Politics is Political

Matt Stoller brings an important perspective to the issue of the media under-covering foreign policy issues in the campaign, namely that the liberal wonk community needs to share some of the blame for this since part of the problem derives from Democrats' reluctance to engage politically with these issues. That seems right to me. Any Democratic campaign worth its salt can provide for you a wonky discussion of its health care plan or its trade policy. But it can also generate TV spots, quips from surrogates, somewhat unfair mailers, etc. that don't at all sound like a seminar on trade policy.

Historically, they've been much worse at doing this on national security issues. 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? And beyond that, "ought" implies "can" and there's just no way to hermetically seal foreign policy off from politics -- one needs to learn how to play the game well. I even wrote an article about this once that became part of the backdrop for Heads in the Sand.

I do think things are changing on this front to some extent, though mostly in a sense of Democrats either getting smarter about playing defense or else the ones who are really bad at defense got killed off in 2002 and 2004. Most Democratic political operations still seem to me to primarily look at national security issues as an area where you might lose points, and not as an area in which to be on the lookout for potential lines of attack.

Comments

Ah! Now the Obama mailer is "somehwat unfair" rather than "a bit dishonest." Maybe Matt's rethought his position?

Posted by Alvaro | February 25, 2008 4:45 PM

Ah! Now the Obama mailer is "somehwat unfair" rather than "a bit dishonest." Maybe Matt's rethought his position?

Posted by Alvaro | February 25, 2008 4:46 PM

Plus, as Drew Westen persuasively explains in his book, letting somebody else dominate a particular area of policy where you're afraid you're weak gives your opponents the chance to select all of the language and build all of the framings and associations which will keep you weak. The only solution to the problem of Democrats looking "weak" on defense is to articulate strongly and consistently the real Democratic principles of national defense. We loose if we ignore the issues and hope they go away, and we loose if we try to hedge our bets by looking like Republicans on defense. The American people can be persuaded to see things from our point of view, but only if we actually get out there and articulate a point of view.

Posted by Galen | February 25, 2008 5:21 PM

In order to articulate a point of view on foreign policy/defense, Democrats first need to have one. It seems to me that as a group Democrats are dominated by people who don't know or care very much about the nitty gritty of national security, and consequently come off like morons when they try to pontificate about it.

Currently there are two major factions--those who basically fit the peace-at-any-price, neo-pacifist profile; and those who share mainstream views on most of these issues, and are consequently excoriated by the first group as traitors and dupes of the Republicans.

Posted by Robert Powell | February 25, 2008 6:18 PM

Those lame-ass Democrats who can't score points on Iraq fall into the following categories:

1) Incompetent idiots who were too influenced by pundit and Republican bullshit to see an obvious WMD hoax when all the evidence you needed was in the newspapers and online.

2) Pussies who sold out to peer pressure and pressure from the Village, jumped on the bandwagon, thus assuming responsibility for Iraq, and thus are not in the position now to go on the attack.

3)Pussies who opposed the genocide but simply don't have the guts to nail the Republicans for being liars and having gotten a million people killed.

4) Pussies like Barack Obama who think we need to err on the side of politeness when attacking Republicans for hoax-driven unjust wars that lead to a million deaths.

5) Deathmongers who see hoax-driven unjust wars that lead to a million deaths as legitimate tools of foreign policy.

If the analog of the bullshit the Republicans pulled on Iraq happened in any other day-to-day venue, like a business deal or a marriage or a poker game, the perpetrators would have their balls cut off and everyone would agree it was the right thing to do. But the Villagers and the DLCers are so blinded by Republican bullshit that the end result is that our country has gone collectively insane.

There's something really, really rotten in Denmark and we haven't faced up to it yet.

Posted by The Fool | February 25, 2008 6:42 PM

I agree and I suspect this is a case of letting ambiguity do the talking in the minds of voters. Rather than clearly articulate an admittedly - even if rightly - relatively dovish position vis a vis that of the Republicans, I'd imagine most big name Democrats prefer to speak in generalities in an attempt to pick up the vote of people who want to feel on an emotional level as if their country is the biggest bully on the block but who, at the same time, are sympathetic to liberal social policies and may be hurting economically.

