have to. This hyperpoliticized climate is the reason why not only is democracy in Iraq in grave peril, but our own democracy is in serious trouble.

If all that remains is the will for temporal political power, we’re really no better than the Sunnis and the Shi’ites in Iraq — just with words rather than guns. How can we profess to value democracy when we’re entirely unwilling to defend it in Iraq? How can we honestly say we believe in a pluralistic society when we’re doing nothing to establish those values in the places where they are needed the most? The legacy of the Bush era will be the exposure of the fact that even when America is attacked, we’re too self-absorbed to manage but a few year’s efforts. The Democratic foreign policy has become nothing more than withdrawal for the sake of damaging a President (who is already politically irrelevant) regardless of the consequences. The true tragedy is that even if the Democrats get exactly what they want, the situation is only going to get worse. Only the most deluded of fools would think that absent the stabilizing force of the US and coalition military presence the situation would improve. Instead, Iraq truly would enter a period of bloody civil war that would quickly spread across its borders and consume the entire Middle East. We would have gone from an unstable “quagmire” to a regional war that would very likely end with a nuclear exchange.

Our mission in the post-September 11 world was to use the power of democracy to combat the authoritarianism that fuels terrorism. Now, that agenda lays in ruins. One can argue that Iraq was handled poorly — and certainly be right — but the way in which the promotion of democracy has been turned into part of some sinister “neocon” agenda shows that the United States has lost its values and lost its way. If we don’t believe in the promotion of democracy abroad, we abrogate our rights to have it here. Asmus is right in pointing out that the Democrats, once the party of Kennedy and Wilson, are no longer. Asmus points out that there is a better way:

Democracy promotion is often messy and hard. You need to work with authoritarian governments even as you try to encourage change in their societies; aid sent to democrats abroad can be wasted; elections don’t always produce the results we’d like. Still, the long-term benefits — as we see in Europe today — are worth it. The answer to Bush’s mistakes must be to develop a more realistic and credible democracy-promotion strategy, not to abandon the goal.

The Democrats have no stomach for anything messy or hard — they want to win, and if they can play to the new isolationism in American culture, that’s precisely what they will do. They can worry about foreign policy the day the first major American city falls to terrorist attack — a prospect which sadly had been growing fainter with time, but now once again becomes less of a probability than an inevitability.

Is Populism The GOP’s Problem?

Peter Beinart has an interesting argument that the GOP has lost its populist message in today’s Washington Post. He argues:

Since World War II, perhaps the Republican Party’s greatest political achievement has been to marry conservatism — once considered a patrician creed — with anti-elitism. The synthesis began with Joseph McCarthy, who used conspiratorial anti-communism to attack America’s East Coast, Ivy League-dominated foreign policy class. It grew under Richard Nixon, who exploited white working-class resentment against campus radicals and the black militants they indulged. It deepened under Ronald Reagan, who made government bureaucrats a focus of populist fury.

But the right’s very success — the beachheads it established inside the Beltway in the 1980s and 1990s — undermined its insurgent credentials. As the judiciary and bureaucracy moved right, taking harder lines on welfare and crime, they became less attractive targets for right-wing rage. And in 1992 and 1996, Pat Buchanan took right-wing populism in a subversive new direction, replacing hostility toward the government elite with hostility toward the corporate elite. In 2000, John McCain launched a crusade against K Street, the financial bedrock of the GOP, and came within inches of claiming the Republican nomination. All of a sudden populism was no longer conservatism’s weapon against the American left but a dagger facing inward, threatening the GOP itself.

Beinart’s analysis is important, as the GOP is divided on key issues like immigration. The populist response to immigration is to enforce the rule of law and not provide anything like an amnesty for illegals. The multicultural left and the corporate right are on the same side, while the conservative base and many on the populist left are opposed to the immigration bill. When Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs are singing from the same hymnal, there’s definitely a populist movement afoot.

However, the same holds true for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton is not a populist candidate. She’s a creature of the elites who stands at loggerheads with the netroots and many in the populist left. The Democrats inability to get anything done explains why the approval rates for Congress don’t look much better than the President’s and Harry Reid has an approval rating equal to that of Scooter Libby. Framing this problem as a partisan one misses the point — our entire political culture is seen as deeply dysfunctional, and people are sick of it.

