BOSTON AND BEYOND


In watching the Democratic convention and the true start of the Bush-Kerry campaign, I can not help but escape from the feeling of detachment that plagues me. As a Dem, I usually have little trouble being fully caught up in the rhetoric and pageantry of a Democratic convention, in the drawing of sharp, clear contrasts between the two parties governing philosophies. And during moments of the this convention that was the cased. I awaited Barack Obama's speech with rapt anticipation. I was fully carried up in the excitement and passion of John Edwards's speech. Most of all, I was delighted in seeing the party's fighting spirit, and its vigorous efforts to wrest patriotism and faith away from their partisan abuse as part of the still effective GOP playbook laid out two decades earlier by Atwater. The home team has never looked more disciplined and yet more passionate. The combination of the two could be seen in John Kerry's surprisingly animated acceptance speech. Rather than play it safe, Kerry spoke from his heart and threw down the gauntlet against the Bush Administration - against its radical religious right agenda on cultural issues, against its abdication of responsibility on social issues, against its irresponsibility on economic issues and its fecklessness on foreign policy. It was the speech that liberal Dems wanted to hear - a speech that read as if it was scripted by Aaron Sorkin. (Indeed, the speech it most reminded me of was the one delivered by Michael Douglas's President in the American President.)
So where does the detachment come from, with such a stirring scene that warmed my left-of-center heart. It comes of course from the cold reality of the grim choice the nation faces on the most important issue facing it - the War on Terror. True, the Democratic Party went all out to show that it is no longer the McGovernite party it was from Carter to Dukakis. And this is heartening. It means that at least on the tactical, political level, the party understands that the War on Terror is not going to be won through appeasement and detente. Kerry, however, has made clear that while he understands he must cabin his Jeffersonian instincts, that when he does so, he will act in a Hamiltonian way. As Joshua Micah Marshall and other moderate Dems have written with approval, Kerry seeks to bring us a foreign policy that will be quite similar to that of Bush the Elder - restrained, multilateral, forceful when necessary, and above all realist.
Kerryt's Foreign Policy (and it very much will be Kerry who will be its foremost architect) It therefore a wholesale rejection of the neoconservative project, rather than a rejection of neoconservative hubris and Cheyney & Rumsfeld's use of Neocon idealism as a cover for their own Jacksonian agenda. As a Democratic Wilsonian, therefore, who believes that the War against Islamist Terror will be won only through the agressive promotion of democratic and liberal ideals in the Islamic world, this is enough to dampen my enthusiasm for the Kerry Administration. (I'm still waiting for Kerry to utter the word "Sudan"). But a second Bush term does not hold out any more hope. Iraq was the Neocon high tide, and even there they have lost out to the Jacksonian impulse to shy from the messy task of nation-building and the need to bring in the Hamiltonian State Department to clean up the mess of the post-war disaster that was in much due to the Neocon disdain for details. Neither side address the deep inadequacy of our current international institutions. Bush revels in it as an opportunity to pursue American policy unfettered, while Kerry appears to be in denial, placing the entire blame for America's strained relationship with those institutions on Bush's recklessness.
Perhaps the best thing for me to do is to focus on the positives of a Kerry Administration. Stem cell research will no longer be held hostage to the most fundamentalist views of the religious right. The Supreme Court and the lower branches of the federal judiciary will be stacked with more Breyers and less Scalias. The defecit will be reduced. There is hope for some progress on education and health care. The perils of climate change will finally be noted, and a serious plan for energy efficiency may get enacted. And with respect to the less-sexy, technocratic aspect of the War on Terror (searching port containers,tracking down loose nukes) Kerry will be more than up to the task. And if that doesn't quite stir me into the same fervor of my fellow Dems, it is enough to make the chances of my pulling the lever for Kerry in November, very, very likely.