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October 19, 2006

Self-Inflicted Wounds

So President Bush makes the wholly uninteresting observation that the insurgents in Iraq may be trying to affect the U.S. election akin to how the North Vietnamese undermined U.S. public opinion via the Tet Offensive, and it's 'proof' that Iraq=Vietnam. This, quite frankly, is why the left doesn't do as well in this country as they should, given how thoroughly the right has driven the place into the ground over the last six years.

Think about it: government spending has gone wild, we've got the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society on the books, education has been formally declared a federal issue, we're in an ugly war we should not have been in in the first place, and still there's a lot of questions about whether or not the Democrats can take a house of Congress in November. Why? Because the left (which, to be more precise, is a small subset of those on the left) keeps doing things like this. Go to Think Progress and watch the video, or read the transcript. Does President Bush say what the writer claims? Not at all. He hits the same basic talking points he always hits, and actually makes a reasonable case. I am coming to the conclusion that we should leave Iraq sooner than later, but there's little doubt in my mind that in so doing, we'll hand the enemy a huge propaganda victory. But rather than engaging what the President did say, and more importantly, what he has said in the past, Think Progress claims he said something he didn't, undermining their credibility.

Democrats are not trusted very far on national security. Historically, even when Democrats are doing well, national security is their trailing indicator, one reason that a recent poll showing them ahead of Republicans on the issue was such a big deal. And national security is a big deal for many voters, because that's really one of the few areas of government action where just about everyone agrees the government should be involved. That puts Democrats at a structural disadvantage in elections; many people who might otherwise vote Democratic instead select Republicans because they believe that Republicans will do a better job protecting them than Democrats. As with so many things when it comes to politics, it doesn't matter what the facts are, only what people believe, and as long as the Democratic Party is viewed as weak on national security, they're going to have that problem.

And confirmation bias makes it very difficult for the Democrats to crawl out of that hole. Anytime a Democrat says something that sounds like he or she might be weak on national security, people will notice it more than when a Democrat says something strong on national security. Overcoming that will take a great deal of time and effort. Part of overcoming that will be to point out where Republicans have failed on national security, but those accusations have to ring true or they will hurt rather than help.

Which brings us back to Think Progress. There is a good case to be made that the Bush administration erred terribly in choosing to go to war in Iraq, and a far better case to be made that they screwed up terribly in the execution of the war. Neither of those cases requires anyone to stretch a single fact, let alone misrepresent what people say. It would certainly be logical to argue, for example, that we are in a position where the enemy thinks they can inflict a Tet-style defeat on us because of errors made by the Bush administration over the past three years, and that we need to focus our efforts on preparing the Iraqi government to maintain itself without our direct support. As long as we're in Iraq, some number of Iraqis will fight simply to drive us from their country, so by getting out we can undercut much of the insurgency's support. If the Iraqi government has the forces at its disposal to defeat the remaining insurgents at that time, we can at least salvage some good from this mission. If we continue the 'we'll stay indefinitely' course, eventually the American public will grow fed up enough that we'll have to leave at a time not of our choosing, with predictable results.

That's not the only viable course of action, but I think it's the best of a bad lot. Unfortunately, I suspect we're far more likely to face option number two, because the Democrats just can't seem to overcome their reputation.

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