I've got to think that if at that Wellstone memorial service cum revival meeting, the son who was screaming almost hysterically, "We will win, we will win" was referring to the war against Al Quaeda instead of the war against Republicans, the Democratic Party would still be in control of the Senate, and perhaps the House too.

Frankie,

Coupla thoughts:

1. Larry Sabato, the UVA commentator on elections who's fairly non-partisan and widely quoted, said that the MN rally-cum-memorial service was one of the dumber things that certainly swayed votes (in an online chat at the Washington Post).

2. If you read the stuff at Democratic Underground and at Left blog-sites, however, that point is entirely lost. The idea that it was tasteless and offensive to many folks, in and out of MN, Democratic and Republican, is either denied, or dismissed.

3. It is partly that cultural disjunction which leaves many Americans wary of the Dems, and worse, which makes them appear non-grown-up. Just as baby boomers now want respectful kids and go to (some kind of) church, so, too, they would like folks to show respect for the dead, w/o disintegrating into a wild cheering section. The inability of the Dem core (or at least so self-proclaimed) to understand this means that, if the Party really pulls to the Left, it will be more and more out of touch. (The GOP faces a similar problem w/ some of its more rabid social conservatives, for roughly the same reason---Americans also want to be left alone w/r/t matters of faith and conscience, not dictated to by ANY political party, least of all hypocrits.)

Just some thoughts....

Don't mean to open up a huge can of worms, but I think you are flattering the Democrats' view of the world too much when you say that Vietnam was "some optional war to prop up a corrupt post-colonial regime." You and I agree that fighting Iraq is a wholly necessary part of the broader war on terrorism. Just so, fighting North Vietnam was a perfectly valid part of the broader war on the dangerous and aggressive totalitarianism of the time, which was communism rather than Islamism.

One reason why the Democrats' radical shift to the left may harm Republicans, even if it results in a bigger majority:

Unreasonable demands can have the effect of skewing where the 'center' is.

I learned a life lesson in one of the most unlikely of places: an American high school. One year, I had the privelege of an innovative economics teacher, who had real-world experience and a love of small business.

One our classes' projects was a simulated labor-management negotiation. Given a list of prefab proposals (from health care plans to safety regs) and a list of what jobs pay what amount, the 2 sides must come to an agreement as to slaries and benefits.

I was selected randomy to be part of the management team, and took charge of drafting our proposal. Now, I already had a fairly good idea (compared to my peers) of the issues involved, so I looked up the rate of inflation, added that to every salary, then on top of that gave all non-management positions a 7% raise and management a 3% raise. Oh, and I added the 2nd most generous heath care plan and accepted all safety proposals without question.

There, I said. I gave my prospective adversaries a very fair solution, whereby they make out better than I, and hopefully we will make enough cash to pay for all this. Surely, when they see how fair I was they will drop their picket signs and embrace my proposal.

Hey, stop laughing at my naivete, I was just a freshman okay??? :(

When I saw the other side's proposal, I nearly peed my pants. They jacked ALL salaries (yes, even the janitors) up to high-level management's level, and also included pay cuts for managers at all levels until more or less every person in the company was making the same amount. The overall personnel budget tripled. Oh, and they chose all the other perks on the list too.

I expected someone besides me to understand that this would kill off any non-monopoly ever concieved, but somehow during the ensuing negotiations, the 'reasonable' position (as defined by both my opponents AND my teammates) was half-way between my (I think) reasonable proposal, and their looney-tunes plan for socialist utopia.

I left that project with my faith in the common sense of my fellow humans badly shaken. Since then, I mined the memory for whatever insights it could hold (because if your perceptions do not match reality, then you must challenge your perceptions).

I concluded that although the negotiation precess was skewed towards 'free money for all' because neither side had a real stake in the outcome, and this disconnect from reality allowed utopianism to creep in, the deciding issue was the opening positions and the assumption that compromise lies directly in between the 2.

And this formed one of my understandings of extreme positions: That although the demands of a group may seem extreme, it can be necessary that they are, so that someone who must compromise with you cedes to you what you really want. The farther out in looneyspace you are, the further people must travel to cut a deal with you. Of course, that can backfire if you are so far out there that you can be safely ignored.

