{"id":17,"date":"2003-10-20T23:55:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-21T04:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=17"},"modified":"2003-10-20T23:55:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-21T04:55:00","slug":"why-howard-dean-wont-get-my-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"Why Howard Dean Won&#8217;t Get My Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to<br \/>\nwalk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving<br \/>\nindependents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean<br \/>\n&mdash; who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.<\/p>\n<p>OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun.  In this, and in other<br \/>\nways, he&#8217;s sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But<br \/>\nit is almost certain I will not vote for him.  Because the next<br \/>\nPresident of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the<br \/>\nthreat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.<\/p>\n<p>Note that I am not saying the next president must have George<br \/>\nBush&#8217;s strategic vision &mdash; and don&#8217;t bother with the<br \/>\nBush-is-an-idiot, it&#8217;s-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely<br \/>\noutsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude<br \/>\nthemselves that he&#8217;s a moron, it will be easier for him to continue<br \/>\ndoing so.  But there must be <em>some<\/em> strategic vision, some<br \/>\nsense of <em>realpolitik<\/em>. Dean ain&#8217;t got it.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls<br \/>\nappears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities,<br \/>\nwith the possible exception of Joe Lieberman.  And supposing there<br \/>\nwere, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it<br \/>\nthrough the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.<\/p>\n<p>And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by<br \/>\ninterest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is<br \/>\ntoday&#8217;s loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the<br \/>\nanti-globalization crowd &mdash; what conservatives call with some<br \/>\njustification the Blame-America-First brigades.  Expecting anything<br \/>\nbut toxic babble from these people was always doomed.  No, the trouble<br \/>\nis that the Democratic interest groups that <em>aren&#8217;t<\/em> outright<br \/>\ninsane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of<br \/>\nhow to do politics.<\/p>\n<p>How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the<br \/>\nracial-problem industry cope?  For these groups, politics is all about<br \/>\nidentity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the<br \/>\nnext round of redistributing the domestic wealth &mdash; they&#8217;ve<br \/>\nactually lost the very *concept* of the &#8216;national interest&#8217;, and are no<br \/>\nmore capable of grappling with the implications of 9\/11 than they<br \/>\nwould be of speaking Sumerian.<\/p>\n<p>Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic<br \/>\nParty &mdash; trial lawyers and the public-employee unions.  (Forget<br \/>\nlabor in general.  The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO<br \/>\nabout a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector<br \/>\nunions could no longer keep most of their people from voting<br \/>\nRepublican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political<br \/>\ngame gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.<\/p>\n<p>The Republicans don&#8217;t have this problem.  All of their major<br \/>\nfactions have commitments that don&#8217;t stop at the water&#8217;s edge.  The<br \/>\nso-called &#8220;national-greatness conservatives&#8221;, the ideological<br \/>\nfree-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even<br \/>\nthe Buchananite isolationalists &mdash; they may disagree violently on<br \/>\nwhat the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their<br \/>\nnormal discourse about politics where they know that concept<br \/>\n<em>fits<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups &mdash; which means<br \/>\nthat the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are<br \/>\nbeing set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger<br \/>\ncolleagues call &#8220;barking idiotarian moonbats&#8221; are the only ones in the<br \/>\nDemocratic Party who actually <em>care<\/em>! They&#8217;re the only Democrats<br \/>\nwith a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world<br \/>\nas anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.<\/p>\n<p>(I&#8217;m actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians<br \/>\nsuck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following<br \/>\n&#8220;international opinion&#8221; relieves them of the intolerable burden of<br \/>\nhaving to think about foreign policy.)<\/p>\n<p>Thus, Dean.  Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to<br \/>\ndo is ignore foreign-policy issues &mdash; but the only way he&#8217;s found<br \/>\nto mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries<br \/>\nis to bark like a moonbat.<\/p>\n<p>That won&#8217;t get my vote.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106670866026678961\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean &mdash; who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA. OK, I like the fact&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=17\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why Howard Dean Won&#8217;t Get My Vote<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}