What this means in a broad sense is that the fury that visited the Republicans in 2006 isn’t going to go away. People are getting sick and tired of politics as usual in which the two major parties squabble like insolent children while simultaneously using government to stuff their wallets with taxpayer dollars. The Democrats promised to do better and failed utterly. The Republicans have no claim to be much better.

Could this situation cause a repeat of 1992 in which a charismatic populist manages to pull a strong enough showing to change the face of the election? That depends on whether there’s a charismatic third-party candidate out there. (And no, Mayor Bloomberg, that isn’t you.) More likely is that 2008 will be a year in which political outsiders dominate — people are sick and tired of our political system’s failures and they want real change.

The Republicans have a chance to seize that opportunity by embracing real immigration reform, fiscal rectitude, and a strong national defense. In other words, the Republicans need a message. The reason why Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani are at the top of the GOP heap is because both have credible claims of being an outside — Giuliani has the kind of no-nonsense attitude that voters want, and Thompson has the gravitas and anti-corruption message that also resonates. On the Democratic side, Obama is doing well precisely because he has an outsider appeal that the other candidates lack.

The candidate who captures the populist sentiment of the American people will be the candidate that wins in 2008 — and the Republicans had better figure out that their principles are the only thing that will keep 2008 from being another bloodbath before the Democrats seize the initiative. Then again, given the state of both parties, there just might be a chance that a third-party populist movement may figure it out before either the Republicans or the Democrats do.

Ron Paul And The Amplification Effect

CNN’s Political Ticker blog wonders if Ron Paul’s online support really means anything:

Right now “Ron Paul” is among the top-searched terms on Technorati, the popular site that tracks blog posts. According to the community Web site, Eventful, there are more than 16,000 outstanding “demands” for Paul to appear in cities across the country – that’s up 11,000 from just one week ago, leapfrogging him over Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York. Ron Paul video clips get plenty of play on YouTube and there is no shortage of blogs devoted to his support.

What do these numbers mean? How do you reconcile that support with the national poll numbers? In virtually every scientific national poll — generally regarded as the best measurement of public support for a political candidate — Paul registers, at most, between 1 and 2 percent. Do the debate numbers reflect something different than the national polls? Is it too early to tell?

I don’t think the offline polls are wrong. Instead, what we’re seeing is a kind of political “amplification effect” in which a small minority of activists are inflating the online presence of a candidate to make them look stronger than they actually are. I rather doubt that Rep. Paul really has much support, and his views are not representative of either the mainstream of the GOP or the mainstream of American politics. Instead, his popularity is based almost entirely on the ease of manipulating online “opinion polls” and spamming. While it’s an interesting strategy, it’s not particularly useful.

For one, this strategy doesn’t tend to do much other than annoy people. Spamming online polls tends to diminish the value of the currency — if an online poll starts consistently displaying results that are clearly out of line, it doesn’t mean that the online poll is right and conventional wisdom is wrong — in fact, it means quite the opposite. The same applies with spamming blog posts and other tactics — the last thing that a credible political candidate wants to do is annoy the very people that they need to impress. Paul’s online armies aren’t helping Paul at all, but marginalizing him as a candidate.

I would wager that the average online Paul supporter is supporting him simply because of his opposition to the war in Iraq — without knowing that on most issues, Paul is frequently to the right of the Republican Party mainstream. For instance, he’s advocated a jurisdiction-stripping law that would prevent the Supreme Court from making any ruling on abortion. His views are in the paleo-conservative Buchananite league, which includes his opposition to the war in Iraq. The support of Rep. Paul that is coming from “progressive” quarters is probably quite unaware of what the man really believes.

This amplification effect is the same sort of thing one sees with the “netroots” — by trying to manipulate online opinion, these political activists groups tend to engage in the sort of group polarization that doesn’t work well in the political quest to capture the vital center. American politics is all about convincing the unconvinced, not shoring up the base. These kinds of online political movements inevitably have little success simply because it isn’t enough to spam a few online polls — a politician has to have a true base of support. Faking it just isn’t enough.

Ron Paul may have attracted some following, but he’s not a viable candidate for the Presidency — and if his online followers knew more about the candidate than his position on Iraq and his pro-legalization stance on drugs, it’s likely they’d find that he’s not the man they think he is.

