Were we right! Invading Iraq was WRONG. We knew it. Now the American public knows it. It's tempting to go back to being good old-fashioned domestically-focussed Democrats again, disdaining all that talk about military and guns. It's neanderthal; it's beneath us. We're on a higher plane. It's tempting to throw out all the "new" and go back to what we were. After all, we were right! Let's just pick out some good old-fashioned Democrats, talk about a domestic agenda, and get back to where we were before this misadventure.
Oh... but wait, good old fashioned domestically-focussed stereotypical Democrats are what got us into this mess. They left us open to the use of fear against us.
Fear can only work so long because the right wing is WRONG. They've created a mess because they're WRONG. And it's coming home to roost. It took 5 or 6 years. But they've finally been proven to have been out of their minds.
As a result, people are open to good old-fashioned Democrats again. But if we folow that path, if we slip back into that "Democrats Don't Do National Security" mindset, what happens in 5-10 years when the failures of the Bush administration have faded in people's minds? What happens when -- not if-- there's another international crisis that makes it possible for the right wing to pull the fear card again? What happens? We'll be right back where we are today.
And it might not even take that long! I made the mistake of having Good Morning America on yesterday. The rhetoric against Iran is taking hold. It sounds just like Iraq all over again. And, I can't believe this, it's working! At least the media is buying it. How long before the American public is? As long as Democrats are perceived to be weak on (or disinterested in) national security, the right wing wins. Instinctively, fear outweighs analytical thought. Quick! You're being chased by a tiger. Do you stop and think it through? Or do you run like hell? And even if you think you would think it through, do you think 51% of Americans would?
So, you say, as I've often said, that we shouldn't settle for their non-thinking. And that's true. We must raise the bar. But, just as you can't teach first-graders to read if they haven't had a good breakfast, you can't ween the American public from Good Morning America until they're not afraid. And just as you can't feed the 5-year-old one morning and expect him to keep learning throughout the school year, you can't "innoculate" the Democratic Party in 2006 with the fighting dems and expect the fear card to go away forever.
We cannot allow a little temporary success like we had in 2006, or rather than our success it was more likely the Republican's complete and utter failure, to allow us to forget everything we've learned about how we got into the crisis that we're in. We were weak on national security through pure disinterest or even disdain. The Republicans used that against us. That forced the old-fashioned Democrats to have to compromise or lose. And we wound up with a bunch of total wimps who shirked their responsibility as the opposition party and gave us an unfinished war we should have won and a disaster of a war that we never should have entered, resulting in some 3000+ dead soldiers, countless dead Iraqis, a Middle East that could implode upon itself at any moment, and Osama bin Laden still on the run. (But at least we can't take our toothpaste on air planes--I feel so much better.)
We cannot be this unprepared again. We MUST be a full-service party. We MUST not fade back into the 70's. We MUST be the national security party. Good old-fashioned Democrats cannot do that for us. They are a flashback to what we used to be. It's nice to think we could go back to that. It's nice to think that "we were right and it's been accepted now and we can go back to what we were doing before" But it's just not true. If you think it is, if you think American's have "learned their lesson," I'd caution you to remember that we probably thought that in 1974 about the lessons we'd learned from Vietnam.