"New Republic" Blog.
DEAN'S LOOMING SISTER SOULJAH MOMENT: Robert Kagan's column in yesterday's Washington Post is so important we're going to forgive him his tired, this-sounds-like-something-a-Republican-would-say-but-wait-a-Democrat-actually-said-it lead.
Kagan makes two equally useful points--one general, the other more specific. The first is that, for all their kvetching about George W. Bush's foreign policy, the Democratic establishment isn't proposing anything radically different. Regardless of who's sworn in as president in January of 2005, the country's basic foreign policy doctrine will be to use military force to root out terrorists and some combination of the threat of force and economic carrots and sticks to prevent WMD proliferation.
The narrower point is that this even applies to Howard Dean--who, depending on what day you talk to Wesley Clark, is the only leading Democratic candidate to have opposed the Iraq war. Unlike the contingent of commentators screaming that Dean is the second-coming of George McGovern, Kagan recognizes that Dean is neither a radical nor, for that matter, particularly dovish. Dean has been talking tough about such foreign policy problems as terrorism and WMD proliferation for well over a year now. Unlike most of the other Democrats in the field (with the admirable exception of Joe Lieberman), he actually supported the first Gulf war. It's entirely possible, as Kagan notes, that Dean will attack Bush from the right on foreign policy--on things like the failure to use ground troops in Tora Bora, and the administration's astonishingly soft treatment of the Saudis--should he win the nomination.
In fact, we'd even go one step further. Knowing Dean and campaign manager/chief strategist Joe Trippi, we'd be surprised if Dean didn't make a fairly dramatic gesture to establish his moderate foreign policy bona fides shortly after winning the nomination--a kind of Sister Souljah strategy for the post-9/11 world. One can imagine Dean, for example, laying into some fringe antiwar group, whose views, he might explain, were toxic to the debate over foreign policy and ultimately unhelpful to the cause of stabilizing Iraq (now that we're there) and winning the larger war on terror.
Dean even foreshadowed such a move in an interview Kagan alludes to in his piece. "There are two groups of people who support me because of the war," Dean told NPR's Mara Liasson earlier this year. "One are the people who always oppose every war, and in the end I think I probably won't get all of those people." (Dean went on to say that the other group consisted of people who, like him, thought this particular war was misguided.)
In fact, even Dean's own assessment may be overly pessimistic. As we've suggested in the past--a suggestion Mickey Kaus graciously references in his own post on the Kagan column--Dean has more room to moderate himself than any other leading Democratic candidate, since his appeal to liberals is more a function of style and tone (i.e., seething anger at Bush) than of any particular policy position. Dean will surely lose the most fringe elements of his antiwar base should he go the Sister Souljah route. But he's unlikely to lose much more than that.
tnr.com |
