Democratic Party

On Wednesday Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate John Kerry broke his self-imposed silence on the war and took up Daschle’s critique, deploring Bush’s “end-run around the U.N.” and calling for “regime change” in the U.S. But when reporters asked him about his remarks, the senator immediately began to backtrack. “It is possible that the word ‘regime change’ is too harsh. Perhaps it is.” Kerry’s backsliding wasn’t as silly as Madonna pulling her antiwar video because, duh, she apparently hadn’t thought about how it might seem once the war actually began, but it was a strange campaign misstep that overmatched Democrats can ill afford.

Why are so many war critics flummoxed by talking about the war? Isn’t it possible to critique the president without giving aid and comfort to the enemy? And is pointing out the effort’s shortcomings the same as glorying in them? I’ve been struggling with these questions since the war began. I’m not an antiwar Democrat; I’m just anti-this war, at this time. I think Saddam is a bigger menace than most of the left seems to; I think his flouting U.N. resolutions merited a tough international response; I thought the world was on its way to crafting one when the Bush administration pulled the plug on diplomacy. Yet even though I opposed its timing, once the war commenced I reflexively wished it would be over quickly.

It’s been a long two weeks. At first it seemed like it might be the cakewalk conservatives promised — Saddam was rumored dead, Iraqis were surrendering, tanks were on the move. Then the coalition bogged down in Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriya, and barely touched the north. Now, momentum’s swung back again, with U.S. troops already patrolling Saddam International Airport, but they still could be a long way from victory. And while I didn’t root for the administration’s setbacks in the war’s early going, I have to admit they served to prove its hubris, its dishonesty and the dashing arrogance of the administration’s frightening first-strike doctrine, which the war on Iraq was meant to kick off. Even if the battle for Baghdad ends quickly, there remains plenty to critique.

It’s obvious that in promising a cakewalk Republican neocons ignored the warnings of intelligence agencies and the military, and the soldiers who actually had to fight the war faced more intense resistance than they were prepared for: soldiers who fought desperately rather than deserting Saddam’s forces; guerrilla units, urban combat, even suicide attacks. Lt. Gen. William Wallace got wood-shedded for complaining that “the enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” but that trivialized the dimensions of the administration’s hubris. Retired generals have blasted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for an unrealistic war plan that emphasized technology and air superiority and minimized the role of ground troops backed by heavy artillery. According to the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld nixed six different battle plans that called for more Army divisions. “He wanted to fight this war on the cheap,” one colonel on the ground told the New York Times Monday. “He got what he wanted.” With troops at Baghdad’s borders, commanders in charge of the offensive were still critiquing the shortage of personnel to the Times on Wednesday. “Do we have enough troops? No.”

Yet I won’t be able to enjoy the spectacle of Rumsfeld being proven wrong, if the battle for Baghdad is bloodier than expected, and the war drags on — though the news Thursday made victory seem closer than it did earlier in the week. After all, such miscalculations aren’t just a political blunder; they may cost American and Iraqi lives. (Though I confess to one guilty pleasure: watching his press conference persona shift from Uncle Rummy, the twinkly-eyed, mischievous old salt who used to have the Pentagon press corps eating out of his hand, to the bitchy uncle from Hell, hissing at his once-adoring charges.) Even before Andrew Sullivan — and, to a lesser extent, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof — warned war critics against seeming to glory in the unexpected difficulty of the war, I was feeling torn about whether to feel vindicated by the administration’s apparent misjudgment about the strength of the opposition they would face in Iraq. I never wished for “a million Mogadishus,” and neither did any prominent Democrat or antiwar leader — Sullivan had to search to find something that inflammatory and cruel. But I’m now stunned at the extent to which Republican bullying has worked to paralyze Democratic critics of the war, and I think it’s time to end the silence.

