UNBRANDING

Good article in the current New Yorker focusing mainly on Joe Biden, but also more broadly on Democratic Party repositioning on national security. The article describes a split among national security-oriented Democrats:

[John] Kerry considers himself to be a national-security-oriented Democrat—[Richard] Holbrooke, too, puts him in that camp—and appeared to take no particular offense at Biden’s criticisms. “I’m not going to dissect the campaign,” he said. But he seemed displeased when I asked whether the Democrats had a credibility problem on defense issues, and he finally said, “Look, the answer is, we have to do an unbranding.” By this he meant that the Democrats had to do a better job of selling to the American people what he believes is already true—that the Democrats are every bit as serious on the issue as Republicans. “We have to brand more effectively. It’s marketing.”

Most national-security Democrats believe that the Party’s problems on the issue go deeper than marketing. They agree that the Party should be more open to the idea of military action, and even preëmption; and although they did not agree about the timing of the Iraq war and the manner in which Bush launched it, they believe that the stated rationale—Saddam’s brutality and his flouting of United Nations resolutions—was ideologically and morally sound. They say that the absence of weapons of mass destruction was more a failure of intelligence than a matter of outright deception by the Administration; and although they do not share the neoconservatives’ enthusiastic belief in the transformative power of military force, they accept the possibility that the invasion of Iraq might lead to the establishment of democratic institutions there.

I'm probably with Kerry here, I think the Democrats do have the correct national security positions, and just haven't done enough to communicate it's details to voters. Ironically, I thought his campaign did a rather poor job of this.

This observation is interesting, and I think accurate:

Richard Holbrooke suggests that the Republicans have boxed in the Democrats, by stealing their ideas. “The Republicans, who always favored bigger defense budgets—we were the soft-power people, the freedom-and-democracy people—now seek to own both the defense side and the values side of the debate,” Holbrooke said. He believes that if the Iraq war actually does bring about the hoped-for results it might help the Democrats. “We’d be better off as a country and better off as a party if Iraq is a success and we get it behind us. The Democrats can then talk about their traditional strengths, domestically and internationally.”

It has been much easier for Republicans to temper their hardline military stance with talk of support for human rights and democratization, things they've never genuinely been interested in for their own sake, than it has been for Democrats to accomodate their liberal internationalism to a greater willingness to use military force, at least in the perceptions of voters. This probably has something to do with the fact that the Republicans have held the presidency during this transition, and that this president has shown an exceptional willingness and ability to redefine his position and terms as it suited his needs. I also think it's easier for people to accept that a tough guy has attained a new sensitivity than it is to believe that a sensitive guy is now tough, especially when the tough guy has been calling the sensitive guy a ponce every day for the last thirty years.