WHEN DID THE DEMS GO SOFT?

Just One Minute fills in the truck-wide gap in the latest installment of the Democratic saga to get a clue about foreign policy: Vietnam might have had something to do with the decline of Dems reputation on defense issues. They over-learned their lessons from the war - moving past skepticism over the use of American force to dogmatic opposition to it. They went past recognizing that many of our Cold-War "allies" were thugs to apologizing for our Cold War foes. The dominant storyline of the left was that international enemies were constructed to distract the American people from pressing issues at home. (For a good example - rent Bob Roberts, which every so often inserts footage of the run-up to the Gulf War into is mocumentary about a folk-singing, right-wing candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania implying the war was somehow connected to Roberts' crypto-facist domestic agenda.) Well, after 9/11 we know the enemies are very much real - and its time for a Democratic narrative that echoes John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, not George McGovern and Walter Mondale.