Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has an excellent post out today regarding the caving of Senate Dems on the Hayden nomination, a pattern of weakness and total lack of principle that is getting as monotonous as it is infuriating. But I'd like to suggest that they may not ultimately be the problem - we are.
A lot has been made of the "consultant class" and the pundits who advise high profile democrats into electoral oblivion by taking a page from the Clinton mold and triangulating to the right, particularly on national security issues. We bemoan the fact that none of these guys and gals even try to stand on principle and make a direct case to the people, laying out facts and invoking the founding fathers in patriotic rhetoric. But we need to step back and understand exactly why they act this way. I submit it is because the consultants are (sadly) right; that fear and paranoia have gripped the country and are forcing it to reject our founding principles in favor of police state tactics.
When you look at Bush's slow slide down from his post 9/11 approval peak, the most likely explanation in my mind, apart from bad policy, is the waning ability to stoke this fearful state in the populous. Simply put, Americans like Bush less because they are less afraid. This has been the administrations greatest failure in a political sense, losing the ability to frighten people. But, and this is a big but, they are still pretty darn scared - call it an existential dread. I firmly believe that the PR folks that run Madison Ave and now advise Washington DC understand the state of the American mind down to a pretty sharp degree. They should because they spend billions figuring out what we believe, want, and most important, are fooled by. So when the "consultant class" advises politicians to "look tough on national security" they are probably giving good advice, given the state of the American mind.
We all can get a little delusional here sitting in our bubble, ignoring history and believing that the media destroyed Howard Dean, rather than the democratic voters in Iowa that overwhelmingly rejected him, prompting his excited speech that sealed the deal. But the fact is he was destroyed in the public mind long before that, since the public simply could not accept an alternate view of Bush/Cheney's paranoid reality. Most people just don't have the time or the inclination to look for nuance on issues, since they are not presented by the MSM or doctrinal system on a daily basis. And THAT is the crux of the problem.
Essentially, and we see much evidence for this now, the more people learn and the more they are exposed to, the better decisions they make (apologies to Malcom Gladwell's Blink). This is where the efforts need to be - influencing the doctrinal system through better education and independent media. Without that we can scream at Hillary Clinton until we're blue in the face and not much will happen, because she isn't speaking to us. She's speaking to the much larger group of Americans who couldn't care less about politics and are just worried about the bird flu outbreak or more likely just paying the friggin' bills. Our job is to make those people care and open minds.