Posted by Tim P. | February 25, 2008 6:43 PM

Democrats deal with national security issues like weak poker players who fold to every bluff. If you fold to every bluff, you'll have your lunch stolen and get stacked every time.

Posted by The Fool | February 25, 2008 6:47 PM

Perhaps they're just bowing to the the reality that a majority of humans are authoritarians at heart, at least subconsciously - witness the pre-war support figures for the Iraq war, for instance - and thus are simply seeking not to unneccesarily draw the ire of such folks, preferring a focus on elements of agreement. Or perhaps some of these Democratic elites are simply authoritarian daddy-knows-best types themselves. I think both cases are plausible.

Posted by Tim P. | February 25, 2008 7:02 PM

"Perhaps they're just bowing to the the reality that a majority of humans are authoritarians at heart"

Projecting a little Tim? Most Republicans, yes. Humans, no.

Posted by The Fool | February 25, 2008 7:22 PM

The Obama superbowl ad briefly took on national security, for what that's worth.

Posted by southpaw | February 25, 2008 7:26 PM

Spare me the ad hominems please. If there's anything that history has borne out time and again - from the highly regimented military and caste-based societies of the classical world to the fascists of the 20th century - it's that many humans (probably a majority) are succeptable on some level to the various forms of tribalism we've embraced over time: nationalism, religion, racism, or what have you.

Whether or not I include myself in this category is really besides the point.

Posted by Tim P. | February 25, 2008 7:38 PM

Well, Tim, you made a blanket universal statement.

You might as well say the majority of humans at heart are all AID victims because they're all susceptible to it.

Posted by The Fool | February 25, 2008 7:43 PM

Out of fairness, I feel compelled to add that Barack Obama is not the only big Democratic pussy on this score. Far from it. Hillary Clinton also falls under at least 3 of those categories of Dems who have pussied out badly on Iraq.

C'mon, Hillary, we know you're too smart to have fallen for that bullshit. And I also believe that you would never start a hoax-driven unjust war that leads to a million deaths on your own, but you aquiesced in one, babe. And that just ain't cool -- and that's putting it in a polite Obamaesque manner.

Posted by The Fool | February 25, 2008 7:56 PM

Yes, all people are potential AIDS victims - this seems a very banal point as we know how AIDS is propogated. When we're talking about human behavior, however, it's not so easy to analyze. Really, our best bet is in studying what people have done in various situations, which is kind of my point.

What I'm trying to get at is: just as if, throughout history, there were many cases in which entire societies seemed to develop AIDS, as there are cases in which societies seem to have organized themselves in authoritarian ways, then, yes, I would conclude that in those hypothetical cases the majority of people had AIDS, just as I would conclude that the people displaying authoritarian tendencies were authoritarian..

For instance, I hate to go all Godwin, but do you really believe that Germans of the 1940s were fundamentally different from people today? You might argue that not all Germans participated in the slaughter - but the historical evidence is clear that the vast majority did not resist the Nazi regime.

Relatedly, I'd reccomend reading Hannah Arendt's work on that score if you haven't.

Posted by Tim P. | February 25, 2008 8:06 PM

Pussies like Barack Obama who think we need to err on the side of politeness when attacking Republicans for hoax-driven unjust wars that lead to a million deaths.

If you are pissing around on a message board I'll tell the truth all day long, but if you are running for president it's not great politics to tell the benighted 60-something percent of the populace that believed all that garbage in 2003 fools and war criminals.

I don't care that Obama doesn't call them names. Name calling isn't power, it's nothing. The only way I would care was if there was someone serious out there that called some folks war criminals and intended to start hanging them from the top down. Absent that there is a clear majority that is unhappy with all this garbage and if they could jettison it without thinking that they voted for Bush in 2004 everyone gets out happy.

Posted by Ed Marshall | February 25, 2008 8:07 PM

OK, so unvarnished truth is that for years our foreign/defense policy was a gigantic idiotic boondogle, tolerated because of cupidity and idiocy.

How to package it into digestible TV spots? I guess, something like "we need to be open to new paradigms".

