Why Howard Dean Won&#8217;t Get My Vote
<p>After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to<br />
walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving<br />
independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean<br />
&mdash; who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.</p>
<p>OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun.  In this, and in other<br />
ways, he&#8217;s sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But<br />
it is almost certain I will not vote for him.  Because the next<br />
President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the<br />
threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.</p>
<p>Note that I am not saying the next president must have George<br />
Bush&#8217;s strategic vision &mdash; and don&#8217;t bother with the<br />
Bush-is-an-idiot, it&#8217;s-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely<br />
outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude<br />
themselves that he&#8217;s a moron, it will be easier for him to continue<br />
doing so.  But there must be <em>some</em> strategic vision, some<br />
sense of <em>realpolitik</em>. Dean ain&#8217;t got it.</p>
<p>In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls<br />
appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities,<br />
with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman.  And supposing there<br />
were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it<br />
through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.</p>
<p>And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by<br />
interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is<br />
today&#8217;s loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the<br />
anti-globalization crowd &mdash; what conservatives call with some<br />
justification the Blame-America-First brigades.  Expecting anything<br />
but toxic babble from these people was always doomed.  No, the trouble<br />
is that the Democratic interest groups that <em>aren&#8217;t</em> outright<br />
insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of<br />
how to do politics.</p>
<p>How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the<br />
racial-problem industry cope?  For these groups, politics is all about<br />
identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the<br />
next round of redistributing the domestic wealth &mdash; they&#8217;ve<br />
actually lost the very *concept* of the &#8216;national interest&#8217;, and are no<br />
more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they<br />
would be of speaking Sumerian.</p>
<p>Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic<br />
Party &mdash; trial lawyers and the public-employee unions.  (Forget<br />
labor in general.  The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO<br />
about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector<br />
unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting<br />
Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political<br />
game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.</p>
<p>The Republicans don&#8217;t have this problem.  All of their major<br />
factions have commitments that don&#8217;t stop at the water&#8217;s edge.  The<br />
so-called &#8220;national-greatness conservatives&#8221;, the ideological<br />
free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even<br />
the Buchananite isolationalists &mdash; they may disagree violently on<br />
what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their<br />
normal discourse about politics where they know that concept<br />
<em>fits</em>.</p>
<p>Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups &mdash; which means<br />
that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are<br />
being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger<br />
colleagues call &#8220;barking idiotarian moonbats&#8221; are the only ones in the<br />
Democratic Party who actually <em>care</em>! They&#8217;re the only Democrats<br />
with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world<br />
as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.</p>
<p>(I&#8217;m actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians<br />
suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following<br />
&#8220;international opinion&#8221; relieves them of the intolerable burden of<br />
having to think about foreign policy.)</p>
<p>Thus, Dean.  Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to<br />
do is ignore foreign-policy issues &mdash; but the only way he&#8217;s found<br />
to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries<br />
is to bark like a moonbat.</p>
<p>That won&#8217;t get my vote.</p>
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