too clever by half

In the context of discussing the media’s failure to cover foreign policy issues (a subject I’ve addressed repeatedly and elaborated on most recently here), whippersnappers Matt Stoller and Matthew Yglesias urge their fellow progressives to bring national-security issues into their politics.

Yglesias:

A presidential campaign knows it needs to check the national security box, so they organize one or more Major Foreign Policy Addresses and then kind of play duck-and-cover hoping that Republicans won’t attack them and when Republicans do attack them whining that you shouldn’t play politics with national security. But if we all take for granted that politics will be played with basic questions of economic growth and fairness, then why not play it with national security, too?

Stoller:

Look, if you want foreign policy to become a political issue, you have to make it a political issue. That’s an organizing problem. I didn’t see any attacks from any Democratic candidates against each other on North Korea or Russia, any attempts to draw distinctions, though I saw a lot of high-minded ‘major serious policy addresses’. …

And you can blame the press if you want, but if 97% of a campaign budget is going towards something other than communicating foreign policy ideas to the public, then what exactly is being done to fix this problem?

Readers may be surprised to note that while I often disagree politically with both Stoller and Yglesias, I agree completely with their positions on this matter.

Of course politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.

Of course national security is a domestic issue.

Of course Democrats need to give voters an idea of what they’re for in foreign-policy matters.

Unfortunately, though, bringing foreign policy to the fore (as it stands now among progressive thinkers) would expose Democrats’ huge vulnerability on this issue if they continue to say that they are for pulling out of Iraq and damn the consequences, which is what their position appears to be. (I’m not sure, because they won’t say.)

The impression that a lot of people have of the Democrats—even, and perhaps especially, during wartime—is that the party is profoundly unserious, in the ways that matter, about the outside world, about foreign policy, and about national security.

To be serious in the ways that matter requires, first of all, that you validate the notion that we are at war, with hundreds of thousands of troops sitting in hostile territory; that a wartime president is, most importantly, the commander in chief, mandated to keep America and Americans safe; that you validate people’s (i.e., the electorate’s) legitimate fears and anxieties about the dangerous world we’re living in (not entirely of our own making) and the many dangerous bad actors we face (some of whom are evil); that you acknowledge political Islam as a movement (even if it has various, and conflicting, manifestations—i.e., some Sunni-inspired, some Shia-inspired) that directly and deliberately challenges Western Enlightenment ideals and, even more important, Western notions about human rights for all.

To be serious in the ways that matter requires that Dems address terrorism as a tactic that we will face here at home. That was—or should have been—one of the lessons of 9/11, which, as readers will recall, preceded the Second Iraq War and was a clear signal about the wider world’s longtime unhappiness with and hatred of the U. S. of A.

The Democrats have utterly failed to address these legitimate fears. Many anti-war Dems have chosen to charge Republicans with fear-mongering rather than address people’s real fears. For example, in their politicking about the Iraq war—and about Bush’s supposedly looming attack on Iran—many Democratic partisans loudly and aggressively downplayed the threat from Iran as “Republican talking points.”

These are not serious arguments, and I believe they will fall way short with those voters who are concerned—at the reptilian-brain level—about “national security.”

From what I can tell, the Dems’ foreign policy narrative is that we have to clean up America’s image abroad, whereas the GOP’s narrative is (as always) about keeping Americans safe.

But, by all means, Democrats should foreground these issues. They just need a better pitch if they expect to win skeptical reptilian voters.

—————-

p.s. Most of the Obama fans that I know support him because they hate the war in Iraq. They don’t want to think about the war. They want to believe that Obama can get us out of there, put it behind us, and move on. He is encouraging them to believe that this can, and will, happen. It’s a cynical political maneuver.

If you personally don’t want to think about foreign policy, that’s all the more reason for you to vote for a person who does think about it, and has honest, smart, well-rounded advisers who come up with detailed plans, backups, fail-safes, etc..