One Toe In The Water

by digby

A lot of people are going to take issue with Joe Klein for this week’s column about the Connecticut race, and with good reason. (Armando does so, here.)

But I am not going to join that party. I have been very hard on Klein for years for his anachronistic political analysis, but I am sensing that something has changed and I think it’s worth recognizing.

Setting aside his weak defense of triangulation as a governing strategy and his misplaced hope that after all the excitement of these last few years the political system will settle down into a nice bipartisan era of good feelings if the Democrats don’t go off the deep end (tell it to Dobson, Limbaugh and Kristol, Joe), I think his piece is actually amazingly right-on in some important respects. He seems to have had an epiphany recently and finally figured out how we got to where we are, if not how to get out of it. Since Klein is a major voice of the insider conventional wisdom, I think we are making progress.

Forget all the silliness he writes about “blognuts” and and his predictable he said/she said rendition of the post Lamont challenges to both parties and get a load of this:

Much was made of Cheney’s venting, and it is a bit too easy, after six years of this bilge, to dwell on the Vice President’s aura and miss the essential felony of the Bush White House—that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support. Indeed, it has often attempted to use the war for partisan gain. To be sure, there is some grist to the Republican portrayal of Democrats as a bunch of wimpy peaceniks. All too often in the post-Vietnam past—the first Gulf War, for example—the default position of the Democratic Party has been to assume that any prospective use of U.S. military power would be immoral. But Bush’s initial post-9/11 response was not one of those times. The invasion of Afghanistan and an aggressive effort to destroy al-Qaeda were supported by just about every Democratic politician. Many leading Democrats even gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq, although most did so, I suspect, for reasons of political expediency. One of the most convincing arguments offered by the bloggers is that the Democratic establishment should have been far more skeptical than it was about a pre-emptive, nearly unilateral assault on an Islamic country.

In 2004 Bush and Karl Rove managed to flummox the Democrats by conflating the war in Iraq with the war against al-Qaeda and insisting that any Democratic reservations about Iraq were a sign of weakness. This was infuriating. It was Bush’s disastrous decision to go to war—and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources—that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush’s feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation’s best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal’s quasi-wingnut [quasi???? — ed] editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, “[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well.”

That’s about as harsh an assessment of Bush’s failures as I’ve read anywhere. He has absorbed the message that supporting Iraq was a bad move from the get. He has absorbed the message that the bipartisanship he loves and values was destroyed by the Republicans, not the Democrats. And while he still bemoans the fact that Dems are weak on security, he does so with much less energy than he has in the past and lays the current disaster directly at the feet of the Republicans and their hyper partisan governing style. This is a good sign.

It’s true that he fails to note his own (and others in the political establishment’s) complicity in the terrible decision to back Bush’s Iraq policy. And he blandly repeats the trope about the Democrats going back to the 70’s (but notably fails to conjure the magic “McGovern” word even once.) However, it’s far more important that he has come to recognize, somehow, that the Republicans “wave the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon.”

This is a big deal as we go into the 06 and 08 elections. If the punditocrisy and the media chatterers can be encouraged to see this clearly, as Klein has done, we might finally be able to change this national security narrative and take these GOP thugs down.

Furthermore, despite Klein’s desperate attempt to find equivalence, anybody can see that compared to “waving the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon,” the “blognuts” rejecting Clintonian triagulation isn’t even in the same league when it comes to extremism. After all, one is exploiting global death and destruction for political gain while the other (even if you think it’s a political mistake) is just routine internecine politics. There simply isn’t any equivalence and it’s quite clear that Joe Klein knows it, even if he isn’t ready to abandon his irrelevant position as a “raging moderate.”

So, I say welcome to the reality based pool, Joe. Go ahead, you can jump all the way in. The water’s fine.

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