There was clear and convincing evidence that Saddam Hussein’s fascist state in Iraq was deeply involved in illicit weapons program and a threat to its neighbors and the United States. Military force was necessary to depose him, and to help the Iraqis build a stable, constitutional government in the heart of the Muslim world as one means, over time, to reduce the terrorist threat against Western civilization.
Judging by the rhetoric of some of President Bush’s harshest critics, you might think these statements reflect the position only of hard-line, radical “neo-cons” exercising undue influence within the Republican administration. But these are essentially the talking points of most of the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate in the Southern states, including Erskine Bowles here in North Carolina.
Speaking at a campaign stop in Halifax County Thursday, Bowles reaffirmed his views about the nature of the Hussein regime and the need for military intervention, though like most other pro-war Democrats he criticizes the president’s handling of the post-war occupation and a lack of involvement by NATO.
Bowles is joined in this position, more or less, by the likely Democratic nominee for the open seat in South Carolina, State Schools Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum. The position is also shared by the leading Democratic candidate in Lousiana, Rep. Chris John, and by presumptive Democratic nominee Brad Carson in Oklahoma. This was also the original position of our own senior senator, John Edwards, before the tenor of the Democratic presidential race led him to overplay his criticism of the post-war Bush policy and underplay his original support.
It may not seem obvious now, given the renewed violence in Iraq, but I think these candidates are not only correct on the merits but also correct on the politics. Moreover, I find it quite interesting that Sen. John Kerry and the national Democratic Party insist that they can be competitive in the South — but on the political issue of the moment, Kerry and his political patron Teddy Kennedy are making the obligatory Vietnam comparisons and continuing to play to the anti-war activist wing of the Democratic Party who dragged their candidates so far away from mainstream opinion on Iraq during the nominating process.
If Kerry was really salable on this issue in Southern and border states, his fellow Democrats running for statewide office in those same states in 2004 wouldn’t be running away from his position. They are. He will be, too, I suspect, as we get closer to the November election, and as long as nothing catastrophic happens in the theater such as a serious military reversal or a devastating terrorist attack.
I was just refreshing my memory today about the pivotal 1864 presidential election between Republican (actually, the ballot said “Unionist”) Abraham Lincoln and his former general, Democratic nominee George B. McClellan. Until fall 1864, it looked like this would be a close-fought contest. Lincoln confided to White House aides that he didn’t not expect to be re-elected. Despite federal victories in the crucial western theater in 1862, 1863, and early 1864, many Northerners (wrongly) thought the Civil War was going badly because of the government’s inability to take Richmond and decisively defeat Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. There was significant opposition to Lincoln’s policies on civil rights, emancipation, and the draft.
But a series of military victories for the Union, most importantly Gen. John B. Hood’s withdrawal of Confederate forces from Atlanta (uh, don’t ask), turned the tide. Lincoln won in a landslide, and his party regained most of the losses it had sustained in the midterm elections of 1862.
My guess, and it’s only that, is that something similar will happen over the course of the next few months. If it does, Kerry could be a goner. I think Bowles and other Democrats running outside the Northeast understand this and don’t want to be seen as Copperheads.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.