POLAR OPPOSITES:

Democrats' Deja Vu: By welcoming antiwar and anti-Bush vitriol, the party is again losing its bearings (David Frum, March 24, 2003, LA Times)

Has there ever been a president who worked harder than Bush to conciliate and befriend his opponents? He appointed a Democrat, Norman Mineta, to his Cabinet, and put another Democrat, John DiIulio, in charge of his signature faith-based initiative. He signed a bill that affixed Robert Kennedy's name to the Justice Department building; renominated Clinton judges whose nominations had lapsed when President Clinton's term ended; compromised his education bill to accommodate Democratic ideas; and rarely, if ever, criticized any Democratic officeholder.

Yet all this symbolic and substantive bipartisanship has done Bush no good. Joe Lieberman, the would-be Mr. Nice Guy of American politics, said in December that Bush had made Washington "more partisan" than ever before. Bush, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne reported in January, "has become a deeply polarizing figure, winning near-universal support within his own party while sowing deep resentment in the opposition."

"Resentment" isn't the half of it. In a Feb. 12 speech on the Senate floor, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd damned Bush as "reckless and arrogant." In December, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accused Bush of "making a conscious decision to ... dominate the discussion with Iraq" in order to divert attention from the nation's economic difficulties. Ted Kennedy -- whom Bush courted and lavishly praised in 2001 -- on March 4 accused Bush of rushing into an "unnecessary war."

As Kennedy's words suggest, leading Democrats are now stepping beyond criticism to lend aid and comfort to the antiwar movement in the United
States and Europe. By adopting the movement's rhetoric, they blur the distinction between the mainstream Democratic Party and the far left. It's important to understand that today's antiwar movement is a very different beast -- more ambitious and more sinister -- than the antiwar movement of the 1960s.

I attended the first of the big antiwar marches in London in October 2002 and was struck by the prevalence of radical Muslim groups and chants. All that was missing were the facsimile suicide-bomber belts.

Now, the antiwar movement is turning to more direct action. In Europe, Italian antiwar protesters have blocked train stations in an effort to halt the transport of military equipment; here in the United States, the protesters are tying up traffic and trying to shut down cities.

The Democratic Party nearly destroyed itself in the 1970s and '80s by inviting in the anti-Vietnam radicals of the '60s. In the '90s, moderate Democrats vowed never to repeat the previous generation's mistake: Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate in 1992 very largely because Gore was one of the few Democratic senators to have cast a vote in favor of the Gulf War resolution. Gore, in turn, selected Lieberman as his running mate on the strength of Lieberman's reputation as a foreign-policy hawk.

The Democrats' hatred of Bush, though, is leading them to forget this painfully earned wisdom and revert to the bad habits of the recent past.

This essay does a disservice to the Democrats, who are not just adopting this radical anti-war position because they hate George Bush, but because the party's sacred domestic programs are threatened by the maintenance of a serious military capability and the expenses of war and the party's core belief, in security, is incompatible with the fight for the freedom of others. The critics cited are correct: the war is, in fact, polarizing, reckless, arrogant, unnecessary, and the road to war has indeed been dominated by the President. It is a war of his choosing, waged on the basis of certain ideals--"[F]reedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity."--that the GOP believes in and the Left does not. We happen to be arrived at a moment in time--because of 9-11--when Americans
are willing to march under the banner of freedom, but such moments tend to be fleeting. In the long term, the Kerrys & Deans are likely on the right side politically, though hopefully that's the wrong side of history. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2003 1:17 PM