A GOP Death Wish?

Glenn Reynolds looks at the Administration’s immigration rhetoric and wonders if there isn’t some bizarre Republican death wish in play. I’m wondering if he’s right — Bush’s only base of support is with the GOP rank-and-file, and they hate his position on immigration. When you’ve got nothing in terms of political capital, it makes no sense to start burning bridges with your strongest supporters. Even Laura Ingraham is on Bush’s case.

Even if one accepts that the immigration deal is good policy, the way the Bush Administration has been defending it has been so ham-handed that even those who might support the bill are reeling. Bush’s political instincts haven’t been right since the 2004 elections, and while Bush’s political future is of absolutely no consequence, he’s dragging down key issues with him. He can’t defend his immigration bill, he can’t defend the war, and he can’t defend his own record. There are some very smart political operators in the White House, but when the ship has already hit bottom, it’s a hell of a lot harder to steer a new course.

Thompson Is In

The Tennessean is reporting that Fred Thompson will run for the GOP nomination. This is hardly a surprise, but does confirm the rampant speculation.

In many polls, Thompson is already in second or third place, which means that he’s got a more than credible shot at getting the nomination. I suspect that Thompson will steal some of Giuliani’s thunder — he has the same leadership characteristics as Giuliani without as much of the baggage. Both Giuliani and Thompson have the sort of gravitas that the GOP currently lacks. Thompson has an accomplished record in governance in law, and has been actively courting the conservative base in a way that Giuliani has not.

I’m not sure how this will all shake out. McCain and Romney are down, but certainly not out, and Romney has been giving some very strong performances as of late. Giuliani and Thompson might do what Clinton and Obama threaten to do with the Dems — take each other out and leave the field open to a dark-horse candidate. Such turns are certainly not unheard of in American politics.

If nothing else, Thompson’s entrance will make this race, already hotly contested, into an even more interesting competition. The Republicans have the advantage of a very strong field, and the top-tier candidates offer much to the party and to the nation. Even the middle- and lower-tier candidates have something to offer: Duncan Hunter is surprisingly well-versed on the issues, Tommy Thompson may have no chance of winning, but his welfare reform efforts helped millions of Americans, and even Ron Paul, while a nut, brings something to the debate. (Even if that something is a punching bag for the other candidates.) It’s a strong field, and the person who finally gets the nod is going to have to demonstrate competence, charisma, and knowledge to make it — which is a good thing for the country in general.

A Compromise Or A Muddle?

Michael Gerson has a critical look at Giuliani’s position on abortion and finds it less than consistent.

Abortion remains a problem for Giuliani in that his position tries to be a compromise, but ends up being a muddle. In fact, it’s much the same muddle that I criticized John Kerry for. If one takes the position that a fetus is a human life, then one cannot consistently argue that the taking of that human life should be protected by law. Gerson does an excellent job of pointing out the inconsistency of this position:

How can the violation of a fundamental human right be viewed as a private matter? Not everything that is viewed as immoral should be illegal; there are no compelling public reasons to restrict adultery, for example, or to outlaw sodomy. But when morality demands respect for the rights of a human being, those protections become a matter of social justice, not just personal or religious preference.

American history has tested these arguments. In debating the Missouri Compromise, Sen. Stephen Douglas said of slavery: “I am now speaking of rights under the Constitution and not of moral or religious rights. I do not discuss the morals of the people of Missouri, but let them settle that matter for themselves.” Abraham Lincoln differed: If faith and conscience tell us that enslaved Americans are men and brothers, then slavery must eventually be ended. Passing the 13th Amendment was not “imposing” our moral views on slaveholders; it was upholding the meaning of law and justice.

Giuliani’s doctrine of individual sovereignty goes much further than did Douglas, logically preventing even states from restricting abortion. And this raises a question about Giuliani’s view of the law itself: Can it be a right to violate the basic rights of others? Given American opinion, progress toward the protection of unborn life is likely to be incremental and partial. It would be foolish to prosecute women who have abortions — and the law struck down in Roe v. Wade did nothing of the kind. But recognizing these limits and realities is different from asserting that the law should have nothing to do with the defense of the weak.

