Dusting Up

Today on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page web site we answer the question: "Given Iraq, are Democrats now positioned to campaign as the national-security party?" My response:

This is a tricky one. As a general rule of thumb, Democrats do better in national elections when the year's defining issue is economic fairness, and Republicans do better when the defining issue is national security. But there are plentiful signs that this trusty, traditional logic is getting scrambled in this remarkable period of ideological flux.

In the 2006 congressional races, of course, Democrats, with their message that we need to get out of Iraq sooner rather than later, dominated. Voters took in the same old tired Republican message that unless we smashed everything in sight and kept on turning our nation into a garrison state, the terrorists would smother us in our beds -- and yawned and pulled the lever for Democrats. More recently, in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois, west of where I live in Chicago, Democrat Bill Foster scored a shocking upset against Republican Jim Oberweis, a local dairy magnate with very high name recognition and very traditionally hawkish Republican positions on foreign policy. The Oberweis message was the same old, same old: Terrorists would smother us in our beds unless we smashed everything in sight and kept on turning our nation into a garrison state. Foster's message was standard issue for Democrats: We can fight terrorism smarter and more effectively by ending the distracting war in Iraq.

He also did something gutsy that no Democratic consultant trapped in the tired old triangulations of the past would recommend: He aggressively opposed the president's call for "retroactive immunity" for telecommunications companies that may have broken the law in cooperating with National Security Agency spying. His opponent said this would all but surrender us to the terrorists. But the Democrat won handily. This was all the more significant because the 14th District was previously represented by then-Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. It's a suburban and rural district. It also includes Ronald Reagan's hometown of Dixon. How Republican is it, traditionally? Well, I remember when I reported there during the 2004 presidential election the few civil servants I met who were voting for Sen. John Kerry and begged me not to reveal that fact. They were afraid that if it got around, they'd lose their jobs.

The old Republican story about national security didn't work. This time, the voters of the 14th District chose a Democrat.

There is even fascinating new poll evidence that the very foundation of the old opposition between national security voters and economic fairness voters is breaking down -- in a way that gives the advantage to the Democrats. People are blaming the bad economy on the Iraq war and Republican security policies generally. They're intuiting that Republicanism is making us both less secure and less prosperous. If Democrats are able to run with a message that firms up this equation in voters' minds, this whole thing could blow wide open.

Tomorrow we turn to "Is the American left now a movement of economic issues and nationalism, of identity politics and social justice, or something else? How do the New Democrats fit into the contemporary left?"

Any frickin' idea how to respond to that?

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