November 30, 2005
Democrats
Have Given Nuance a Bad Name
By Ruben
Navarrette Jr.
SAN DIEGO
-- Democrats, especially those with presidential ambitions, think
they're being so clever. They have devised a line of argument
they believe will help them benefit politically from President
Bush's troubles in Iraq.
But it turns
out they aren't so clever after all. What they've come up with
stands a good chance of backfiring and doing Democratic candidates
more harm than good. Even though Iraq seems to be a huge liability
for the president and the Republicans, it's possible that the
war will eventually hurt the Democrats as much as anyone.
That's a
shame. The Bush administration has made plenty of mistakes in
Iraq -- starting with the fact that it didn't send enough troops,
and didn't provide adequate supervision for some of the troops
it did send. Remember Abu Ghraib? This country could stand an
honest and vigorous debate, not about how we got to this point
but about where we go from here.
But this
much is certain: If a debate comes, it'll be no thanks to Democrats.
The best they could dream up goes something like this: ``We were
hustled. Sure, we voted to authorize President Bush to use military
force to invade Iraq, but we were misled. Not that we regret toppling
Saddam Hussein. We only regret that we weren't given all the necessary
information to make a more informed decision.''
The ``we
were hustled'' approach offers something for everyone. If you
support the war, you can applaud Democrats for backing the president.
If you oppose the war, you sympathize with them for being conned
by what you've probably already decided is a devious bunch.
But Democrats
are forgetting one crucial detail, something they should have
learned from recent presidential defeats: Americans hate politicians
who duck responsibility for their actions by relying on parsed
phrasing and other word games.
Democrats
lost the last two presidential elections, in part because they
sent forth candidates who -- in their eagerness to get as many
votes as possible from the left, right and center -- took both
sides of every issue, flipped positions, parsed phrases, eschewed
straight talk and gave nuance a bad name by taking complicated
policy positions that were impossible for most Americans to decipher.
Now Democrats
are getting ready to make similar mistakes in their attempts to
politicize the Iraq War. The Clintons are setting the tone. While
Sen. Hillary Clinton stakes out a ``hawkish'' pro-war position,
former President Bill Clinton bad-mouths the administration's
war effort. On the difficult question of whether we should stay
the course in Iraq or pull out, Democrats have a ready answer:
``Yes.''
By working
both sides of the street -- playing to both the anti-war base
of the Democratic Party and those swing voters who still feel
uneasy about the prospect of an immediate withdrawal -- Democrats
run the risk of pleasing no one. They also stand a good chance
of coming across as cravenly opportunistic, willing to say anything
at anytime completely unencumbered by something as inconvenient
as a set of core principles. That was the rap against Al Gore
and John Kerry. Democrats really don't want to get to a point
where the same can be said of their entire party.
None of
this is likely to help Democrats as they inch toward the 2008
presidential election. At this point, their strategy for retaking
the White House is simple: hope that voters are, by then, so discontented
with President Bush that they decide they don't want any more
Republican administrations for a while and vote Democratic by
default.
That's lazy
politics. You bank on the opposition party messing up things so
badly that you don't have to lift a finger to win. Trouble is,
that strategy rarely works. If you don't have a countermeasure,
a different view or an alternative policy, if all you do is criticize
the other side while sending mixed messages as to what you really
support, then you have nothing. And, in politics, those who offer
nothing tend to lose out to those who offer something.
Bill Clinton won two elections by offering voters a vision of
where he wanted to lead the country, not just endless criticism
of where the country already was.
When the
country is at war, you can't play both sides against the middle.
Democrats have a choice to make. They can come up with a new strategy
for how to talk about Iraq, or they can get used to coming in
second.
©
2005, The San Diego Union-Tribune
