RALEIGH – Politicians have a number of rhetorical tics that, well, tick me off. Perhaps the most annoying one, arriving with the regularity of the two-year electoral cycle, is sanctimoniously to label something as “not a partisan issue.”
Education is not a partisan issue, they say. Clean air knows neither Democratic nor Republican nor Libertarian lungs. Politics ought to stop at the water’s edge, so as not to make foreign policy a partisan issue. And so on.
So here’s an obvious question: what is legitimately a partisan issue? It seems that virtually anything of abiding importance is supposed to be off-limits during election season. Perhaps the notion is that we ought to choose our state and national leaders on the basis of their considered views on garbage collection – only, as it happens, recycling and public health are not partisan issues.
Our own Sen. John Edwards twitched in this general direction during a campaign appearance Sunday in Detroit. President Bush, he said, was irresponsibly seeking to divide the nation by attacking John Kerry’s ability to leader an effective war against terrorism. “The truth is [Republicans supporting Bush] are trying to exploit one of our nation’s greatest tragedies for personal gain. It is immoral, and it is wrong,” Edwards said. “This isn’t a Republican issue or a Democratic issue.”
Actually, I cannot imagine a more important issue for the Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards tickets to spar about. Of course national security is a partisan issue, as the two parties are offering contrasting strategies for protecting the country from attack. The Democrats argue that the president’s priorities got screwy after the overthrown of the Taliban in Afghanistan, resulting in “the wrong war at the wrong time” in Iraq and the alienation of European and other allies. They also say that Bush has bungled the Iraq effort. The Republicans argue that Iraq was a legitimate campaign in the war, given Saddam Hussein’s long history of harboring, financing, and training anti-American and al Qaeda-linked terrorists and the risk that they might gain access to his weapons programs (now suspected to be less advanced than many, including Hussein, believed before the war). They also question whether Kerry could get any more help out of the French and Germans in Iraq or Afghanistan, and are suspicious that he would wait for international approval for actions needed to protect America and its interests.
Further evidence that the war on terrorism is very much a partisan issue can be found in the cross-tabulations of recent polls of North Carolina voters. Democrats and Republicans simply don’t agree on the matter. While two-thirds of Democrats say the war in Iraq was unjustified, 82 percent of GOP voters say it was justified. Democrats are unsure whether “the United States should stage preemptive attacks in the war on terrorism,” while large majorities of Republicans (84 percent) and independents (60 percent) say the U.S. should. Independents are closer to Democrats on the issue of whether the government should be able to detain U.S. citizens without any charges if they are suspected of terrorism, with both groups saying no by a two-to-one margin and Republicans saying yes by a 56-37 margin.
I see no reason to pretend these partisan differences don’t, or shouldn’t, exist. The stakes are high, the issue critical, and the choice to be made potentially momentous. Edwards (I’ve more-or-less given up on the feckless Kerry) should simply argue his side and not the rules of the contest.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.