Positioning

by digby

Matthew Yglesias explains why some of the Republican presidential candidates are inexplicably behaving like Bush cultists and some are not:

The oddity of the emerging GOP presidential field is that it’s dominated by candidates — John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney — who are, in one way or another, importantly unorthodox conservatives. Consequently, they need to hew very closely to hawk dogma in national security policy to prove their bona fides even at the moment where political support for the hawkish position is collapsing. Sam Brownback, a distinctly second-tier contender but one who benefits from being a committed social conservative with standard conservative economic views, is taking the chance to be the exception and resist the urge to surge…

The only thing I would add to this analysis is that, as best I can tell, ever since the war began in March 2003 it’s been the case that any given dovish position looks better and better as time goes on. When thinking about positioning yourself for primaries that won’t be held until a year or more from now, it’s worth keeping in mind that things will almost certainly look worse 9-15 months from now than they do today.

For the Republicans being a true blue conservative is so important that a candidate who is not an unreconstructed hawk or a religious nut (preferably both) cannot get past the primaries. That puts the “electable” (appealing to independents) candidates in a very difficult position and they have obviously decided they are better off with Bush and the war than being out there without any wingnut credentials at all. It’s very risky.

I remember writing a long comment somewhere on the day of the Iraq war resolution that the Democratic presidential contenders were stupid to vote for the war for purely political reasons because if the war was going ok in 2004, Bush would almost certainly win and if it wasn’t their vote would be hung around their necks like a dead albatross. John Kerry certainly paid that price for his vote which made it virtually impossible for him to make a coherent case against the war.

The problem was that most of these people were fighting the last war, Gulf War I, when many of them felt burned by their vote against a war that ended up being a glorious (and painless) victory. The Republicans never let them forget it. It was understandable that they were unsure of themselves and thought it was a good bet to go with the war — it was just a year after 9/11 and Bush was at 65% in the polls. It wasn’t a good bet at all.

I thought long and hard about that since then, wondering how a politican can truly know the smart move in cases of war and I concluded that they probably can’t. They simply have to do what they think is right. It’s a different case than most legislation where you can horsetrade and think about positioning for the future and otherwise play politics. War is a wildcard — you can’t know in advance how things are going to go or what position taken today might benefit you tomorrow. The risks are so high and the moral questions so profound that you are better off just trying to make a reasoned decision and being open minded about changing your mind if things go differently than you expect.

It’s an unsatisfying and frightening way for politicians to deal with big questions like this, but I don’t see any way they can avoid it. Many of the Democrats followed their instincts in 1991 and were humiliated — so they didn’t follow their instincts in 2002 and they were trapped. I’m not disagreeing with Yglesias that they should keep in mind that there is an ever reduced risk in being against the war, but I don’t think as a general rule it’s a good idea to put too much stock in such things. War is not predictable.

.