This article is specifically on topic to the question of Democratic presidential candidates, so I figured I would post it here rather than as a separate thread. I’d be interested in knowing what the Americans with liberal (modern definition, not classical) tendencies think of the chances of the Democratic presidential candidate if the party sticks with an anti-war platform. As I have said previously, I think it is political suicide.
John Kerry Puts the Big
Issue Before the Voters
by Daniel Henninger
John Kerry – winner in Vietnam of the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and three Purple Hearts – would rather talk about what voters want in a Commander in Chief than, say, the Arctic wildlife refuge. Who wouldn’t?
Any normal person would. But the Democratic Party is not quite a normal party now. It has become the antiwar party. It is the hell-no-we-won’t-ever-go-party. Which is why Howard Dean, the most antiwar candidate among the party’s presidential hopefuls, is stretching his lead in polls based on phone calls to Democratic warrens, with the result reflecting what Salon.com’s David Talbot calls “the party faithful’s passionate mood.”
Not all, but most Democratic professionals understand that in the wake of September 11 this course most likely would take the party’s candidate to the bottom of the cliff in a general election. Amid Vietnam’s agonies and a Watergate scandal cresting in the media, George McGovern lost by 18 million votes.
No matter. Activist Democrats have managed to make patriotism itself a wholly owned conservative value, burdening their candidates today with the historically unprecedented task of proving they’re patriots too. In a recent poll for the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, Republicans held a 28-point lead over Democrats on the handling of terrorism and Iraq (among “married with kids” it’s a whopping 45 to 48 points). This week Sen. Kerry said, “I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.” A fair statement, but not everyone would vote for it.
Thus, Sen. Kerry announced his candidacy this week in a place called Patriot’s Point in South Carolina, in front of the USS Yorktown and surrounded by Vietnam veterans. It may well be that turning his campaign to national security is mainly intended to collect Democratic primary votes across the South, but whatever the calculation, we should thank the senator from Massachusetts for laying this issue on the table. This is a debate worth having.
Like it or not (and many Democrats do not), the U.S. is No. 1 in the world, and there is no serious No. 2. Having arrived here, it would be good to have competing visions of the U.S. role in the world put before the American people so that they may choose one with their vote.
Arguably, the only serious presidential-level debate on the U.S.'s world role in recent memory was between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. Just three years ago, there was nothing more compelling on the foreign-policy mind than the Kyoto Treaty (some pollster should ask whether more than 3 people in 10 can say what that treaty was about). But now America’s electorate is staring face-on into a foreign-policy sandstorm. No need to dance with “hypotheticals.” September 11 was real; the Iraq war happened; al-Qaeda and the global terror network are real and North Korea is both nuclear and nuts. So, yes, we need a Commander in Chief. We’ve got one, but I look forward to hearing John Kerry and Joe Lieberman articulate the Democratic other.
In truth, there’s no need to wait. Democratic politicians, academics and pundits have been articulating their alternative since 1966 when Sen. J. William Fulbright coined “the arrogance of power” and spoke of “practical cooperation for peace” with Russia, the need for “respectful partnership” with Western Europe and “abstention from the temptations of hegemony.” In the years since, there has been a steady stream of books elaborating this view, with titles such as “The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone” by Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School, or “The End of the American Era” by Charles Kupchak (both held positions in the Clinton administration).
This week, nearly four decades after Fulbright, Sen. Kerry said: “Pride is no excuse for making enemies overseas. It is time to return to the United Nations, not with the arrogance of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz but with genuine respect. For the Bush Administration to reject the participation of allies and the UN is a miscalculation of colossal proportions.”
For more than 20 years, Democrats have accused GOP presidents of forsaking “multilateral solutions” for what Richard Gephardt recently called “chest-beating unilateralism.” This Democratic policy formula reappears no matter what the issue, whether Saddam or Soviet SS-20 ballistic missiles. During the great showdown with Manuel Noriega over the Panama Canal in 1989, Democrats urged Mr. Bush’s father not to act without the support of the Organization of American States. Bush-41 invaded Panama, and two weeks later Noriega was in a Miami jail.
Democrats have been urging “cooperation” and “consultation” for 40 years. Maybe in this election we’ll finally find out what this means. Democrats strongly imply that the mere process of talking with the U.N. or even with an enemy such as North Korea constitutes success. The cardinal Democratic sin in foreign policy is to “alienate our friends.”
In his announcement address, Sen. Kerry said: “I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations. I believe that was right – but it was wrong to rush to war without building a true international coalition.” What does this mean? Faced with a real threat to American security, will John Kerry wait, talk and consult, no matter how many months or years it takes until Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Kofi Annan are standing with him on the bridge?
I don’t doubt that a President Kerry or even a President Dean would deploy the U.S. military on relatively modest missions – a Haiti or Liberia, or Somalia. But an Iraq war? A strike and follow-through against North Korea? After Vietnam and no matter that September 11 happened, and no matter what the merits, Mr. Kerry and the others (perhaps excepting Sen. Lieberman), give the impression they would not act, or not act in time. They would consult, specifically with France, Russia, Germany and the U.N. secretary general.
There is no way to know with certainty whether any of them would act on the scale of the Iraq war on behalf of American security. But Mr. Kerry has usefully raised the issue. It won’t be sufficient to say they would have “done things differently.” The real question is whether they would do it at all.
Updated September 5, 2003
ABOUT DANIEL HENNINGER
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Mr. Henninger joined Dow Jones in 1971 as a staff writer for the National Observer. He became an editorial-page writer for the Journal in 1977, arts editor in 1978 and editorial features editor in 1980. He was appointed assistant editor of the editorial page in 1983 and chief editorial writer and senior assistant editor in October 1986, with daily responsibility for the “Review & Outlook” columns. In November 1989 he became deputy editor of the editorial page.
Mr. Henninger was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 1996, and shared in the Journal’s Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of the attacks on September 11. He won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary in 1985. In 1998 he received the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, for editorials on a range of issues, including the International Monetary Fund, presidential politics and cloning. He won the 1995 American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing, and he was a finalist in that award in 1985, 1986 and 1993. A native of Cleveland, Mr. Henninger graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree from the School of Foreign Service.
Mr. Henninger invites comments to edit.page@wsj.com.