Energy policy is the same. After 20-30 years of idiocy, the average home is too large, too far, and the vehicles used to move around are too inefficients. Abandoning exurbs to bankruptcy and decay can be the best thing to do at this moment (if we could only junk SUVs as we are at it).

Again, it does not make good TV spots. Luckily, some collective American genius seems to produce the required solution, and, blessing of blessings, liberals are not to blame! Similarly, the idea, radical 10 years ago, to double the price of gasoline is also accomplished, and again, we are not to blame.

The truth is cruel, which, for fact-based folks, is a huge impediment.

Posted by piotr | February 25, 2008 8:12 PM

"If you are pissing around on a message board I'll tell the truth all day long, but if you are running for president it's not great politics to tell the benighted 60-something percent of the populace that believed all that garbage in 2003 fools and war criminals."

This is what I'm trying to say, The Fool.

Posted by Tim P. | February 25, 2008 8:14 PM

The only national security commercials that have ever seemed to work are either Hooah!-style cheerleading, or Scared Shitless-style attack ads. For example, Daisy.

National Security, Matt, means war. As Forrest pointed out, it's true that war means fightin' and fightin' means killin', but the vast majority of the country has not ever served in the forces, let alone seen combat.

So, at best we have realistic depictions like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List for World War 2.

But our popular movies are usually like Rambo or Die Hard or something else. Great entertainment - awful policy, strategy, and tactics.

Note: I have decided to leave out the assertion that a not insignificant part of the country is genuinely thrilled to be whipping out at the wogs on general principle.

Posted by Greg | February 25, 2008 8:48 PM

Try harder, dudes. The fact that I'm just dicking around on a message board and using bad language doesn't mean that I am suggesting you can lift the text of your 30 second spots out of my blog posts.

It's the spirit of the thing I'm getting at.

Get it?

Posted by The Fool | February 25, 2008 9:05 PM

Thanks to The Fool for illustrating exactly why most of the voters mistrust Democrats on national security, and for taking an appropriate name for his posting persona. To wit:

--spouting alarmist propaganda, like multiplying the number of Iraqis killed since 2003 by about ten and bandying around terms like "genocide" with a clear disregard for truth.

--ignoring relevant facts, like the conclusion of the UN itself that the sanctions regime clowns like The Fool tout as "working" really DID kill about a million Iraqis, half of them children, while tightening the regime's grip on power and enriching its collaborators.

--demonstrating historical amnesia by skipping lightly over the fact that Iraq started the war in 1991 with the invasion, rape, and annexation of a member of the UN General Assembly and US ally, Kuwait; then comprehensively violated the ceasefire agreement.

--revealing a callous disregard for generally agreed upon international norms against not only wars of aggression, but the proliferation AND USE of wmd's; aggressive restraint of trade in vital commodities; state supported terrorism; and genocide. Nice moral high ground.

--making statements indicating a contempt for the morality, and in fact sanity, of the citizens of the US as well as those of other democracies that supported the enforcement of UN Resolutions like Britain, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Poland, etc, etc. Very persuasive, let's vote!

Most Americans decided a long time ago that if we are dragged into a war by an aggressive tyranny we should try to win rather than play for a tie.

Self-regarding adolescents running around wetting their pants in hysterical advocacy of isolationism and appeasement in the face of genocidal totalitarianism are a national disgrace, and are disproportionately represented in the Democratic Party, and blogs like this. Face facts.

Posted by Robert Powell | February 26, 2008 3:02 AM

Powell: "people who don't know or care very much about the nitty gritty of national security, and consequently come off like morons when they try to pontificate about it."

Powell resembles this remark.

I can't decide whether Powell or Ford is the biggest idiot on this blog. Ford is a Ku Klux Klan psychotic, but Powell is overdosed on DMT.

Ford has, on occasion, actually posted one or more sentences that were, no doubt unintentionally, correct, even if buried in a mass of other bullshit.

Powell never has.

Powell wins.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | February 26, 2008 3:14 AM

Another pointless, boorish, information-free comment by The Amazing Hack. At least he's consistent.

