The Democratic National Party should trade its symbol — the
donkey — for Opus the comic-strip penguin. His anxiety closet is
populated by every boogey man the minds of the Dems conjure when
their nightmares come. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, even Condi
Rice pop out regularly to scare poor Opus half to death. To Opus,
and the Democratic Party, Dubya, Dick and Don are much more
frightening than bin Laden, Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez. Which
brings us to the Dems’ campaign strategy for the 2006 campaign.
They’re working hard to make their anxieties ours, and it might
work.
Whenever the Democrats lose an election, they believe the result
has only one cause: the voters didn’t get the message. The fact
that the message may be the problem never occurs to them. In 2004,
John Kerry stood up to accept their presidential nomination,
saluted and announced he was reporting for duty. Which didn’t make
much sense to those who heard the facts from John O’Neill and his
“Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth.” The Dems campaigned on the
Iraq war and lost. Now they’re standing up to fight against being
“Swift boated” again. In the typical media inversion, being “Swift
boated” is understood to mean to be smeared falsely when, instead,
it should be defined as being buried by the facts. Two years later,
they think they can win by selling the same anti-war snake oil. And
they may be right, but only if Iraq goes terribly wrong.
James Carville’s “Democracy Corps” (the campaign advisory group
he runs with all-time-loser Bob Shrum) published a strategy memo
last week that says Republicans are completely vulnerable on the
war. Carville’s memo said, “The President’s attempt to nationalize
the election around the war on terrorism is backfiring, with Iraq
rising in importance and more people believing the war makes us
less secure.” It goes on to say that public sentiment is turning
more negative on Iraq. Carville’s strategy counts on things getting
worse in Iraq before the election. The Dems’ greatest fear is that
something good will happen in Iraq before November 7th.
They are probably safe from any big success in Iraq this year.
No matter how well our forces are doing, the Iraqis are not taking
advantage of what we have done. The fact that Ambassador Khalilzad
has threatened to cut off funding of Iraqi police forces — because
the Maliki government hasn’t rid them of death squads — says too
much. But the lack of good news may be overshadowed by bad news.
Terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere may have learned from 2004 as
well. The famously leaked National Intelligence Estimate of last
week says, in part, “United States-led counterterrorism efforts
have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its
operations…” Two years ago, bin Laden’s pre-election videotape
had no noticeable effect on the election. This time, al-Qaeda or
others may try something different. What if there were a massive
terrorist attack in Iraq or Afghanistan just before the election?
How would voters react to an attack that caused massive American
casualties? Probably not in the way that Carville and Kerry think.
When the president said last week that the party of Harry Truman
and Franklin Roosevelt had become the party of “cut and run,” it
resonated. It’s a pity that Republican candidates don’t get it.
In the past week we’ve heard Al Gore declare that cigarette
smoking is a big reason for global warming, Sen. Mike DeWine of
Ohio say that he doesn’t know what the president means when he says
Dems are the “cut and run” party, and Bob Woodward’s 576-page
campaign script for Howard Dean’s 2008 run tell us the shocking
news that Don Rumsfeld doesn’t always get along with Condi Rice. If
voters aren’t confused, it’s no fault of either national party. Or
of Mortuary Bob Woodward, best remembered for his patently
fictional deathbed interview of former CIA Director William
Casey.
Woodward’s latest, the third volume in his “State of Denial”
series, is so chock full of fibs, it’s a wonder the 527 Media —
those that have gone beyond bias and into political activism — can
even keep up. Woodward writes that Rumsfeld and Rice are so at odds
that he won’t take her phone calls. Not true, quoth Condi, who adds
that she told Woodward that before he wrote the contrary. Woodward
writes that then White House chief of staff Andy Card tried to get
President Bush to dump Rumsfeld before the 2004 election. Not so
says Card. Is there a lick of truth in Woodward’s book? Who cares?
Only those unfortunates who bought Lil’ Billy’s My Life
will buy this doorstop. And most of those who do won’t have time to
read it. They’ll be too busy standing backs braced against the door
of the Dem anxiety closet desperately trying to hold it closed. If
only the Republicans would open it.
I have, in the past, recommended you buy stock in the makers of
Prozac and Wellbutrin, usually prescribed to relieve the symptoms
(but not cure) what ails the Dems. If you haven’t yet, do so now
because I’ve had a peek inside the anxiety closet and I’m about to
open the door.
Back already? Okay, here they are. Lined up, waiting to escape,
is a host of Democrat nightmares. The first is the economy. Will
the Dow top 12,000 this week or next? The Bush economic boom roars
on. Second is the media itself. If the 527 Media — the N.Y.
Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS and AP are
outed as the liberal political activists so many of them have
become, the Dems’ best campaign mechanism will collapse. Third is
the fact that if the Dems take the Senate, their committee chairmen
will be a major disaster. Carl Levin will kill ballistic missile
defense, Leaky Pat Leahy will block confirmation of every judge who
isn’t a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and Jay Rockefeller will
do his damnedest to stop NSA from listening to any terrorist
telephone calls. And the fourth, the worst, is glowering at the
Dems from the darkest corner of the closet.
Howard Dean is traveling the nation, building his own base for
another run in 2008. If I were a Dem, I’d not get a wink of sleep
until Dean was sent back to Vermont.
The Dems probably don’t have that much to fear. The Republicans
know what’s in the anxiety closet but won’t have the gumption to
open the door. Too many of them are already thinking about 2008,
just like the Dems.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004) and, with Edward
Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United
States (Regnery, May 2006 — click here).
