The American Spectator

Finally, the vast majority of Americans don’t think that violent criminals should go free because of judge-created technicalities, and they certainly don’t think terrorists deserve all the same protections as American citizens. Judges affect all these issues, and when judges themselves are an issue in elections, conservatives win again and again and again.

Yet, as Manny Miranda of the Third Branch Conference has conclusively shown, this Senate’s record of confirming judicial nominees of its own party (and for that matter, this administration’s diligence in nominating them and fighting for them) is the worst in more than three decades and, in any meaningful context (i.e., Watergate excluded), probably the worst in history.

This is not a record that moves voters to the polls for the Republican Party.

FORTUNATELY FOR REPUBLICANS, there is still time to turn things around. A carefully chosen fight on judges will help. So will a well-chosen fight on the treatment of captured terrorists. So will another, better-conceived fight over the death tax, one that successfully overcomes a Democratic filibuster. So will a well-chosen fight against a liberal spending priority. So will passage of a border-protection-first immigration bill that contains a down-the-road trigger for some of the free-market, pro-legal-immigrant provisions of the Pence-Hutchison proposal.

In all cases, it is the embrace of conservative positions that will bring victory within reach.

What really makes Republican/conservative victory possible, though, are the weakness and the wackiness of their Democratic opponents. Does anybody, yet, know what Democrats actually are for, other than for making President Bush look bad? Does anybody think they won’t try to raise taxes? Does anybody think they’ll do a better job of protecting the borders or that they won’t institute an openly declared amnesty for illegal aliens?

And does anybody doubt that a Democratic congressional majority would try to gin up impeachment charges against the president? That’s the last thing, of course, that a majority of the American public wants to see.

Most of all, Americans can easily see from Joe Lieberman’s primary loss on Tuesday that the defeatist Left and the Howard Dean screamers control the Democratic Party.

But conservatives must not misunderstand why the Lamont brigades make Democrats look bad. It’s not because the Lamont brigades are against the war: So, too, are the majority of Americans now, because the Rumsfeld Pentagon seems to have made such a mess of it. Instead of opposition to the war, per se, being anathema, what’s anathema to most Americans is the idea of losing the war.

As in the proverbial saying, the American public doesn’t want merely to see its soldiers go home — although it strongly does want their tour of duty to end — but it wants to see them “declare victory and go home.” The declaration, though, must be believable. In this light, an anti-war Democrat who nevertheless outlines a credible plan for victory would be the strongest candidate of all.

The reason the message of the Lamont victory makes Democrats vulnerable is not that opposition to the war is a political weakness, but that opposition to victory is a political weakness. There is not yet a nationally prominent Democrat who seems to care two figs about actually winning the war. Until and unless there is, Republicans still have a chance to limp across the electoral finish line with their majority intact. It will be conservatives, though, on whose shoulders those limping Republicans will be leaning.