72 lines
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72 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
Why Howard Dean Won’t Get My Vote
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<p>After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to<br />
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walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving<br />
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independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean<br />
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— who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.</p>
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<p>OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun. In this, and in other<br />
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ways, he’s sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But<br />
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it is almost certain I will not vote for him. Because the next<br />
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President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the<br />
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threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.</p>
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<p>Note that I am not saying the next president must have George<br />
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Bush’s strategic vision — and don’t bother with the<br />
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Bush-is-an-idiot, it’s-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely<br />
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outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude<br />
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themselves that he’s a moron, it will be easier for him to continue<br />
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doing so. But there must be <em>some</em> strategic vision, some<br />
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sense of <em>realpolitik</em>. Dean ain’t got it.</p>
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<p>In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls<br />
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appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities,<br />
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with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there<br />
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were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it<br />
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through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.</p>
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<p>And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by<br />
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interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.</p>
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<p>I’m not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is<br />
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today’s loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the<br />
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anti-globalization crowd — what conservatives call with some<br />
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justification the Blame-America-First brigades. Expecting anything<br />
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but toxic babble from these people was always doomed. No, the trouble<br />
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is that the Democratic interest groups that <em>aren’t</em> outright<br />
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insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of<br />
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how to do politics.</p>
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<p>How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the<br />
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racial-problem industry cope? For these groups, politics is all about<br />
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identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the<br />
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next round of redistributing the domestic wealth — they’ve<br />
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actually lost the very *concept* of the ‘national interest’, and are no<br />
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more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they<br />
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would be of speaking Sumerian.</p>
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<p>Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic<br />
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Party — trial lawyers and the public-employee unions. (Forget<br />
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labor in general. The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO<br />
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about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector<br />
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unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting<br />
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Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political<br />
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game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.</p>
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<p>The Republicans don’t have this problem. All of their major<br />
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factions have commitments that don’t stop at the water’s edge. The<br />
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so-called “national-greatness conservatives”, the ideological<br />
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free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even<br />
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the Buchananite isolationalists — they may disagree violently on<br />
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what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their<br />
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normal discourse about politics where they know that concept<br />
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<em>fits</em>.</p>
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<p>Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups — which means<br />
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that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are<br />
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being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger<br />
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colleagues call “barking idiotarian moonbats” are the only ones in the<br />
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Democratic Party who actually <em>care</em>! They’re the only Democrats<br />
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with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world<br />
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as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.</p>
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<p>(I’m actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians<br />
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suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following<br />
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“international opinion” relieves them of the intolerable burden of<br />
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having to think about foreign policy.)</p>
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<p>Thus, Dean. Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to<br />
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do is ignore foreign-policy issues — but the only way he’s found<br />
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to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries<br />
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is to bark like a moonbat.</p>
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<p>That won’t get my vote.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=106670866026678961">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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