You can see this kind of thinking in people trying to find a 'middle road' in the middle east... "Ok, we can condemn the deliberate mass-murder of Isrealis, but to seem fair we gotta condemn Isreal too, as if accidental or incidental civilian-killing and the killing of enemy terrorist leaders is equally horrible".

Compromise is essential to getting anything done, but there has to be a way to break through the misconception that "half-way between any 2 groups' positions is the obvious and natual comprimise". One party might have put forth a good-faith proposal that is as far as they are willing or able to go, and the just comprimise lies much closer to there.

Again, the middle east. Barak's historic proposal has one lasting effect, and it is negative: Although his proposal is much further than anything Arafat had ever seen, and indeed was far more than Barak could democratically live up to (The moment Israel's angry voters could, they applied a hefty boot to his ass to help him out the door), it is going to be hard for any successor proposal to offer any less.

So in effect Barak's proposal will now be by default the STARTING position of any negotiations and get worse (from Israel's point of view) from there.

The center had shifted, and if anyone noticed, they certainly wern't on our news.

So too with the democratic shift. We will soon have a far-left monkey-wrench thrower who's perfectly willing to

P.S. This argument could be made a lot better, but I don't have the knowledge required. I'm certain someone must have thought of this concept already, but I don't know who or where that might be.

Sorry about the unfinished paragraph.

So too with the democratic shift. We will soon have a far-left monkey-wrench thrower who's perfectly willing to filibuster most anything short of a total liberal agenda and to hell with what the voters want.

The republicans will have a choice. Either cave and act as if the '02 was a resounding democratic victory, or allow the machinery of government come to a halt over and over again, waste the 2 years until the next elections, and pray that the Liberal media don't manage to spin the stoppage as the Reps' fault.

At the very least Bush's well-earned reputation as a fair-minded guy to the Dems will be shredded. You can't negotiate with someone who wants it all, as the talking heads covering the Moscow theatre cannot seem to grasp.

Your comments make it sound as if Viet Nam was a Republican failure; it was the Democrats that got us into that mess. Nixon ran on a platform of ending the war - a promise he eventually kept. Granted, his strategy was to drive them to the bargaining table, where he took his first chance to surrender without actually appearing to do so. I don't recall anyone else offereing a more viable exit strategy (I'm only a bit older than VP, so I wouldn't recall this first hand).

What really killed the Republicans for some time afterward was Watergate.

Well, Nixon didn't really surrender. His strategy was known as "Vietnamization." This involved a period of several years over which the US reduced its troop presence, and trained the South Vietnamese army to take over control of the war on its own, with the US providing financial and material help. It wasn't really a bad idea. It actually worked for a couple of years (1973, 1974), and the South was able to hold off the North's attempted advances pretty much on its own. But 1973 and 1974 saw Nixon paralyzed and then forced out of office by Watergate, and in the 1974 elections the Democrats picked up almost 50 seats in the House (running their majority to an overwhelming 291-144, more than two-thirds of the House) and 5 seats in the Senate (which became 61-37 with 2 independents). The Democrats basically then cut off all aid to South Vietnam over President Ford's objection, and the South fell in April of 1975 when the North engaged in a new offensive to take advantage of the South's weakness.

SO it looks like the democratic party is going to hew much more to the left now that Pelosi has a clear shot at the minority leadership post.

As I remember, the Republican party did quite well in the 1966 elections (gained 40 house seats and several senators). Not quite going into a hole and hiding!

So Stephen, you think if Dems adjust their platform to become hawks, they are suddenly ready to reclaim power? Not likely.

They need a leader the equal of GWB to lead them out of the wilderness and back into civilization. A leader who is not beholden to a multitude of special interests, and who has clarity of vision and moral purpose. A leader, not a politician. They don't raise em up like that in the Dem party. Who can/will fill this role? Even if Al Gore had run as a hawk in 00, it's still Al Gore pretending to be a hawk. It would fool about 10 people. You can't just adopt a hawkish viewpoint overnight like a new hairdo, without alienating huge sections of the traditional power base. It's a commitment, an understanding of our place in the world, and it doesn't come from focus groups or political advisers. It is do-able, but not in the short term.

