Let's say for arguments sake that some of the Democrats are right and Iraq is another Vietnam. Do these Democrats remember clearly what happened to them as a party during the Vietnam War?
As a student of history I have been scratching my head wondering about the Democratic Parties current fixation on the Vietnam decade. While it is apparent that many within the party and the media have warm memories of how their feeble protests 'stuck it to the man', that is not all that accurate politically speaking.
The anti-war movement reached its crescendo in 1972...when Republican Richard Nixon won every state in the country except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. How could this happen? The answer is fairly simple, the anti-war movement split the Democratic Party and drove out the blue collar meat and potatoes labor movement. But that splintering is only a part of the story, the party splintered again over numerous current issues and was incapable of unification behind any candidate. Many talking heads refer to the 'Reagan Democrats' when looking at the demographic segmentation of the population during elections. This segment is credited with the Reagan landslide. The truth is the 'Reagan Democrats' existed as a powerful voting block back when Reagan was still a Governor in California. It was those same Reagan Democrats who elected Richard Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972.
The irony is that this anti-war split was clearly foreseeable even before 1968, you can see it early in the mid-sixties when student radicals were incapable of playing nice with the other fringe liberals. For example the outcast bikers were more likely to attack the Berkley radicals than to join them in their street protests. The party bosses were waring with the new anti-war leadership over control of the party, the party was also divided North/South over race issues and could barely create a platform. You had Humphrey/Jackson leadership splits over busing, and McCarthy and McGovern splitting off from the Johnson Democrats over the Vietnam War.
Despite all of this awful leadership and policy splits, the party controlled everything - the Presidency, both houses of Congress and a liberal leaning Supreme Court. This was the high water mark for the Democrats. The party has been furiously destroying itself ever since.
Why?
That answer is difficult. Many ideas suggest themselves to me. One obvious idea is the use of these natural splits by the Republican Party...driving wedge issues between the glue that tries to hold the Democratic Party together. You see it on abortion, gay marriage and national defense today. You also see it most clearly on the anti-war left. Ironically enough, the Republican Party has had to do very little actual politicking to benefit from these splits. The Democratic candidates have been spun in circles by their own party; trying to bridge these gaps. This has allowed the Republicans to charge every national Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter with flip flopping on the issues or third party candidates to accuse the Democrats of being no different than Republicans.
It might surprise you who I think the biggest ally of the Republican party has been...why the media of course. Not those few in the media who all but push the Republican talking points...they are useful to the Republicans but they can't really split the Democratic Party since most Democrats are not consumers of those news outlets; and those who are, distrust them deeply. The Democrats are being split by the liberal leaning mainstream media. Nothing drives wedges between a party any quicker than media reports which try to push the Democrat's agenda upon party members who feel strongly about the issues. The agenda-based journalism, trying to push a 'story-line', has created fissures between the Democratic Party and has forced candidates to speak out of both sides of their mouth and the party to have planks in their platform that they clearly do not actually believe or worse fear to articulate. This is the meat behind the AMMP ('American Mainstream Media Party') described by Howard Fineman when he wrote about it in January 2005. He says the AMMP has failed...sadly I think he has picked the wrong party. It is the Democrats who have failed, with a big assist from Howard's AMMP.
With the media whipping up partisan distress over the liberal talking points, special interest groups can force candidates to address issues directly that they otherwise might be able to avoid. Sadly the AMMP and those special interest groups do not reflect majority opinion. Thus do the Democrats continual dwindle in their influence. You can see it most clearly in the disconnect between the platform statements, and the candidates.
The Democrats supported the Iraq war in the last election...according to their platform. Today they are forced to utter the, 'I was duped defense.' Yet the core of the party are clearly anti-war, as evidenced by Howard Dean's meteoric rise. The candidate, John Kerry, clearly stated that he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman, that too is in the Democrat's platform. Approximately 90% of the delegates to the Democratic Convention supported legalizing gay marriage. The platform also supported further tax cuts, yet the candidates raged against Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. The candidate, John Kerry, spoke eloquently about how he believed that abortion was wrong - he just didn't want to legislate his own personal morality. Of course the Democratic platform defended a 'woman's right to choose' and over 95% of the delegates to the convention supported abortion, indeed Kerry himself voted against a partial birth abortion ban. All of this is great stuff...very nuanced...but it exists not because of the nuance of the issues or because candidate Kerry was somehow unable to make up his mind about anything, but because the Democratic Party has ceased to exist as a uniform entity capable of supporting a single coherent set of beliefs. If you want unity, the beliefs have to go! That, more than any other reason, explains why the party has failed to articulate an alternative to the Bush administration policies.
Lets face it, the Bush administration has hardly demonstrated much competence outside of efficiently running election campaigns. In fact, if the real Democrats could not defeat Bush in 2004, their only hope is to run as maverick Republicans. Senator Hillary Clinton appears to understand this and has staked out positions which, for Democrats anyway, are nothing short of Attila the Hun. This is a woman who led an effort to nationalize health care, who has been emphatically pro-abortion, who has had her liberal ticket punched by anyone and everyone who could punch it. Today she is one of the more conservative Senators, positioning herself to run for President. Does anyone really believe she is pro-Iraq war? That position is a political necessity for her but may actually be fatal in the Democratic primaries. The anti-war constituents will destroy the party and in Hillary's case, perhaps their only hope for success, rather than permit any position short of immediate withdrawal and defeat and the media will see that the anti-war masses remain whipped into a fury by getting their daily fix of anti-Americanism. Just like 1972!
You see, the roots of this problem extend back to the Vietnam War and with few exceptions (i.e. Republican self-inflicted wounds), the Democrats have never recovered. It is ironic that some Democrats appear determined to duplicate their Vietnam era failures today. It is almost nostalgic...even for them.
Sometimes a comic strip so perfectly and succinctly skewers that nothing can be added to improve it.
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