Where are the Democrats?
It ought to be easy to be a Democratic politician now. An unpopular president leads an unpopular war that is going nowhere. The president regularly violates Constitutional protections, covers up scientific data, has no domestic accomplishments worth mentioning, has messed up drug coverage for seniors, has created a huge deficit. And every week brings a new example of corruption. Yet, the Democrats seem timid, quiet, and there is nothing like the full-throated roar that there was against Clinton, or even against Nixon.
Where are the Democrats?
And when the Democrats do get going, they pick goofy targets and go after them ineffectively. For example, there is the Dubai ports deal. Now, to be sure, they, technically ‘won’ that confrontation. However, they wound up looking bad. First, because they picked the wrong reason to go after the deal. They tried to make it about security, when it should have been about hypocrisy. The problem isn’t that Dubai is a terror state, the problem was that after Bush has spent five years trying to whip up fear of an Arab tide of terror it was more than hypocritical for him now to claim that he was shocked that people didn’t like an Arab company running some of our ports. The hypocrisy was that once again money trumped everything, as it always does for Bush.
And then there was Hillary. She isn’t a liberal and so she took out a strong position opposed to the ports deal. Oops, one problem, her husband, reported the Financial Times (March 5th) had made over $500k from speeches in Dubai, had received a half million dollar donation for his presidential library, and was advising the company on how to handle the opposition to the deal.
And why shouldn’t he? We want closer relationships with responsible Arab governments and to deepen business dealings with them. The real Democratic position should have been to mock Bush for his expediency, not to try to pander to security fears.
But that does represent a constant Democratic problem: they so want to be considered tough and manly like the Republicans.