BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, August 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
That was unfortunate timing this week for the Lamont Democrats, declaring
themselves officially the antiwar party within 24 hours of the Brits
foiling an Islamic terror plot to spread thousands of U.S.-bound bodies
across the North Atlantic, or perhaps across New York, Boston and
Washington as the planes descended. Yes, we know; they support the war on
terror but are merely against George Bush's war in Iraq. How does that
work?
Last week before the Lamont victory, 12 members of the congressional
Democratic leadership sent President Bush a letter urging that he start a
phased pullout from Iraq, euphemized as a "redeployment," starting before
the end of this year. But it is becoming increasingly fantastic to argue
that Iraq, with its apparently limitless supply of suicide bombers,
hasn't much to do with the terror threats manifest elsewhere.
Put it this way: From the perspective as of yesterday of getting on a
U.S. airliner, who would you rather have in the Senate formulating policy
toward this threat--Ned Lamont or Joe Lieberman?
Well, the Democratic Party would rather have Ned Lamont. That commitment
was sealed Wednesday when Mr. Lieberman's longtime colleagues in the
Senate, in one of the least edifying spectacles in recent political
history, pledged their troth to the one-issue neophyte, Ned Lamont. Sens.
Kennedy, Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Reid and, most embarrassing of all, Chris
Dodd of Connecticut, participated in what can only be seen as a tragic
Shakespearean assassination of a former colleague.
With the knifing of Joe Lieberman, the Democrats have locked in as the
antiwar party. No turning back now. You're in or you're out. And this
will be enforced. Susan Estrich, formerly of Dukakis for President, told
the Fox News Channel this week that Hillary Clinton "has got to get
herself in a position where she's for withdrawal of troops in Iraq before
the next Democratic primary."
Running as the antiwar party amid a world obviously vulnerable to
pitiless terror will require political suppleness. But the younger
generation of Democratic activists--widely praised for their irreverence
and antic energy--may not fit the sober public mood now.
This isn't the moment for a politics based on comics turning the
president and vice president into joke material. The national mood may
not be right now for extended blogospheric daisy chains of
smack-the-enemy or cool wordplays with people's names. This isn't a game
anymore. Not after yesterday's news.
What the Democratic Party needs more than anything for the way forward is
adult supervision. Who's going to provide that? Bill Clinton? Joe Biden?
Howard Dean? Not likely.
But let's not overstate the blogs' role in this. They get both credit and
blame for driving the Democrats to an antiwar platform. But there was
never any real resistance from the party elders. The people atop the
party provided the energy and intellectual content to the last famous
antiwar movement, against Vietnam.
Events like the massive protests in Washington and elsewhere between 1969
and 1971 were in part about events in Vietnam, but there was also a huge
amount of narcissistic self-indulgence in the movement. People joined in
the expectation of being around an "event"--part rock concert, part
street theater, the rush of being part of a morally unblemished belief
system. Sort of like the Web. This politics produced two major
candidacies--Eugene McCarthy's challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and
George McGovern's to Richard Nixon in 1972. Both got blown out.
This current group is a little older and more sophisticated than that
antiwar generation, and the Web is a money machine. But the genetic code
is still the same. It's driven both by purity of purpose and antipathy of
the "other." The relentless, almost sophomoric emotionalism over George
Bush is understandable enough, but the need to demonize Joe Lieberman was
interesting. Wednesday Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic
campaign committee, said: "This shows what blind loyalty to George Bush
and being his love child means." Pretty clever. But the mindset that
outputs humor like that is likely to produce a politics that rubs swing
voters the wrong way in, say, Ohio.
Yesterday brought an Islamic plot to blow up people on airliners. The
news cycle before that brought Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets into Israel
and a war in Lebanon. Before that, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
said Iran would give the West its reply to demands to halt nuclear
bomb-making on Aug. 22, the anniversary of Muhammad's flight to heaven on
a winged horse. Before that, in July, North Korea fired ballistic
missiles toward the Sea of Japan (a little-noticed assessment by U.S. and
Japanese technicians concluded this week that six of the seven missiles
fell within their targets).
And in the past year, Democratic leaders have criticized not just in Iraq
but warrantless wiretaps of suspected terrorists, interrogation
techniques at Guantanamo, the Swift financial monitoring program, and
data-mining phone records. The pull-out-from-Iraq letter was just the
culmination.
This is the context in which the post-Lamont Democratic establishment
plans to run as an antiwar party. Commencing a phased withdrawal from
Iraq, as they suggest, with the mission unfinished, in my view will cause
suicide-bomber recruitment to skyrocket in a delirium of victory over the
American infidels. And those bombers won't remain inside the imaginary
security line around Iraq but will travel to the capitals of Europe, to
Israel and to the U.S.
In a better world, the U.S. war on terror, at its core, would be
bipartisan. That world was what Joe Lieberman's politics represented.
That world is dead. Democratic support for the Republican
administration's plans to fight these terrorists is down to about zero.
This means the Democrats must have a plan of their own to defeat terror.
Every Republican running for office at every level this fall should force
his opponent to describe it. And if they aren't certain about the
details, they can call Ned Lamont.
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Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial
page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on
OpinionJournal.com.
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--
"The Democrats [...] look like they're turning into a domestic version of
the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and
so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that
are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed
to perpetuate their suffering," David Brooks, "Weekly Standard"
.
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