In the face of mounting American casualties in Iraq and growing discontent with the war at home, President George W. Bush has restated time and again the need to follow through on our firm commitment to the Iraqi people.
However wrongheaded Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq may have been, the Democratic party could take a lesson from his willingness to see this decision through to its conclusion in the face of setbacks and criticism. The Democrats, it seems, have allowed the failure of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Jimmy Carter's attempt to establish a foreign policy based in human rights concerns, along with the crushing electoral defeats of George McGovern and Walter Mondale, scare them out of being Democrats. Rather than attempt to reformulate the values behind these policies or campaigns, the Democratic Party has instead acquiesced to the rightward movement of the country by moving itself closer and closer to the center.
The recent growth in the U.S. economy is widely seen as a catastrophe for the Democrats' prospects for taking the White House in 2004. Whoever emerged from the nine candidate field was expected to use Bush's failure in managing the economy at a major campaign theme next year. With this weapon seemingly taken from their arsenal, the Democrats are now expected to turn their attention to the war on Iraq, focusing the campaign on the continued chaos there and discrepancies between reality and the Bush administration's pre-war claims.
I pray the Democrats' will think more broadly than this. For one thing, the situation in Iraq could turn around just as the economy did. As troubling as it was for the Democratic candidates to be put in the position of trying to downplay the good economic news, it would be far more problematic to be in the position of trying to downplay or spin significant progress in bringing peace and stability to Iraq.
Even Howard Dean, the self-proclaimed representative of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," offers a platform that is almost entirely reactive. Rather than articulate a vision for the next four years, Dean spends most of his time criticizing the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cut (justifiable criticisms, no doubt, but recognizing Bush's mistakes is not enough to qualify one for the presidency). Dean often voices the desire to "take America back," but it seems all he really wants to take it back to is how it was before George W. Bush. While it is possible that such a strategy could work next year, it would do little to brighten the long-term prospects of the Democratic party. As captivating as Bill Clinton was as an individual, he did little to capture the nation intellectually or to change the way it thought about governing, as evidenced by Al Gore's failure to hold the presidency for the Democrats' despite the prosperity of the late '90s. Nostalgia for Bill Clinton is not going to provide sufficient impetus for getting the country moving in the right direction.
Governor Dean did sound a promising note in the direction of broader thinking when he called for a greater sense of community and attacked the "atomistic society" created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. It is important that the Democrats attack the ideology behind Republican policy rather than just looking at it effects. One can grant a Reagan supporter's loftiest claims about his success in growing the U.S. economy and furthering our interests abroad and still condemn his presidency. Even if Reagan left an America which was economically vibrant and powerful globally, he also left an America that was morally bankrupt, in which the prosperous were excused from any responsibility to the less fortunate by myths of "welfare queens" and voluntary homelessness. By the same token, even if President Bush's tax cuts were successful in stimulating the economy, they are, as Sen. John Edwards has continually pointed out, immoral in their nature, enhancing the prosperity of those already the most privileged and placing the tax burden to a greater extent on working people.
The left must seize upon issues of economic justice to retake the moral high ground from the right. It is time for America to have a moral debate that focuses on compassion rather than faith and family values. President Bush and his supporters would likely contend that, among other things, the president's faithfulness to his wife and deep religious conviction make him a more moral man than President Clinton. Liberals generally allow such an assertion to go unchallenged, and thus implicitly concede the right's definition of morality. The case must be made that, by fighting for universal health care or by championing the cause of the underprivileged, men like Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson posses a different kind of morality than that possessed by Bush or Reagan, a morality more important for someone charged with leading a nation.
Hopefully, next year's election will not merely be a debate about specific policies, past or future, but will be a debate about what we as nation aspire to, what we value and what role we believe government should play in that. Liberals must have enough faith in the American people to believe that this is a debate that we can, and indeed must, win.
Anthony Resnick is a Trinity junior. His column appears every third Thursday.
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