Re: Vietnam, one problem we have now is the generation running the country now was 20 years old in 1969. They think every war is destined to fail like that one did. They need to read about some other wars. Vietnam was a bad idea made worse, yes, but is hardly representative of our typical military engagements.

If my experiences with Left Dems is anything to go by, getting them to read ANY military history would be an enormous improvement. These were people who, in defense studies programs, would REFUSE to study military history, on the grounds that studying war made you accept war as a legitimate instrument of statecraft.

No, these folks wanted to study peace, as though if you just studied peace enough, you'd learn how to avoid war w/o going through the nastiness and the brutishness.

'Course, these are the same folks who could not, absolutely could not fathom the idea of actually USING CW, BW, or nukes, on their own part (fair enough), or anybody else; therefore, they were useless weapons that were intended solely for posturing.

There's a reason I haven't been back to Cambridge despite spending some ten years there.....

As a Republican, I hesitate to offer any good advice to the Democrats. I would be very happy if they wandered off into left fantasyland for a few years. Nonetheless, I will offer this. The reaction against the Democrats that did them in began not with the Wellstone affair, but that of Bonior and McDermott in Baghdad. And it was not the actions of the loons in Iraq that sunk the Dems, it was the leadership's failure to repute their lunacy. The Wellstone rally just confirmed the trend.
I wish the Democrats well in their attempt to return to their tradition as an American party. I would bet against it just yet though.

Your use of the word Axis (capitalized, no less) is inflammatory, especially to loyal American citizens like myself who have lived in both New York and San Francisco.

Your confusion of leftists (especially extreme straw leftists), liberals (you and most Americans are liberals by 20th century standards), and Democrats especiall muddies the water.

Your conflation of the war on terrorism with a war to overthrow Saddam is unexamined.

Your reader's idea that Democrats will disloyally sabotage the government the way the Republicans did under Clinton is unfounded. For one thing, the Dems are not organized enough.

Your other reader's implicit idea that the Democrats are not American is insulting.

When honest conservatives show a willingness to police the excesses of their own partisans, in and out of government, I will have more hope for the future of the American polity.

re: Xian

Well, see Peter Beinart's recent column in TNR about the Dems failing to take on the GOP re: tax cuts and Iraq. He notes that most didn't believe in going after Iraq, but wanted the issue off the table. Remember, first the Dem leadership wanted the Iraq debate pushed until after the election (we'll leave that odd logic for another thread). Then there was a hurry to move it up, to get rid of it.

In short, Dems response to Iraq was negotiable, and the voters took note of that. There were no Republicans in Bosnia or Serbia, telling Tim Russert how great Milosevic was. When two Democratic house members (including the former minority whip) alluded that Bush would lie to get his Iraq policy and that Saddam was a swell guy, Dems avoided the issue and wanted nothing to do with it. They offered some equivocating pablum about congressmen having the right to free speech, as if we didn't know that. So if the Democratic Party has been tagged for considering national security and foreign policy as minor issues, to be triangulated on the whims of special interest groups, there's some recent evidence to that effect.

Gore was the last presidential candidate, for crying out loud...I'm still waiting to hear what he would have done different re: Iraq and terrorism...it's clear that he believes the President has screwed up...Sep 11 was fourteen months ago, so he should issue a position paper any day now.

Great letter. I agree with many of your sentiments, but I still feel that pursuing a war against Iraq is a waste of resources that could be better spent trying to undermine Saddam's support base through trade. Authoritarian regimes unsupported by the west, once exposed to free trade with industrialized democracies, readily fall apart. All it took was a little openness and the communist block fell to pieces. Many totalitarian regimes that are holding on by the skin of their teeth, like those in Iraq, North Korea, and Cuba, would be wiped away in less than a decade if we invaded them with our business might rather than our millitary might. The amorphous "war on terrorism", like the similiar "war on drugs" (which has resulted in the destabilization of Columbia, a country now in the middle of a four-way civil war that we've only managed to inflame more), is merely a call for more wasteful spending on unnecessary weapons systems and a shibboleth that can be used to justify any act by the present administration, no matter how much our "allies" may disagree.

Conquest through capitalism. It's the American way. :)

Xian,

Echoing Joe Baby's comments, you speak to the issue of security.

