Just got done watching Hardball on MSNBC. They had Pat Cadell and Peter Fenn, both Democrats and both movers and shakers within the party. Cadell was shaking with anger trying to defend Howard Dean (Fenn supports Joe Lieberman). They both just blasted each other. It was great TV. Cadell was trying to make the point that Dean is energizing his party and that he was right about the war. Fenn was trying (poorly) to make the point that Dean cannot win in the general election.
My analysis is that they are both correct. The war with Iraq will probably be the defining point of the coming election. When the war started there was less than 30% of support for the anti-war position. So Dean gets most of those votes for sure. Problem for him is that truly this is the base of the Democratic party. In the general election that plus other party faithful will not be near enough to beat George Bush.
I sure hope to see more of these great internal wars on TV. It does make for some fine entertainment.
Posted by Tim at December 29, 2003 09:24 PMTim,
The mainstream Democratic position on the war: Where are the WMDs? / Is it Vietnam yet?, is rapidly becoming unsustainable. The WMD issue no longer has traction because it has been superceded by other events, "Vietnam" is no longer an issue because it always was a fallacious, historically inaccurate and intellectually dishonest argument.
In reading the second volume of Manchester's Churchill bio, I found an interesting parallel between the French and British intelligensia of the interwar period and some of today's liberals. Because WWI was so terrible and the struggle to vanquish evil was so costly and difficult, the educated classes of the 1930's, in effect, reasoned away the need to confront Hitler. So it is with many members of the contemporary left who, for reasons of both political opportunism and moral cowardice, refuse to face facts and willfully distort reality.
Just like the so-called elites of the 1930s, they are too smart by half. May they not share the fate of their deluded predecessors.
