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A Time for Leading, Not 'Framing' |
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by Clarence Page
(No verified email address) |
25 Aug 2005
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While a debate over the war has erupted between Republicans and Republicans, Democrats wrestle with an ambivalence that reminds me of Gore Vidal's description of the Vietnam-era Congress: Unsure of whether to be hawks or doves, they sound like capons.
A capon is a castrated chicken. |
If Democratic Party leaders were listening to me, I'd give them some good old-fashioned advice: Run to the head of the parade so you can lead it.
As remarkable as President Bush's slump in the polls has been for his handling of the war in Iraq during these, his dog days of discontent, so is the failure of Democrats to benefit from it.
In an early August Newsweek poll, for example, 61 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Bush's handling of the war and only 26 percent agreed with his wish to keep American troops there "as long as it takes."
As Bush's approval ratings have shrunk, the Democrats have not gained. Just 42 percent of Americans approved of congressional Democrats in a Washington Post-ABC News poll in June, a figure that was about two percentage points lower than Bush's.
And, going in to the August recess, polls were showing disapproval of Congress's performance to be higher than it has been since 1994, the year voters swept Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, for Democratic incumbents, their approvals have not been significantly higher than those of their Republican counterparts.
The public sees a problem that Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel described on ABC's "This Week" Sunday: America is getting "locked into a bogged-down problem" like Vietnam.
Yet, while a debate over the war has erupted between Republicans and Republicans, Democrats wrestle with an ambivalence that reminds me of Gore Vidal's description of the Vietnam-era Congress: Unsure of whether to be hawks or doves, they sound like capons.
A capon is a castrated chicken.
With most of the party's congressional wing having voted for the war three years ago, many have a hard time admitting now that they were misled. The result is a deep division between the stay-the-course centrists and the get-out-soonest progressives that leaves leaders unable to come up with an alternative policy or consistent message that offers voters a choice, not an echo of Bush's policy.
Leaders like Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid of Nevada, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York criticize Bush, but only for the way he has tried to win, not on whether his goals are winnable.
Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin last week became the first senator to call for a specific pullout deadline, defying his leadership. He later clarified on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that his date, Dec. 31, 2006, for all troops to be withdrawn from Iraq is only a "target," not a "deadline," and can be pushed back if circumstances require it.
With that, Feingold, who also may be running for president in 2008, gave voice to his party's increasingly impatient left-progressive wing that wants leading Democrats to get tougher in pushing for a troop withdrawal. Call them the "Cindy Sheehan" wing, after the famous protesting mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. Sheehan's camp near Bush's Texas ranch has invigorated the antiwar movement and put new pressure on Democratic moderates.
What are Dems to do? There's been a lot of talk in Democratic circles about how issues are "framed," a term of George Lakoff, a University of California at Berkeley professor of linguistics, who has advised party activists.
Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, he notes, carefully choosing the language with which to present them and building an infrastructure of spokespeople through which to communicate them. By dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive.
I am reminded of how Democrats used to have the lead on that art, which today is often called "spin." Democrats in President Lyndon B. Johnson's day knew how to clobber Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the conservative 1964 Republican presidential nominee, by painting him as "trigger-happy." That pretty well describes the tunnel vision of Team Bush as they rushed this country into war with Iraq.
Today's issue should be not so much how and why we got into Iraq but whether we want tomorrow's foreign policy and national security to be led by the sort of trigger-happy tunnel vision that got us into the current mess.
That's not an alternative policy, but it is the beginning of a real contest of ideas for both parties to offer the voters. Richard Nixon, running against Lyndon B. Johnson's war in 1968, offered "peace with honor." Democrats need to offer at least that much.
© 2005 Daily Camera
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