By request, this is moved/reposted from today's Open Thread.
Long article in NY Times magazine. Interesting read.
The Things They Carry as in baggage. As in soft on defense.
A few weeks ago, I asked Howard Dean how, given his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq, he felt he could overcome the Democrats' reputation as the antiwar party. ''I think you're still in the old paradigm, which says that they're the party of strength and we're the party of weakness,'' Dean admonished me as I sat across from him on his campaign plane. The chaos in Iraq, he said, had upended the old stereotypes. In John F. Kennedy's day, Dean pointed out, the Democrats enjoyed the reputation as the party of resolution. ''I think this may be the year to regain it, oddly enough,'' Dean said. ''Oddly enough'' is right. It seems awfully unlikely that in the first presidential election since 9/11, against a president who has spent most of his administration carefully cultivating and reinforcing his role as commander in chief, the Democrats can regain the status as the party of national security, which they lost during the Vietnam War. But that is precisely what party strategists were hoping through the fall as American troops got caught in the mayhem of Iraq and the nation's standing in the world plummeted lower and lower. And they had reason to think so. A poll conducted in November by the nonpartisan PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 42 percent of Americans said that the president's handling of Iraq decreased the likelihood of voting for him, versus 35 percent who said it had increased the likelihood. Another poll taken around the same time found that a majority of respondents believed that President Bush is ''too quick to use our military abroad'' and that he practices a ''go-it-alone foreign policy that hurts our relations with allies.'' Earlier, Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling and policy organization headed by the consultants James Carville and Robert Shrum and the pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, published a study with the following conclusion: ''When Democrats put out a clear message on national security, it now plays Bush's post-9/11, post-Iraq message to a draw.''
There are many salient points within the article re how and why Dems seem soft on defense. The question remains whether 'wrong and strong' beats 'right and weak', better termed 'right and nuanced'.
Either way, it's an issue our candidate is going to have to address and overcome in order to win. And that's true whomever the Dem candidate is.
P.S. Things Dems need to do (to not lose on the issue) do not include channelling Joe Lieberman.