I don't trust "The Nation" to diagnose GOP failures, why should I trust "National Review" to handicap the Kerry-Edwards loss?
Peter Beinart at TNR writes an intelligent piece, United They Fall
Now, Democrats are looking for an even better vehicle for the same ideological consensus. Looking back to Bill Clinton, some suggest a Southern governor. But Clinton wasn't merely a Baptist, Southern-accented Michael Dukakis. He represented a controversial break from the liberal orthodoxy of the '80s. Where Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Dukakis had all opposed the death penalty, Clinton embraced it. And, to underscore the point, he left the campaign trail to oversee the execution of mentally retarded murderer Rickey Ray Rector. Where Dukakis and Mondale had endlessly pandered to Jesse Jackson, Clinton outraged the African American left by showing up at Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and denouncing the anti-white rapper Sister Souljah. Where Mondale had proposed raising taxes, Clinton called for a middle-class tax cut. What Clinton recognized--and today's Democrats don't--is that, if you're not making liberals uncomfortable, you're not going to win.In my view, John Kerry's Sister Souljah opportunity was France. Liberals forget that the conflict between Washington and Paris didn't begin with Dick Cheney; France was actively thwarting American power--and American ideals--throughout the 1990s. Jacques Chirac had the right to oppose the Iraq war, but his virtual campaign to prevent European countries from assisting in the occupation rightly outraged many Americans. Had Kerry stood up to Paris during the campaign, he would have shown he could do so in the Oval Office. And he would have proved that success in the war on terrorism--not multilateralism--was his highest foreign policy principle.
One reason is that many of the Democrats inclined to cause trouble are gone. With the loss of five Southern Senate seats, the high-profile conservative Democrats who might have urged the party to reject gay rights or embrace Social Security privatization--people like Louisiana's John Breaux, not to mention Georgia's Zell Miller--are no longer around.Even more surprising than the silence on the party's right is the silence on the party's left. I have yet to hear a single prominent Democrat say Kerry lost because he wasn't sufficiently antiwar. Partly, that's because liberals can't say Kerry didn't mobilize the base. But, more broadly, I suspect it's because Iraq obscured the fact that, on most issues, the divisions between the party's liberal and New Democratic wings simply aren't that great. Howard Dean, we tend to forget, was a deficit hawk and a former Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) poster child who had backed the Gulf war.
In my last column ("What Went Wrong," November 15), I wrote, "Honest conservatives, even those who admire Bush, know he didn't earn a second term." That was a poor way of expressing my point: that, judging from the president's low approval rating and the large percentage of people who felt the country was on the "wrong track," Bush had not convinced most Americans he deserved a second term. They gave him one because of their reservations about Kerry. My argument was a political, not a moral, one. I have no doubt that many honest conservatives believe Bush is a good, even great, president, and that, in their eyes, he has earned a second term.