THE YEAR THE SENATOR WON THE PENNANT:

The Right Stuff: DEMOCRATS SOUND LIKE REPUBLICANS CIRCA 2000. (Daniel W. Drezner, 07.29.04, New Republic)

After John Kerry sewed up the Democratic presidential nomination, there was much fretting about whether he would need to tack left in order to appease the Deaniacs and Naderites. The Fahrenheit 9/11 phenomenon fueled this concern. In the run-up to this week's convention, a spate of new analyses came out regarding the growing power of left-wing special interests, and whether they even wanted Kerry to win in November. But after three days of the convention, one Kerry campaign tactic comes through loud and clear: The Democrats will be attacking Bush from the right as well as the left. Indeed, some of the rhetoric deployed sounds awfully familiar to that used by a presidential candidate four years ago--George W. Bush.

A key plank of Bush's 2000 campaign was "restoring honor and dignity" to the White House. The Democrats seem bound and determined to top that. On Tuesday, Barack Obama sounded like he was channeling Bill Cosby at various points in his speech: "Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn--they know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." In last night's speech, John Edwards praised the values of "faith, family, responsibility, and equality of opportunity." As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out this week, these are conservative tropes.

It's on foreign and defense related issues, however, where the echoes of the Bush 2000 campaign come through loud and clear. Four years ago, Bush articulated a realist foreign policy platform, based on a strong and well-funded military. Kerry has gone out of his way in interviews and profiles to articulate his realist bona fides--contrary to my expectations from this past spring.

There's certainly plenty of room to President Bush's right, but not on any of these issues. Senator Kerry, if he's only interested in votes and not the country, could adopt a few simple, traditional themes of the Right: isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. Only the last would cause him any trouble with his base and he'd probably pick up as many disaffected whites as he lost Hispanics. Ross Perot rode such a platform to 18% of the vote in '92 and while George W. Bush is too popular with conservatives to lose that much support he might well lose as much as 5%. That's enough to make John Kerry president at the expense of only his soul.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2004 4:55 PM