I was one of the folks who heartily opposed much of the Clinton Administration's foreign policy. On North Korea, in '94, I made the argument to Congressional staffers that negotiating with the NKs was a formula for disaster. At various fora, I and my colleagues debated against intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo.

NEVER did we argue that Clinton was somehow equivalent or inferior to Kim Jong-il or Milosevic. NEVER did we argue that, somehow, the United States was their moral equivalent. NEVER did we argue that Clinton, in pursuing the ends he was, was somehow disloyal to the US, lying, or obfuscating the truth.

We DID argue that Clinton was wrong in his assessment of North Korea and its leader, that the Balkans were not a vital interest of the US, and that it was not at all clear what the actual nature of events were in Kosovo.

If this makes us somehow equivalent to Cynthia McKinney and her "Bush Knew!" crapola, or McDermott and Bonior's moral equivalency IN BAGHDAD, I'd be curious how.

But the fact that you'd view us as somehow the same, I think, encapsulates part of why the Dems were rejected. At the end of the day, the American voters could tell the difference, even if you can't.

Well said, Dean. Those that opposed Clinton's Balkan adventures did so in the context of the real issues, not a fantasyland of DU conspiracy theories.

Nicq, it would be great if we could overcome regimes like Saddam's by exporting capitalism, but it can't happen. Increased trade relations with such countries would result only in a few politically-favored people there growing extremely wealthy, and do nothing for the people.

Economic progress is possible only given a certain minimal level of settled law, property rights, etc.

And economic well-being is by itself no guarantee against aggressive behavior. Germany in 1939 was an economic power, and most of its people were (by historical standards) reasonably well-off. This didn't prevent the attacks on Poland, France, et al.

I agree with your axis idea. I have been calling it the NYLA axis for the last 3-4 years. This stands for New York, Las Angeles axis and is kind of catchy, I think. It also describes the bi-coastal mindset and shows their ignorance of the rest of us fly-over people.

And the heartless truth is, you’re not going to get your kind of America until after this war is won. Not over, but won.

Please, define "won". When will we be able to say we have "won the war on terrorism"? When terrorism no longer exists on this Earth? When all islamist terrorists are dead? Then dream on. You're asking for the equivalent of: "stop fighting for civil rights until the war on crime is won, because crime is more important".

I happen to be one of those Democrats who reads an awful lot of military history. I am practically steeped in it. The "war on terrorism" is no more a war than "the war on poverty", because you cannot have a war against a concept. You cannot properly have a war unless there is an achievable end goal. In this "war", there is none. As with the "wars" on poverty, drugs, crime etc, this is an abuse of the word war as psychological propaganda to attempt to justify a particular set of policies - indefinitely. Bush has never even attempted to answer the question "how will we know when we've won?", and neither has any conservative pundit I've read.

My opinion that the war in Iraq has been counterproductive in the struggle against islamofascist terrorism is also completely founded in my understanding of the history of war, conflict, and politics. Bin Laden and al Qaeda give not a remote shit about the United States, nor do they "hate freedom". The entire purpose of 9/11 was to trigger a response that put caucasian, Christian boots on the ground in the Middle East. Their goal was to create a common enemy in order to invoke to Qur'an's call for Moslem solidarity against an outside force, as they desire to create a pan-Islamic state. The only good in the "war on terror" to come out of Iraq is the removal of US troops from Saudia Arabia, but it seems unlikely that it is worth the damage and massively increased recruitment and anti-US rhetoric.

Fortunately, the pan-Islamic state is not created yet, but it is far closer now than it was four years ago, with both Pakistan and Saudia Arabia hanging by a bare thread and many madrassas - the only source of education for many Moslems across the whole region - having gone into anti-US-rhetoric-overdrive. Bin Laden played U.S. machismo like a Stradivarius.

I opposed Bush because (among other reasons) I want to keep the US safe from terrorism, and I know military and political history well enough to understand that this is no war and that approaching it as such is precisely the wrong strategy for long-term success.

I would respond to the Republicans, in RE: this letter: "Wake up! You used to stand for fiscal responsibility, which was needed as an opposing and complimentary force to the Democrat drive for social good. Now you've lost yourself in blind spending, waiting for an unwinnable and undefinable war to be won. But we have work to do here in the now, and we need your partnership."