Posted by Robert Powell | February 26, 2008 7:24 AM

Powell: many of your points are weak and/or wrong on the facts and/or logic. There is no point rehearsing the reasons why with a brainwashed ideologue like you.

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 8:54 AM

But don't worry, Bobby. There's hope for you yet. After the international liberal fascist communist conspiracy defeats the freedom-loving patriots like yourself all over the world, you will be the immediate benficiary of a free public re-education that will deprogram all the conservative nonsense that's been instilled in your brain.

bwahahahahahahahaha
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 9:01 AM

Isn't there some other place where Powell and "The Fool" can spout their idiocy at each other?

Posted by Njorl | February 26, 2008 9:11 AM

Fuck you Njorl. I wrote the best comment to this post yet above at 6:42. Do you have anything substantive to say or are you just a whiny bitch?

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 9:41 AM

Look, boys, "genocide" may not be the best term. As a practical matter it is a vague term and in international law it is a term of art with a very complicated legalistic meaning. I'm not committed to the word genocide. Nothing really turns on what we call the mass murder that happened in Iraq. All I really mean by it is that you took unjustified violent action that resulted in a very, very large number of people getting killed.

Terminological quibbles are really just a smokescreen, but what should we call it when someone undertakes a hoax-driven war of aggression that results in the deaths of a million people? (Bobby: maybe its only half a million. But Bobby, really, do you think it makes a qualitative moral difference?).

So let's get serious, boys. We're talking about the U.S. -- OUR COUNTRY -- being responsible for, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million murders. It doesn't get any more morally serious than that. That buries the needle on the evilometer.

Some of you have moral radar that is highly sensitive to bad language or lack of politesse -- but government-run mass murder? Not so much.

I spit on people like you and your fucked up value systems.

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 10:21 AM

By the way, Bobby, I'm not a godfearing man but I bet you are. The way I hear it, the Lord doesn't look kindly on murder and even less so mass murder. I bet he doesn't like it when people make excuses for mass murder either or try to lowball the numbers in defense of mass murder.

The way I hear it, he burns people like that.

Sux for you, Bobby.

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 10:38 AM

--The latest and best peer-reviewed data on casualties in Iraq since 2003 was recently released by the UN (WHO). It indicates that between 154,000 and 210,000 Iraqis died violently during this period. Most of these people were killed by terrorist car bombs and the like. Civilian deaths attributed to the US military run about 40,000. This is a huge tragedy that cannot be minimized. But our moral position is by any standard better when we are putting our lives on the line to minimize civilian casualties rather than causing them in large numbers from a distance with the embargo and periodic missile strikes.

For comparison, we killed about 60,000 French civilians in 1944.

--This data does not indicate the number of Iraqis who are alive today because of the invasion, but it's safe to assume it's a big number given the totals run up by the sanctions regime (see above), and the literally millions killed by repression and wars of aggression launched by the regime.

--Anyone who thinks the war in Iraq was ginned up out of thin air by a clique of deviants in the White House after 9/11 needs to be reading history instead of posting about it. The relevant UN, Congressional, and Parliamentary Resolutions, plus a few of the major commission reports like Hutton, Duelfer, or Robb/Silverman would be a good start.

The tactic of name-calling and "I could prove your facts wrong, but I won't", is typical of the kind of teen-aged misbehavior that passes for the courage of one's convictions in intellectually deficient circles. These matters are too serious to be left to the looney-tunes, and Democrats' hesitance to disassociate themselves from such yahoos has been, and continues to be, a real problem for the party.

Posted by Robert Powell | February 26, 2008 11:51 AM

Hey Bobby: don't tell it to me. Tell God.

The way I hear it, he's omniscient, i.e. knows both the actual facts as well as how honest you were in forming your own opinion.

Its awful hot in Hell, Bobby. Careful there, bro.

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 12:05 PM

Bobby: God also knows if you were completely honest in dismissing the ORB and Lancet studies. Dude, you better have a real solid argument when the Lord asks you about those studies.

Cause if you don't, he's gonna burn your ass.

Posted by The Fool | February 26, 2008 12:13 PM