Steyn on Democrats in Fall Elections

While the Republicans are wrenching themselves into pretzel shapes over immigration, the Democrats face a much deeper problem, and Mark Steyn sums up the strange kabuki theater samurai suicide Connecticut Dems are inflicting on themselves.

The Chicago Sun-Times has his Sunday column which warns that the Democrats are listening to the Sirens singing sweet treason on the Scylla [or is it Charybdis?] side of the straits they must navigate to achieve a majority in the House and/or Senate. Mark notes:

...the most significant portent for the Dems may not be their stupendous flopperoo in the California special election nor the death of Zarqawi nor the non-indictment of Karl Rove -- though, taken together, they render pretty threadbare the Democrat strategy of relying on Republican immigration splits, bad news in Iraq and the GOP's "culture of corruption." No, the revealing development is Joe Lieberman's troubles in Connecticut. Six years ago, he was the party's beaming vice presidential nominee. Two years ago, he was an also-ran for the presidential nomination. This summer, he's an incumbent senator struggling not to lose in his own primary to a candidate who's the darling of the anti-war netroots left. What's the senator done to offend the base? Nothing -- except be broadly supportive of the Iraq campaign and other military goals in the war on terror. He's one of a very few Democrats who give the impression they'd like America to win.[my emphasis]

But in today's Democratic Party it's the mainstream that gets marginalized. Forty years ago, George Aiken recommended that in Vietnam America "declare victory and go home." Today, the likes of Jack Murtha, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy have come up with their own ingenious improvement: Declare defeat and go home. Having voted for the war before he voted against it, Sen. Kerry has now effortlessly retwisted his pretzel of a spine: Last week, he voted to lose Iraq even though we're winning it. Even if there's no civil war, even if the insurgents' leader is dead and his network in ruins, even if the Iraqis are making huge progress in self-government, even if by any historical standard everything's going swell, the Defeaticrats refuse to budge: America needs to throw in the towel and hightail it out of there by the end of the year, which is the date Kerry is demanding we surrender by.

It's often said that in our bitter fractious partisan politics much of the Democratic base's anger boils down to sheer loathing of Bush. If he were gone, if it were a Clinton or Gore waging war in Iraq, the Dems would be cool with it. I think not. Their fury with Lieberman suggests a corrosion that goes far deeper than mere Bush Derangement Syndrome. The Democrats may be prepared to go along with some Clintonian pseudo-warmongering -- the desultory lobbing of a few cruise missiles at Slobodan or that Sudanese aspirin factory -- but, when it comes to the projection of hard power in the national interest, the left cannot get past Vietnam. Indeed, the reaction to Peter Beinart's ringing call for a reassertion of "liberal internationalism" -- ringing in the sense that nobody's picking up -- suggests that even his quaintly dated Eurocentric Sept. 10 ineffectually respectable multilateralism has few takers among today's left.

In the early '70s, when Kerry was insisting we'd get out of Vietnam at very little cost, he at least could plead ignorance: He didn't know what would come after. In 2006, we all know what followed: boat people, Cambodia's killing fields, globalized dominoes falling from Grenada to Iran. When Murtha, Kerry and Co. effectively demand that America agree to retraumatize itself in the humiliation of an even bigger geopolitical bug-out, one assumes they're failing to consider where the dominoes would fall this time round -- in Afghanistan, in Jordan, in Turkey, and beyond. It would end the American moment: Why would Russia, China or even Belgium take American power seriously ever again?

Meanwhile, Bush's "approval numbers" are back up. Maybe even in double figures again. The mistake the media make is to assume that the 60, 80, 97.43 percent of the electorate that "disapproves" of Bush is therefore pro-Democrat. I doubt it. On the Republican side, some of those antipathetic to Bush were never in favor of liberating Iraq but figure now we're in it we need to win it. Others were in favor but revile Bush for pussyfooting around not just with the insurgents but with the Iranians and the Syrians. Others are broadly supportive of Bush on the war but are furious with him for supporting the No Mexican Left Behind immigration bill. None of these demographics seems particularly fertile soil for the Democratic Party, especially a Democratic Party willing to devour Joe Lieberman in the interests of Defeaticrat purity.

I think that the voters' frustration with the Republicans stems from the six-year Bush syndrome as much as from the maddening incompetence displayed by Bremer and Rumsfeld in the strategic prosecution of the Peace after the War. I think Hillary's antennae are much more finely tuned than klutzes like Kerry, Murtha, and Gore. The average American is sick of the war, but unlike the urbane chattering classes, does not want to squander "the American moment" by walking off the job site before it is completed. That is simply "un-American."

The problem with the Democrats lies in the fact that the Party's loudest, harshest voices come from the "nutroots" online and the "Hollyweird" hyper-flakes whose extravagant lifestyles and rancid rantings embarrass even liberal-minded Oprahfied Dems. The great heartland of the US where about seventy Senators are elected is mainly red in belief and temperament, even though many states there have MOR Dems as Senators. Note that Robert Byrd and Ben Nelson, both up for re-election, are voting Republican right down the line before November.

Canadian Steyn may have intuited the fatal flaw of Democratic activists---their inability to understand the average American.