That’s the fundamental philosophical problem that Giuliani faces — it may be pragmatic to argue what Giuliani argues — but there’s no real intellectual or legal consistency to it. Granted, expecting perfect consistency from a politician is a fool’s errand to begin with, but on an issue so important to so many, Giuliani’s tightrope act may not be enough.

Abortion should be seen for what it is: the unjust taking of human life. It is a tragedy that our society is not sufficiently enlightened that such a basic precept is honored. Giuliani may be right in that we pragmatically cannot end abortion overnight — but the argument that we shouldn’t try at all is not a consistent or coherent one. It can be a child or a choice, but not both at the same time, and Giuliani’s attempts to try and have it both ways may not fare any better than the other times that it has been tried.

Bush’s Immigration Gamble

Mickey Kaus takes a look at today’s immigration compromise in the Senate and finds it to be a major political loser for the President:

This is looking more and more like the Bush administration’s domestic version of Iraq: a big risky gamble, based on wishful thinking and nonexistent administrative competence, that will end in disaster. What disaster? 1) Lower wages for struggling unskilled–and semi-skilled–American workers (including, especially, underclass men) even when the labor market should be tight; 2) Income inequality moving further in the direction of Latin America–maybe even to such an extent that social equality between the rich and their servers becomes difficult to maintain; and 3) A large semi-assimilated population along our southern border with complex, understandably binational allegiances–our own Quebec. … Actually, I can see why some Republicans might not be so bothered by (1) and (2). But what about Democrats? …

This immigration compromise is essentially an amnesty deal for 12 million illegal immigrants. Such a “compromise” is not going to be acceptable to many, if not most Republicans unless it includes something more than the promise of enforcement down the road. The deal is essentially the 1986 immigration policy redux, and it will have the same effects.

Make no mistake about it, the first Republican candidate who comes out on the side of enforcement before amnesty will rocket up in the polls. We already know where McCain stands, and Romney has proposed an immigration policy substantially similar to what’s going through the Senate. Will Giuliani keep his law-and-order image by asking for an enforcement-first approach? Will Fred Thompson use this issue as the springboard for his entrance into the race?

Neither party is getting it on this issue. There is a massive groundswell of people from both the right and the left who don’t want to see Americas borders opened. We have the rule of law in this country, and to give amnesty to millions of people who have decided to break the law is a violation of the principles of fairness and equality. Every day, people risk their lives to come to this country and are rejected — meanwhile, illegals pay no attention to the law, and they will end up getting amnesty while political prisoners and asylum seekers end up waiting for years for the same opportunity. We are a nation of laws, and when we legitimize breaking the law we erode our own legal foundation.

President Bush’s approval ratings are almost entirely due to his strong support with Republicans. If he signs a bill like this into law, he’ll join Ehud Olmert in the single-digit range soon enough.

Tonight’s GOP Debate

My reaction: I didn’t watch any of it.

However, over at The Corner, it’s looking like Rudy seems to have done quite well. Rudy’s biggest problem is still with abortion, but I’m not yet entirely sure it’s fatal to him. At this point, it seems like that issue has been discussed to death, and Rudy’s forthrightness on the position does seem to be helping the matter. Rudy’s numbers have gone down as of late, but that seems to be as much attributable to the Fred Thompson factor than Rudy’s abortion position. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Giuliani apparently bitch-slapped Ron Paul into next week. Then again, that’s not a particularly difficult task.

As always, Glenn Reynolds has his usual roundup of links. It looks like the general zeitgeist is that Rudy won, but McCain didn’t do badly either. Romney didn’t do as well as the last week.

It’s just too early in the race to get too worked about about these debates. It’s all inside baseball at this point, and people aren’t going to start paying attention for a while yet. Any debate that features a crank like Ron Paul or Mike Gravel isn’t a debate in which you’re going to get much depth. When the field winnows down to the top few candidates, we’ll get more action, but it doesn’t look like there are going to be any surprises as to who’s going to be in the top of this lineup.

Will Abortion Be Giuliani’s End?

GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani is set to make a major policy address on abortion, and many are predicting that he’ll come out as being openly pro-choice.

If that is true, Giuliani may have ended his chances at getting the GOP nomination.