Here’s why the administration’s early miscalculations matter, even if the pace of victory picks up again. First of all, Rumsfeld wanted to fight the war “on the cheap” not because the Pentagon is broke, but because the administration’s outrageous new military doctrine of preemption requires it. What good is declaring you’re for preemptive protective strikes if you can’t go in and prove you mean it? The new Bush doctrine required that the war in Iraq be a cakewalk, so as to send a message to our enemies in Iran, Syria, North Korea — wherever evildoers lurk — that they must tremble before our crushing military might. And if they didn’t get the message, we would have enough troops and firepower left over from Iraq to deliver it more directly. Tragic as the setbacks were for the Americans and Iraqis who lost their lives, from a historical perspective they might serve to prevent more loss of life in rash or unjust U.S. military interventions.

The administration’s arrogance and misjudgments also deserve denunciation if you take seriously the notion that we are trying to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam, and bring democracy to the region. Poor Nicholas Kristof, having scolded doves who glory in the military’s difficulties, found himself in Basra this week, watching a looming humanitarian crisis there. But thanks to his own self-imposed restraints — to refuse to seem to be saying “I told you so” in a time of war — he was unable to call it what it was: the entirely predictable result of our all-but-unilateral strike on Iraq.

Those of us who argued for more time, to bring more of our allies onboard, if not the U.N., did so not because we’re Saddam lovers or Bush haters or we’re secretly French; it was because the difficulty of winning the war, securing the peace and rebuilding Iraq required an international coalition. As one moderate Egyptian told the Times’ Thomas Friedman (who was himself a little too sanguine about the incredible gamble with human life that this invasion represented): “Maybe the Iraqis will eventually stop resisting you. But that will not make this war legitimate. What the U.S. needs to do is make the Iraqis smile. If you do that, people will consider this a success.”

It’s not too late to make the Iraqis smile, of course. But it is too late to take back the pictures, broadcast around an already hostile world, of dead Iraqi children, grieving parents, wounded civilians and the comparatively lucky Iraqis who are merely having to drink sewage-tainted water and scavenge for food, due to delays in humanitarian relief. And let’s be honest: Making Iraqis smile, even belatedly, is a much tougher job than it would have been had this invasion been backed by the U.N., or at least by a more genuine “coalition of the willing,” in which more partners were doing the tough work of bringing humanitarian aid to Iraq even as American forces did the lion’s share of the fighting.

The anti-Saddam alliance built by the White House — which militarily consists almost entirely of the U.S. and Britain, with a small number of Australians and a handful of Poles — would be comical if its impact weren’t so tragic. In 1991, for the first Gulf War, Bush’s father amassed a coalition of 32 nations that sent thousands of troops and committed $70 billion in aid; this time around most leaders of the 40-something countries supposedly backing Bush did little more than affix their names to a “Best of luck with the war!” greeting card. (And as Jake Tapper has reported, some of them are trying to retract even that.) Bush and Rumsfeld are dissembling when they say this coalition is larger than the one assembled in ’91, and they deserve to be called on it every time they say it.

Clearly the administration has sold this war with a combination of deception and distortion. A poll last week found that a majority of Americans think Bush didn’t tell the truth about the cost of the war, either in fiscal terms or in terms of the loss of human life, and I thought once again how silly polling is: The fact that Bush didn’t tell the truth about this war and its costs is not a matter of opinion, it’s fact, and he should pay for it.

But as U.S. forces close in on Baghdad, what should war critics do and say? The antiwar left loses me with talk of a quagmire in Iraq. Some of it sounds like wishful thinking, and it will likely be proven wrong: This war will probably be won in months, not years, and it could still end in only weeks — though the battle for Baghdad is so fraught with potential nightmares it makes realistic predictions impossible. (Coalition forces still do not decisively control any Iraqi city.) Yet all week the lefty news site Common Dreams has been awash in stories about the coming U.S. defeat, with headlines like “It Will End in Disaster” and “The Monster of Baghdad is Now the Hero of Arabia” and “The Bright Side of War.” I recognize that reporting bad news isn’t the same as enjoying it, but some on the left seem to be wallowing in it, a little too self-satisfied that the war has seemed to be going badly.

