You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

I thought Noam Scheiber was joking on this. Apparently not:

Moderates must insist, à la Galston and Kamarck, that Democrats won't win back the White House unless they convince voters to trust them on national security, which means making the war on terrorism not just the party's top priority but its central preoccupation in 2008. We're not just talking about calling for a larger military, but something dramatic to signify the shift--like a plan to strike an Iranian or North Korean nuclear facility if need be. Moderates must also maintain that Democrats can't afford to lose ground among swing voters by taking hard-line positions on abortion and gay marriage, though the basic right to an abortion and civil rights for homosexuals should remain central Democratic positions. In return, moderates would endorse an ambitious domestic policy agenda, the centerpiece of which would be universal health insurance but which would also include revisiting nafta and intense opposition to K Street-sponsored legislation like tort and bankruptcy reform.

Dude. We tried this already. Go ask Lyndon Johnson how well it worked.

Update: Maybe this needs a fuller rebuttal. Since my colleague Matt gave it a semi-approving citation, there's a terrifying chance that someone, somewhere, is taking it seriously. And we can't have that. So let's say it simply: this idea is insane. And it's insane in the Einsteinian sense of the word, as in doing the same thing twice while expecting different results. Kennedy got us into Vietnam because he was worried about looking weak, and Johnson accelerated our involvement for the exact same reason. He figured that The Great Society couldn't go off if its planner was deposed for being too soft on Communism, so he'd better level IndoChina to be on the safe side.

It didn't work. Indeed, not only didn't it work, the schism it created destroyed the Democratic party's national security credentials for a generations. Eugene McCarthy and later, George McGovern, were direct results of Johnson's decision, and they collectively did the party's foreign policy standing more damage than any red baiters ever could have. And, in doing that, they helped create Reagan and doom the the Democratic party's social projects for a generation.

That's what happens when you take a party fundamentally skeptical of military solutions and then force it to support a plan everybody knows to be a bad idea in order to protect a political flank. The bad idea blows up, the underlying tensions busts forth, the party looks fully incompetent, and all the things Democrats are strong on are quickly forgotten. So forgetting all the quotidian concerns -- we don't have enough money for these wars, we don't have the manpower, they wouldn't accomplish anything, etc. -- it's simply bad political advice, no matter how intuitive it may appear.

In fact, Scheiber clearly misread Kamarck and Galston, who quite convincingly argue that Democrats have mistaken foreign policy for an issue-based arena, when in reality what wins the day are a candidate's personality traits, which voters mentally translate into rough approximations of how the candidate would fight a war. The real argument of the paper was that:

Democratic candidates have to establish a bond of trust with the electorate that is based as much on character and integrity as policy agendas and issue papers. We believe that in presidential elections, which pose the most personal political choices voters ever make, this personality test is the most important of all. We summarize it in three questions, which are not ours but rather the electorates’: Is the candidate a person of strength, with core convictions and the ability to act on them through challenges and criticism? Is the candidate a person of integrity, who displays consistency over time, who tells the truth, and whose words and deeds coincide? And: is the candidate a person of empathy, who understands and cares about people like us? In American national politics, candidates who appear cold, calculating, vacillating, or elitist rarely succeed.

The conclusion, then, should not be that Democrats must disingenuously promise to follow a bad plan of action because it makes them look tough, but that they should nominate someone tough enough to keep the electorate's confidence without pledging to embark on idiotic, dangerous adventures. Kerry, resume aside, didn't come off as tough. Others will. But Scheiber's idea is neither tough nor smart, it'll just make the candidate who proposes it look stupid and then, in the unlikely event that he's elected, lead to a foreign affairs crisis that'll fracture and destroy the Democratic party for a generation. As I said the first time: we tried this before. It didn't work. To do it again and expect anything different, well, we know what that's called.