There has been a disturbing trend in much of the Democratic party rhetoric, especially over the past year. The accusations of Bush-lite, or there being no differentiation between the parties, etc. I understand where this attitude comes from, but I believe it ignores a deep understanding of the issues involved.
The problem isn't the Democrats message, the problem is the Republicans... They've taken Democratic issues, claimed them as their own... well at least in the message, the actions don't live up to the message.
The DLC's New Dem Daily argues that we shouldn't argue against the Republicans, we should instead challenge them to live up to the message they've stolen. In recent years, the DLC has struck me as the one group within the Democratic party which has spent time analyzing the Republican message and learning from it. We'd do well to heed their advice in this case especially.
Borrowed Clothes
Much of the commentary on the president's big speech last week on promoting democracy abroad suggested that George Bush was trying to identify himself with the democratic idealism of Ronald Reagan. But the borrowed clothes that dressed up Bush's speech also belong to the tradition of progressive internationalism championed by Democratic presidents from Roosevelt and Truman to Kennedy and Clinton. In fact, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have stood most consistently for a values-based foreign policy.
Mr. Bush could as accurately have invoked Bill Clinton, whose strategy of "democratic enlargement" led to the consolidation of democracy throughout Central and Eastern Europe as well as NATO's eastward expansion, or Jack Kennedy who vowed to "pay any price" to assure "the survival and success of liberty." Reagan, the former Democrat who admired FDR and took his middle name from Woodrow Wilson, embraced a somewhat militaristic version of this tradition rather than the GOP's traditional isolationism and nationalism.
Democrats should celebrate Mr. Bush's late conversion to democracy -- if it turns out to be more than a tactical shift designed to get him off the hot seat on Iraq. They should not allow the public to get the impression that Mr. Bush cares more about advancing liberal democracy than they do.
This isn't the first time that the president has delivered a fine speech arguing that our best weapons in the war on terror are the values of democracy and freedom. Indeed, he tends to fall back on such rhetoric whenever his actual foreign policy -- based on unilateralist diplomacy, excessive reliance on military force, and tacit alliances with Middle Eastern dictatorships -- appears to be foundering. The political purpose of this latest speech is obviously to remind an American public that is cooling to the administration's international stewardship that there are bigger stakes at issue in Iraq and in the Middle East generally than the day-to-day scorecard of bad news from the region.
But until the administration's policy on the ground refocuses on working with our liberal democratic allies on the long-term mission of democratizing and liberalizing the Middle East, then the broader strategy articulated so well in last week's presidential speech would represent nothing more than a promissory note. We'll be watching to see if the administration continues to exempt Saudi Arabia and other "moderate" regimes in the Middle East from what the president once called "the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." The president's eloquent call for giving priority to democracy over stability in the region is, of course, implicitly a repudiation of the realpolitik diplomacy of his father's administration.
That's all the more reason that when Bush moves in the right direction rhetorically, Democrats say so, instead of reflexively damning everything he says, and implicitly abandoning their strongest suit on an issue that could be decisive in 2004. Aside from its firm grounding in Democratic tradition, a foreign policy centered on the aggressive promotion of democracy and freedom is precisely what many leading Democrats have been demanding throughout the Bush presidency. Presidential candidates Joe Lieberman and John Kerry have made the "wider war on terrorism," including democratization and economic liberalization in the Middle East, the centerpiece of their foreign policy alternatives. Democratic foreign policy experts, such as Ron Asmus, Ken Pollack, and our own Will Marshall, have long made the same arguments, most recently in the progressive internationalist manifesto that the Washington Post applauded Sunday in an editorial.
Moreover, the full deployment of America's resources -- in "soft" diplomacy as well as tough military action -- is the best possible underpinning for the belief of nearly all Democrats that America must re-engage with the traditional alliances and multilateral institutions that served us so well during the Cold War. Without a positive vision of what we're fighting for in the war on terror, Democratic criticism of Bush's unilateralist habit can easily and dangerously appear to represent little more than irresolution or non-interventionism.
So we urge Democrats to react positively when the president resorts to the right foreign policy message, and to focus their criticism on his consistent failure to take his own advice. In calling for a foreign policy based on the power of American values instead of an exaggerated appreciation for force of arms and the pursuit of ephemeral "stability," Bush is borrowing Democratic clothes, which he should be pushed to wear or give back to their proper owners.