The other problem with all the talk of a “quagmire” is that it seems to lead to comparisons with Vietnam, from which it’s just a short but dishonest intellectual hop to thinking of defiant Iraqis as the Viet Cong. But it’s obvious that the “resistance” to American and British forces can’t be considered any kind of mass popular uprising; so far it’s mostly the result of Saddam’s brutal coercion. The reports of fedayeen shooting soldiers who try to desert and civilians attempting to flee from combat are chilling. Read Phillip Robertson’s haunting report from northern Iraq on Saddam’s “execution committees” that keep soldiers from deserting. On Wednesday, Iraqis were once again cheering invading troops as liberators in the city of Najaf. There will no doubt be more scenes like that to come.

Opponents of this war can’t be invested in the quagmire theory, or in the myth of widespread popular Iraqi resistance to the U.S, or a pan-Arab uprising against the coalition. For starters, it’s morally corrupt to root for a dictator like Saddam under any circumstances. And those banking on a “big muddy” scenario in Iraq risk further political marginalization if the pace of victory accelerates again. If the war was wrong — and I believe its timing and unilateralism certainly were — it will remain wrong even if Saddam’s regime is toppled sooner than the quagmire theorists expect.

So what do opponents of the war, and the president’s policy in prosecuting it, do now? I can’t support Kucinich’s call to stop the fighting immediately; it would only let Saddam’s regime come in and crush those who’ve risen up against him, and submit the country to further terror and chaos. On the other hand, I think Rumsfeld’s sneering insistence that a cease-fire is completely off the table is frightening: Should the battle of Baghdad bog down, should there be a reasonable chance to resume diplomatic efforts to remove Saddam Hussein, why wouldn’t we stop the killing and talk about it? Democrats should be ready to call for that if there’s evidence there’s still a diplomatic solution to this tragedy.

Even with the war yet to be won, the Bush administration is trying to impose Rumsfeld’s military model on postwar Iraq, handing power to the Defense Department while marginalizing Colin Powell’s State Department, not to mention the United Nations. The indefatigable Powell is of course fighting back, but Democrats need to speak out against the Pentagon power grab. Meanwhile, another military leader marginalized by Rumsfeld, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, told Congress it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq after the war, and was slapped by deputy Paul Wolfowitz as “wildly off the mark.” The cakewalk conservatives’ arrogance about the war will be extended to the peace, whenever it comes, and they deserve to be fought at every opportunity.

Some Democrats still insist silence is politically wise. “Democrats don’t need to do any criticism of the Bush administration right now,” consultant Jenny Backus told the Times. “The unnamed generals are doing that job for us.” But top Democrats have been preaching silence as strategy since before the midterm elections, and the party’s shellacking at the polls cost them all credibility. Americans won’t let them sit this fight out. Yes, Democrats must choose their words carefully, they should critique the president fairly and cogently, they should always think about the impact of their words on the troops. But the GOP attack dogs will come after them whatever they do.

In a dishonest piece of writing in the Weekly Standard this week, “The War for Liberalism,” cakewalk conservative William Kristol described the Democrats as divided between brave “Dick Gephardt liberals,” the “patriots” who back the war-supporting former minority leader, and the despicable “Dominique de Villepin left,” — there’s the French slur again, after the foreign minister who led the U.N. opposition to Bush’s war — whose adherents “hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory.” And though Kristol’s list of de Villipin leftists is short on names, one of the handful he includes is Nancy Pelosi — despite her vote “in support and appreciation” of Bush’s conduct of the war.

Kristol is wrong: Most war critics still hope for an American victory, one that results in as little loss of life and as much freedom for Iraqis as possible. But it’s already clear that he and his neocon friends designed a war that wouldn’t ensure we could do either, and they and their war deserve criticism. There will be a reckoning for bullies like Kristol, and all the pampered, pink-cheeked scions of no-sacrifice who sold this war dishonestly. Yet I fear there will be a lot more Iraqis and Americans dead before that day comes.

First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.

Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.

Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)

What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.

While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)

Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.

In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:

The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”

When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.

It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.

Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:

Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.

Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.

But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.

One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.

I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.

Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.

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