Mayor Giuliani has been walking a fine line, stating that he would nominate strict constructionist judges to the Supreme Court and indicating that he would continue the status quo on abortion. Even though he has stated that he does believe in a woman’s right to choose to terminate their pregnancy, he’s always prefaced that by stating that he finds abortion abhorrent.

The simple fact is that the majority of the Republican Party believes that abortion is the killing of a human life and should be outlawed. That is a reasonable, consistent, and moral position and it is one that defines what the Republican Party is about. The lives of the innocent should be protected by law, and life begins at conception. If one believes that life begins at conception, then one simply cannot support abortion as either a moral or a legal matter. It is a barbaric practice often done for reasons which have nothing to do with the life or health of the mother, but for nothing more than sheer convenience. It is barbaric for the law to take away the right for an unborn child to exist — the paramount right of all — for such flimsy reasoning.

Mayor Giuliani is right, as a practical matter, abortion should be an issue for the states. The legal reasoning behind the landmark abortion cases of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood is based on poor reasoning and judgments that are properly the domain of legislatures and not the courts. The Court’s abortion jurisprudence isn’t just an affront to the lives of the unborn, it’s an affront to logic and consistency as well. If the reasoning in the Roe and Casey line of cases were overruled, the states would be able to make the sort of legislative judgments as to how to treat abortion that the federal system of government should allow them to make.

However, even if Giuliani gets the legal argument right, many Republicans, if not most, will not vote for a man who is pro-abortion. Such a stance is one that is too far out of line from the values and principles of the Republican Party. Giuliani has to respect that matters of faith and of human life are of paramount concern to his party — and while Republicans can and do disagree, the person who represents the GOP to the nation cannot be someone whose personal views are so far removed from the majority.

There are a few issues which define the Republican Party — and abortion is one of them. Mayor Giuliani deserves some credit for being honest and candid with his party, but if he expects to run a campaign that supports the taking of innocent human lives, then he cannot expect to win the Republican nomination.

Overstretched

The Washington Post has an interesting piece on how the Democrats have lost momentum due to the Iraq issue. While Congress and the President fights over war funding, the Democrats have been unable to advance their own agenda:

But now that initial progress has foundered as Washington policymakers have been consumed with the debate over the Iraq war. Not a single priority on the Democrats’ agenda has been enacted, and some in the party are growing nervous that the “do nothing” tag they slapped on Republicans last year could come back to haunt them.

“We cannot be a one-trick pony,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped engineer his party’s takeover of Congress as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “People voted for change, but Iraq, the economy and Washington, D.C., [corruption] all tied for first place. We need to do them all.”

Rep. Emanuel is right on one thing: the Republican defeat in the last election wasn’t due solely to the Iraq issue. Iraq was certainly a major part of that defeat, but it was certainly not the only one. Republican voters stayed home because the GOP lost its conservative principles. The GOP lost independent voters because they couldn’t lead. Now the Democrats are repeating the same mistakes.

The approval ratings for Congress are hardly much to crow about — they’re only marginally better than the President’s. What have the Democrats accomplished in the last few months? They didn’t get their “New Direction for America” passed. They didn’t get their “Six for 06” agenda passed. They haven’t done anything to stop the war, and for all the bluster about how they’re going to force the President to back down, it would be political suicide for the Democrats to refuse to fund our troops in harm’s way. Instead of getting their agenda passed, their single-minded fixation on Iraq is leading the party into gridlock.

Now, in terms of the effect on the country, gridlock’s a good thing. The less Congress does, the better for everyone — especially this Congress. If Congress doesn’t pass another bill for the rest of the session, it will have been better than what the last Congress did. However, politically, the Democrats have to do something or they will get tagged as a do-nothing Congress just like the GOP did. Competence still matters, and it’s hard to argue that the Democratic Congress has been any more competent, any more judicious, or any less partisan than the one before it.

The Democrats are acting in the same way the Republicans did — focusing so much on their agenda and playing rough-and-tumble politics that they’ve neglected the vital center. Congress’ poor approval ratings are no coincidence. The American people are looking for leadership, and a party that can’t keep its promises and seems more interested in partisan bickering than getting things done won’t be successful. The Republicans already learned that lesson in the last cycle — the Democrats may learn it in the next.