Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. So why, in politics, isn't it used a little more often? Or, at all?
Looking back, the neocons were wrong about Iraq. That's not in dispute. Is there no lesson in that? Should not the people who were certain our troops would be greeted with flowers not have to bear some measure of opprobrium?
And if you want the left's version, many liberals (myself included) were convinced in the 90s that welfare-to-work would be a disaster, with starving families in the streets and a rise in crime rates. Turns out we were wrong, and speaking for myself, it made me rethink strategies to get people transitioned from assistance to independence.
But we don't hold people to the lessons of the past. Not even potential Presidents.
Looking back just 30 years, we can see how important it is to find a President who was on the right side of history. Or at the least, can admit when he was wrong.
Start with Reagan. Look at his dire pronouncements in the 60's against Medicare, and you're struck by just how astoundingly wrong he was. All of the signature Reagan cliches are there: goverment takeover, loss of freedom, inefficiency, etc. All of them utterly, completely, wrong.
But we elected him anyway, and there he was repeating the same mistakes. His foreign policy typified a person whose views of war largely came from movies: We dropped in to Lebanon, only to get a bloody nose and beat a hasty retreat when the narrative wasn't working out. We engaged in movie-style intrigue, playing both sides off against the other in the Iran-Iraq war, then trading arms for hostages, arming terrorists, as if it were all the plot of some big screen thriller. We all know how that worked out.
Next up, George H.W. Bush. Here's a guy who fought in WWII, who knows up close and personally that not every tin-pot dictator is the equivalent threat of Hitler. His foreign policy was most likely influenced by his short stint as CIA Director - that job will give you a powerful taste of Kissinger's realpolitik.
And he was, very pragmatic. Gulf War I put Saddam in a box, without losing the lives of huge numbers of American soldiers and Marines, without getting us in a quagmire, it was the way war, if it has to happen, should be: short, brutal, and generally avoiding civilians.
His Panama excursion lacked the last criterion, as the US literally flattened a civilian neighborhood beating a path to Panama's defense headquarters. But that was largely unavoidable, and again it was short, brutal, and got the job done. He'd learned the lessons of his own history.
Now we arrive at the Vietnam generation. Clinton was against the war, and history has judged him right: it was a pointless waste, a Cold War proxy fight that wasted countless lives. And his foreign policy reflected that lesson: stay out of other people's wars, when you have to intervene do it in a limited way that doesn't keep you committed. Perhaps the psychology was to make America's outside dalliances limited affairs (yes, I went there), but in any event it made America's use of power limited to what was neccessary and effective.
Then we get to the cowboy. The guy who spent Vietnam in the National Guard, playing at being a fighter pilot. His overseas adventures showed a similar sense of fantasy, I won't bother to rehash the results. Suffice it to say, he recapitulated the history he knew, and reality reared its ugly head.
Which brings us to Romney. Here's a guy who protested in favor of the Vietnam war - not in favor of putting his own posterior on the line, mind you. He had what his wife considers an equally important commitment persuading the French to give up wine. Or at least, equally pointless.
But nowhere has Romney indicated he grasps that he was on the wrong side of history. A thoughtful man, a man who has grown since his youth (some do, some don't), would own up to this: yes, I supported that war, and since then its clear I was wrong. Here's what that taught me.
Romney shows no sign of such introspection. In fairness, no journalist has bothered to ask: Governor, you were for a war that in retrospect looks utterly stupid. Do you agree with the verdict of history? If not, why not? If so, what did you learn?
My guess, he'd argue against the widely accepted conclusion that America should have stayed out (or even embraced the north). Let him put his stubbornness and denial on the table, if that's what he believes. Its a hugely informative insight in to the man's character and judgment.
Instead, we get policy questions that he'll weasel out of: Guns? Contraceptives? Abortion? Deficits? There's a quick two-step for every one of them.
With a chameleon like Romney, you need to not even bother to ask about policy. Get behind those and go to values, to judgment, to firt and guiding principles. That's when you pin a person down, when there is no "I'm all for letting you choose while I let others force you to not have a choice" bull feces.
Its nice that we have a domestic issues debate, a foreign policy debate, and a "Town Hall" (which really isn't, given the screening, but that's another post for another day).
I wish we could also have a history debate: Here are the major issues within your lifetime, and here's the stance you took. Tell us what you learned. Tell us if you were ever wrong. Given how history repeats, its at least as good a guide to the future as the policy questions that are batted around incessantly.
(Sorry to deviate from my usual format: heavy on statistics and citations. This week's post is a dive in to the value of historical judgment, and is largely a matter of opinion. Next week I promise to return to being a quant geek.)