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Edited on Thu Feb-02-06 07:20 PM by Wordie
It's the only issue on which he (and therefore Republicans in general) comes out ahead in the minds of the public, and it's the one on which Kerry lost in 2004. It's something we need to effectively fight in order to minimize coatstrings wins by Republicans in the elections later this year. We need new thinking on this and a different approach.
Bush's strange comments about "isolationism" in the SOTU (did anyone else sort of scratch their heads when he used that term, like I did?) were apparently part of a strategy to paint critics of his wrong-headed "building democracy" plans in Iraq and elsewhere on the defensive. Here's part of one article I read on a blog, the leftcoaster, that lays out a plan that seems to make sense:
Once Again, Democrats Can Move To Bush's Right On National Security (Steve Soto)
...As for the message and national security, let me say something that I have said before during the 2004 campaign, which was amplified again last night when Bush did his Woodrow Wilson impersonation and talked in a muddle about terrorists and democracy. It is an important point that Newsweek Online’s Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey made again today in their great piece. Put simply, I don’t give a rat’s ass about democracy in the Islamic world right now or about this country’s supposed obligation to nation-build across the globe. All I care about, and all Democrats should care about, is capturing and killing where necessary terrorists who are a threat to this country.
Despite the flowery talk from Bush about spreading democracy, the war on terror is about dealing with a specific threat and the tactics used in those threats; it is not, as Bush would like it, about a years-on-end campaign to remake the world’s regions in our image. Bush, Cheney, and Halliburton of course want this to morph from a “get Bin Laden” effort into a “spread democracy around the world” effort because that entails an unending war on a tactic (terror) whose length and definition of success is left to the executive branch to decide. Contrarily, getting Bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda by working with cooperative countries to disrupt their support networks and financing, through Special Forces rather than regime changing occupying armies is a more under-the-radar but quantifiable effort that doesn’t allow the executive branch to dictate its length, necessary resources, or evaluate its success and patriotism of those pursuing accountability in a vacuum. It requires results, not platitudes, and such an approach as Wolffe and Bailey said today, and we said back in 2004, allows the Democrats to use the Wilsonian delusion that Rove has instilled into Bush’s conflicted and shallow brain and actually move to Bush’s right on national security.
And it happens to be what John Kerry advocated back in 2004, which the media ignored to focus on him being an alleged “flip-flopper” and unworthy of medals that Bush and Cheney could never dream of, or had the guts to obtain on their own.
Representative Jane Harman, who is the Ranking Member on the House Intelligence Committee, is firing up an effort to help Democrats refocus their message on national security, and I hope this is part of that effort. Quite simply, Democrats should tell voters that destroying Al Qaeda and impeding those than mean us harm must be our immediate national security strategy, and not nation building or Bush’s delusions of Wilsonian grandeur.
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/
(Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a permalink to the article, so you'll need to scroll down the page to read it - at this point it's about 1/3 of the way down.)
On edit: the other issues upthread are all very important also.
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