Lukewarm Water

I don’t always agree with Joan Walsh but I think she is on to something important in today’s Salon Column.

I wrote last fall that I thought the Senate resolution giving the president carte blanche to invade at will was a serious, perhaps fatal, error on the part of the Democratic Presidential Wannabe Club.

The moral reason was obvious. Dick Cheney made it quite clear, two months before the vote, that the administration planned to attack Iraq, no matter what. It was immoral to give Bush a blank check to do that for their own craven political purposes. This was a vote on a matter of life and death, not “bring your daughter to work day.”

The political reason was that the base of the party was going to be slow to forgive. This was clear from the enormous outpouring of e-mails, letters and phone calls coming into Senators’ offices; record numbers by all accounts. As my own Senator, Diane Feinstein said on the floor of the Senate:

People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office – and with no other factors – I would have to vote against this resolution.

Naturally, she voted for the resolution, ostensibly because of the supposed grave imminent threat Saddam presented to the US that we in the peacenik hoi polloi just didn’t seem to grasp.

…the same hoi polloi who knew very well that invading Iraq was a long held wet dream of radical neocons who were opportunistically using 9/11 as an excuse to advance their agenda… the same hoi polloi who could see with our very own eyes that the Bush Doctrine, published and distributed for every American to read, advocates muscular unilateralism and the emasculation of international institutions and the rule of law. You didn’t have to be an insider to know that the administration’s late blooming “commitment” to getting UN approval and international support was nothing but window dressing to buy time.

As Walsh says in her article:

Frankly, I found it equally incomprehensible how someone could support the war as Gephardt did, and now pretend that he didn’t know the president had no plan and no international cooperation to get it done. I knew that, sitting behind my desk in San Francisco, raising my teenaged daughter. Why didn’t anyone tell Gephardt, the savvy House minority leader?

Walsh doesn’t say it, but here in Santa Monica I knew our Senator Diane was voting for it because she was afraid that she’d be labeled a coward by the Mighty Wurlitzer if she didn’t. Continuing to live in the past, and making political calculations based upon the closed, insular advice of political consultants who have outlived their usefulness, the Democratic leadership believed that the conditions of 1991 were again at play and they would not let themselves be caught out this time. Always fighting the last war, as usual.

Walsh says it is “unseemly” for the contenders who voted for the resolution to now pile on the Bush administration. I don’t think it’s unseemly, it’s just not credible. It showed a remarkable political obtuseness not to recognize that when the base of the party is worked up enough to call and write in record numbers, something is in the air besides the smell of patchouli oil. These were Democrats, not anarchists or Naderites. That kind of political tone deafness is a disqualification in my book. At a time when the electorate is closely divided, you’d better pay attention to your base.

The vaunted Carville-Greenberg-Shrum operation further confused the issue by advising Democratic candidates to go around the country saying “I’m for the war, but with reservations” because that’s what their polls told them that many people felt.

Apparently, they didn’t realize that the people who felt this way were looking for leadership on the issue not equivocation. By saying they were for the war but with reservations, voters were simply saying that they supported the president by default in a time of war (and media cheerleading), but they knew in their gut that something wasn’t quite right.

It was the candidates job to identify and articulate where that feeling came from. When the Democrats appeared to be just as uncomfortable and confused as they were, swing voters went with the guys who seemed sure of themselves. You can’t blame them.

But, most importantly, the consultants failed to realize that by taking this position the democratic leadership was telling the energized base to go fuck themselves. The results were predictable:

Here’s what the Carville-Greenberg-Shrum operation said in their post-mortem of the election:

On Election Day, Republicans won by 4 points in voting for the House of Representatives (51 to 47 percent). That produced a gain of just 4 seats in the House. In the Senate, Democrats went from a one-seat majority to being in the minority. That represents a swing of 4 points away from Democratic performance in 2000 (even), actually the switch of around 2 percent of the voters, not a seismic change.

[…]

This imbalance of energy and direction produced a unique electorate, which would have been noted election night, had the traditional exit polls been available. The 2002 electorate was more Republican and much more conservative than those that showed up in the Presidential election of 2000 and the off-year election of 1998. Republicans were greatly energized by their campaigns, while Democrats were not.

If the Democrats had had the balls to say what they knew very well was the truth, we may have won the mid-terms and kept George W. Bush from hurtling forward with the Iraq war when the rest of the world balked at his bullying ways. At the very least they would have had a principled and coherent position from which to run. It was a huge failure of nerve and it explains the predicament the Wannabe Club finds itself in today.

Hence, grassroots support for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.* The others look like presidential pretzels trying to explain themselves, now that things have gone wrong. Many of us predicted it would be so.

*I don’t mean to ignore Kucinich, Sharpton and Braun. They also objected to the war and I admire them for it. Their voices are worthy of respect and all three of them have followings that should be valued in the Party. But, they have little chance of gaining the nomination for reasons unrelated to the Iraq war.