councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 04/07/30/10:43 |
| The New Republic Website
The Right Stuff by Daniel W. Drezner http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=scholar&s=drezner072904 After John Kerry sewed up the Democratic presidential nomination, there was much fretting about whether he would need to tack left in order to appease the Deaniacs and Naderites. The Fahrenheit 9/11 phenomenon fueled this concern. In the run-up to this week's convention, a spate of new analyses came out regarding the growing power of left-wing special interests, and whether they even wanted Kerry to win in November. But after three days of the convention, one Kerry campaign tactic comes through loud and clear: The Democrats will be attacking Bush from the right as well as the left. Indeed, some of the rhetoric deployed sounds awfully familiar to that used by a presidential candidate four years ago--George W. Bush. A key plank of Bush's 2000 campaign was "restoring honor and dignity" to the White House. The Democrats seem bound and determined to top that. On Tuesday, Barack Obama sounded like he was channeling Bill Cosby at various points in his speech: "Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn--they know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." In last night's speech, John Edwards praised the values of "faith, family, responsibility, and equality of opportunity." As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out this week, these are conservative tropes. It's on foreign and defense related issues, however, where the echoes of the Bush 2000 campaign come through loud and clear. Four years ago, Bush articulated a realist foreign policy platform, based on a strong and well-funded military. Kerry has gone out of his way in interviews and profiles to articulate his realist bona fides--contrary to my expectations from this past spring. True, Democrat after Democrat at the convention has criticized the Bush administration for being unilateralist--a standard liberal line. But they have also gone after the administration for refusing to expand the size of the military to meet the current demands placed on the armed forces. In their speeches Wednesday night, both former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and John Edwards bashed the President for moving so slowly on intelligence reform. (Bob Graham probably said something along these lines as well, but I lost the will to stay awake 90 seconds into his speech.) The similarities between the campaigns extend to the tactical level. Four years ago, Bush received the endorsement of a fair number of high-ranking retired military officers--Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf most prominently. This rankled some of the retired military brass, who believed strongly in the tradition of senior officials remaining apolitical after they left the active military. At the time, General Merrill McPeak, the chief of staff for the Air Force from 1990 to 1994, defended his endorsement of Bush on The News Hour, saying, "I support him in general. I think he's right on the issues." Four years later, McPeak was back on PBS--to endorse John Kerry. He also appeared in a stark black-and-white DNC film aired last night, in which he said, "We're on the wrong course." Five other retired generals appeared in the film, and each of them seemed bound and determined to say the word "Kerry" in close proximity to the phrase "commander-in-chief." For many of these officers, their surprise at supporting a Democrat is palpable. Shalikashvili said in his speech last night, "I do not stand here as a political figure. I stand here as an old soldier and a new Democrat." He wasn't the only one: Earlier in the evening, Lt. Colonel Steve Brozak--a Marine who served in Iraq and is now running for Congress in New Jersey--stated that he had been a registered Republican 18 months earlier. There are, to be sure, limits to the effectiveness of veteran porn. The tactic didn't deliver election victories for John McCain or Bob Dole, both of whom had even more impressive military histories than Kerry. But in the end it may not be Kerry's biography that makes the most difference, but rather the way in which his biography has provided a natural opening for his party to move to the administration's right on military issues. "America's armed forces need better equipment, better training, and better pay," Bush said in his 2000 convention speech. If that line sounds familiar, it's because just about every major Democratic speaker this week has said almost exactly the same thing. Who would have thought that the man many believe to be the most conservative president in modern history could be outflanked from the right? And by the so-called most liberal man in the Senate. Daniel W. Drezner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Sanctions Paradox (Cambridge 1999). He writes regularly at www.danieldrezner.com/blog. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho