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The Struggle for the Soul of the Democrat Party What happens when neither political party has a really new idea about what is happening in the nation and the world? You get election results so nearly tied that a few hundred votes decides who won or lost. It is, if you think about it, fairly astounding that the voters are so equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. You notice, I said "the voters", not the people who simply identify themselves as members or sympathetic to one party or the other. One of the Republican Party’s greatest problems right now is that it has drifted so far away from what its base believes and wants, many are prepared to stay home, short of candidates that offer them a compelling reason to show up at the polls.
The Democrats are faced with another problem. Its platform is essentially the one that won four terms for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 30s and 40s. Responding to the Depression, FDR tapped every bright lad he could to come up with something—anything—that might turn the economy around. In the end, it was World War II that energized the nation and started the U.S. on its superpower trajectory. It was helpful, too, that the homeland, other than Pearl Harbor, had not suffered the destruction that occurred in Europe or Japan. So Americans ever since have had Social Security, Medicare, and a host of other "entitlement" programs. The problem for recent administrations is that these programs are either broke or soon will be. When the GOP added a hugely costly prescription drug entitlement they were acting more like Democrats, but by then the way Congress functioned there were few members who could be clearly identified by party affiliation. All were drunk on "earmarks" funneling millions back to their districts. The notion that local communities should run their schools is foreign to them. All seemed indifferent to protecting national sovereignty, securing the borders, or the invasion of a million aliens every year. The only thing with which one could definitively identify Republicans was their support for the war in Iraq. It was, of course, the single issue that turned control of Congress—just barely—to the Democrats in the 2006 elections and it is the one issue that will determine the outcome of the 2008 elections. The only issue Democrats have is their hatred of President Bush and their opposition to conservatives who have a visceral contempt for abortion, gay marriage, and thuggish foreign leaders. In the 2008 campaign Democrats will offer national health care, but that notion has been trotted out for a very long time and most people are vaguely aware of what a disaster it has proven to be in England and Canada, to name just two places. Michael Moore’s documentary, a celebration of Cuban health care, managed to overlook the many shortages of everything needed to practice medicine there. Most books about politics are, by definition, partisan but a rare exception is Matt Bai’s "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics." He is such a skilled journalist, a political writer for The New York Times magazine, that he humanizes the individuals who are now locked in a struggle to control the Democrat Party. The result is, frankly, a hilarious portrait of a party where obscenely rich people think their money can make a difference and buy them real influence, while nobodies with little more than bad attitudes and Internet sites like "The Daily Kos" have become movers and shakers to whom candidates must pay heed. Sandwiched between these groups are the party apparatchiks; those who must raise funds, the political consultants, the pollsters, and the think tank folks, all of whom are desperately trying to fashion a winning campaign. About the only thing the members of both parties agree upon is that the members of the opposing party are just too dumb to understand the issues! Neither party lacks for really dumb people and this includes those who have risen to the top. At one point, prior to the 2005-6 campaign, casting about for a new motto, Rep. Nancy Pelosi suggested that Democrats call themselves "the people’s party." Bai notes that, "This slogan was quickly and wisely rejected, as it sounded like a communiqué from the party headquarters in Pyongyang." In the end, the Democrats concluded that policy ideas, leadership issues, and the usual rhetoric of campaigning weren’t needed, given the collapse of support for and by Republicans. Why "offer an actual agenda and risk the possibility that some voters might not like it?" One of the real issues is the war against the Islamofascists and, whether a Democrat or Republican is elected, they will be part of a continuum of presidents who have either tried to ignore them as did Clinton or put troops in the field to kill them as Bush did. It doesn’t matter in the short run what people think about current state of the war—except for the way it influences elections—because it is a war that was declared against us and which we must pursue until victory whether we want to or not. Aside from a lack of any ideas other than those inherited from FDR and LBJ, the Democrats will continue to suffer from the general perception of cowardliness in the face of an enemy and endless bleating about the poor and disadvantaged. They tend to ignore the way America has grown famous and wealthy from people who worked hard, took risks, and moved up the economic ladder. The other factor working against them is the way the population has leaned to the right ever since the days of Reagan and Goldwater. Bush will not be a factor in the 2008 elections except as a person on whom Democrats can fix (and waste) their hatred. But he is not running for office. Without a compelling reason to vote for a Democrat candidate, voters may decide to stay with the party that—flawed as it may be at this point—still believes in lower taxes, a strong military, and the magic elixir of freedom, opportunity. Every week the Center must ask for your donation because it is your donation that keeps this website on the Internet and underwrites our communications programs. Give what you can. Thank you! In my youth, I got my first taste of skepticism about the Central Intelligence Agency when the Bay of Pigs fiasco occurred. When John F. Kennedy got cold feet and withheld air cover for the invasion of Cuba that was supposed to overthrow Fidel Castro the defeat was sealed. It was made worse, however, by the choice of the invasion site, a mangrove swamp instead of the original location. Over the years, the CIA has continued to be caught flat-footed. It apparently had no idea that the former Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse until the Berlin Wall came down. It had no idea that India or Pakistan had both independently developed nuclear weapons and it is likely that it has no idea how far along Iran is on a similar path. This alone is cause for concern, but over the years there have been a number of books published revealing the failures of the CIA such as Bill Gertz’s "Breakdown: The Failure of American Intelligence to Defeat Global Terror" and Congressman Curt Weldon’s 2005 "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America…and how the CIA has ignored it." The latest book is Rowan Scarborough’s "Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA" that asks whether it has become "a rogue agency." The answer to be found in this veteran journalist’s book is yes. Time and time again, CIA operatives leaked internal documents to anti-Bush administration newspapers such as The New York Times. Most famously, it compromised the NSA’s monitoring of telephone and other electronic communications into the U.S. from suspected terrorists to their agents and fund-raisers here. There is a word for this: treason. Much of this was the result of a turf war between the CIA and the Pentagon. Needing to get on a war footing to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, top Pentagon officials concluded they had to increase their own intelligence capabilities to serve their forces in the field. The CIA had little or no "humint", i.e., agents in the field, to provide accurate information on the inner workings of al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. For years it had come to depend on electronic surveillance as opposed to the most valuable source, eyes and ears in nations hostile to our interests. This problem had been compounded by the way the Clinton administration had, throughout the 1990s, cut the budgets of the Agency and the Pentagon. Following attacks on U.S. embassies and other targets, except for a few desultory and failed uses of cruise missiles against suspected targets, the CIA information demonstrated its inadequacy. A 2002 joint inquiry into intelligence community activities before and after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 concluded that then-CIA director, George Tenet, "was either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of intelligence community resources necessary to combat the growing threat to the United States...The record of this joint inquiry indicates that [Tenet] did not marshal resources effectively even within the CIA against the threat posed by al Qaeda." When President Bush sent Porter Goss, a former CIA agent and congressman, to take over the Agency, he and the staff he brought with him were savagely undermined by those within the Agency to a point where they found themselves whispering to one another in his office, fearful their conversations were being tapped! At their departure in 2006, the CIA was estimated to be at least five years away from being re-built to deal with its responsibilities. "One-fifth of the CIA’s analysts and one-seventh of its total number of employees had been hired in the past twelve months" under Goss’s replacement, Air Force General Michael Hayden. "In fact, half of the entire agency had been hired since September 11." Because the CIA depended on placing its operatives in U.S. embassies, the fact that we had none in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, insured that we would have little information from those nations. Al Qaeda’s intense emphasis on security insured the CIA "had failed to penetrate al Qaeda, knew little about the inside workings of the Taliban, and had (and has) few contacts inside Iran." "Few in the Agency spoke Arabic." As the Middle East moves ever closer to a regional conflagration, the CIA lacks even language capabilities. This remains true of other intelligence agencies as well. This explains in part why the military effort in Iraq has been a lethal learning curve as the Pentagon sought to build an independent intelligence capability that the CIA could not or would not provide. Meanwhile, the public has been distracted from these deadly truths as CIA insiders fueled the idiotic furor over the "outing" of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee and the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. A critic of the Bush Administration, he launched his attack, not surprisingly, in The New York Times. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA says that, "The Director of Central Intelligence shall be responsible for national intelligence…Such national intelligence should be timely, objective, independent of political considerations." George Tenet arrived at his job having been a political operative in Washington, D.C. for many years. He was selected for the job by then-President Clinton and kept on by President Bush. Despite being the recipient of the prestigious Medal of Freedom, Scarborough concludes that, "Tenet rewarded Bush’s loyalty with disloyalty. His memoir, "At the Center of the Storm", shifts blame for some of the CIA’s big mistakes from Agency people to Bush people. So we are left with an Agency that has ill-served America’s security for decades at this point and, in particular, the waging of war against its present enemies. The many books documenting this failure can be ignored only at our peril. As his second and final term moves to a close, one suspects that President Bush has concluded that this problem should be left to whoever replaces him. He has been resolute in fighting the stateless enemy, al Qaeda, and nations like Iraq that have or continue to sponsor terrorism to destroy the West. All that stands between these enemies and the West is the United States of America. If the public loses heart at this point, the fight will come to our shores in ways Americans cannot even begin to imagine. Have you shared one of our commentaries with a friend? It’s easy. Just use our Referral Blast system.
©
2007 Alan Caruba. |
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