The Red Pill

Democrats spend an awful lot of time talking about patriotism. For a generation--since becoming the anti-Vietnam War party, really--Dems have been on the defensive on the topic. When a Republican criticizes a Democrat's position on a matter pertaining to national security or policies involving patriotic symbols, the Democrat usually protests: Stop questioning my patriotism! But we're hard-pressed to think of any example in which a Republican politician has actually called a Democrat unpatriotic.

On the theory that the best defense is a good offense, some Democrats have started pre-emptively wrapping themselves in the flag. Unlike Republicans, they actually do level charges of unpatriotism. Thus peevish peacenik Howard Dean: "John Ashcroft is not a patriot." And here he was at last night's debate (of which The Wall Street Journal was a co-sponsor):

The biggest issue in this campaign is the question of patriotism and democracy. I am tired of having John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney and Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh lay a claim to patriotism and lay a claim to the American flag. That flag belongs to every single one of us. And I am tired of having our democracy hijacked by the right wing of this country.

Now first of all, Jerry Falwell? What century is Dean living in? We guess he's playing to the elderly vote, for Falwell hasn't been a major force in Republican politics since the early 1980s. In any case, he hardly fits as an example of someone "laying a claim to patriotism," seeing as how he was last seen two years ago suggesting that Sept. 11 was God's punishment for America.

As for Dean, let's stipulate that he is indeed a patriot and that he has every right to wrap himself in the flag. Is going around bragging about what a patriot he is, while impugning the patriotism of his opponents, really the best way of expressing his patriotism? Besides, whatever you may think of John Ashcroft, calling him unpatriotic is obviously and laughably false, like calling Howard Dean phlegmatic.

Also invoking patriotism last night was the new kid on the block, Gen. Wesley Clark:

If I am president, we are going to build on a new kind of American patriotism. We are going to reach out to people and bring them together based on a concept of public service and contribution to the public good, the protection of our liberties, the right to speak out.

Hmm, public service, public good, liberty, free expression: The elements of Clark's "new kind of patriotism" seem indistinguishable from the old kind. So what is Clark getting at? The New Republic's Peter Beinart argues that it's all an effort to obscure differences over policy:

Much of the Democratic base still doesn't take national security seriously. Sure, Democrats know that most Americans don't trust the party to keep them safe. But they deny that this distrust has anything to do with prevailing Democratic ideology. The party, they reassure themselves, merely needs a tougher image.

And so Democrats keep trying to find new, ever more Rambo-like personas to proclaim essentially the same message. First, there was John Kerry, whose Vietnam heroism supposedly inoculated him against GOP attacks, his incoherent Iraq position notwithstanding. Now, there is General Clark. Maybe Clark does indeed have a proactive, coherent national security message. But, with his Kerry-esque, have-it-both-ways position on Iraq, he certainly hasn't articulated that message on the stump. And many of the Democrats who cheered Clark's entrance into the race don't particularly care; for them, Clark's résumé is the message. Once again, the Democrats are trying to solve an ideological problem with a biographical solution. It didn't work for decorated World War II flying ace George McGovern; it didn't work for Vietnam triple-amputee Max Cleland. And it won't work next fall. The voters--shocking as it may seem--actually care what the parties believe.

And what do the Democrats believe? Well, last night Dean responded to a criticism from Dick Gephardt on Medicare by saying: "We need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush, not each other." Great patriot though Howard Dean may be, it strikes us as misguided for him to begin his "enemies list" not with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein but with the president of the United States.