The Informationist

The Informationist Decides, 2008 (or at least he starts thinking about 2008)

As long-time readers know, I severed my longstanding affiliation with the Democratic Party in January 2005, when President Bush used his inaugural address to properly orient American foreign policy toward the promotion of liberal democracy abroad. The Democratic response varied from tepid to negative. To make matters worse, just as Bush was trying (with limited success) to get the Republican Party in line with his vision, the Democrats appointed Howard Dean DNC Chair. Eighteen months earlier, I had told Dean supporters that, had the Democrats chosen him as their 2004 nominee, I would volunteer to help reelect Bush. The party’s subsequent choice of John Kerry struck me as a bottom-of-the-barrel but still palatable choice. My take on Kerry from December 2001 (when friends first broached the possibility of his becoming the next nominee) was that he was weak and unimpressive, but likely an improvement over Bush. I did a bit of (unenthusiastic) volunteer work for the Kerry campaign during the fall of 2004, but spent the entire period wondering whether I was backing the right candidate. More than two years later, I remain uncertain.

So where does that leave me in 2007, looking forward to 2008? It frees me to consider the entire field, without reference to party labels. Here’s my current categorical ranking—with plenty of ties (listed in alphabetical order) because a fair amount of pertinent information remains unknown:

1. Rudy Giuliani (R)
John McCain (R)

[large gap]

2. Hillary Clinton (D)
Newt Gingrich (R)

3. Joe Biden (D)
Bill Richardson (D)

[enormous gap]

4. Barack Obama (D)
Mitt Romney (R)
Tom Vilsack (D)

[large gap]

5. Sam Brownback (R)

6. Chris Dodd (D)
John Edwards (D)
Al Gore (D)

[large gap]

7. Mike Huckabee (R)

[unbridgeable gap]

8. Chuck Hagel (R)

If you’re wondering, foreign policy dominates my thinking. Here’s a bit of preliminary analysis:

As longtime readers of The Informationist (or my actual honest-to-God publications, including Digital Phoenix) know, I do not see it as a coincidence that the two dominant buzzwords of the past decade have been “globalization” and “terrorism.” Globalization refers to the policies, actions, and technologies that are allowing growing parts of the world to become richer and freer. Such rapid transformations, however, are often disconcerting--and really do force people who had been comfortable with the status quo to relinquish much that is familiar. Anyone enamored of globalization’s general trends (as I am) should anticipate a backlash. My take on the 1990s was that the Clinton team did a pretty good job of nurturing positive trends, but spent far too little effort anticipating the backlash that erupted on 9/11. Despite many of the Bush team’s attempts to move us in the right direction towards confronting this backlash, America and its allies remain without even a consensus about the nature of the threat.

I believe that we are locked in a battle to the death with a smart, determined enemy intent upon bringing down Western civilization. While I won’t fall into the trap of assigning it a single name or address, I believe that we are witnessing a convergence of groups that recognize the emerging global liberal order as a threat to their plans of utopian authoritarianism. These groups disagree bitterly among themselves about the order that they would like to see emerge, but all acknowledge (correctly) that the destruction of the current order followed by a period of anarchy is a prerequisite to achieving their goals. Some of the emerging coalitions may appear unlikely (beyond the obvious, consider whether there is really room for the nominally Catholic Hugo Chavez in the world of Ahmadinejad’s Hidden Imam).

I believe that George W. Bush understands the nature of this threat. As far as I can tell, that puts him in a significant minority position throughout Western society. I also believe that Bush’s personality, management style, and specific decisions have deterred many people from vocally sharing his understanding. This hardening of opposition may prove to be the single most negative legacy of the Bush administration.

The next President’s single most important job will be to convince a robust governing majority of American and Western public opinion that we must confront this challenge. Our next President’s primary tasks will therefore be to continue nurturing the economic growth that globalization and technology enable, to promote the growth of liberalism and the institutions necessary for its spread, and to devise a strategy for confronting the backlash that both consolidates western support and meets its more violent proponents with the requisite force.

Those beliefs lead me to a simply litmus test. I will support any candidate who understands the nature of the threat over one who remains uncertain, and any uncertain candidate over one who is certainly wrong. Only within a category will I even look at other issues. As to 2008 politics, I remain an independent for a reason. I don’t like the Republicans much more than I did a decade ago, but I like the Democrats a lot less.

I have been waiting more than five years to hear a leading Democrat make the following points loudly, clearly, and repeatedly (I consider all to be self-evident):

1. The spread of liberalism and liberal institutions, including but not solely democratic elections, is critical to the long-term welfare of the United States, and should be the basis of our foreign policy.

2. The maintenance and expansion of a globally integrated economy is critical to the short- and long-term welfare of the United States, and should form a significant plank in any American foreign policy. In the Middle East in particular, this means securing the production facilities and shipping lanes necessary for a functioning oil industry.

3. There are numerous movements around the world intent upon rolling back the globally integrated economy and the spread of liberal democracies. The violent among them have declared war on us, and we must respond in kind.

4. The PapaBush administration set in place an unconscionable policy in Iraq whose sole purpose was to delay the brutal resolution of some long-term conflicts. Nothing pressed the Clinton administration to change this policy, and by and large it did not. No responsible U.S. President could have left this policy unchanged after 9/11. The only question was which of several potential Iraq policies was “least bad” in the post-9/11 world.

5. It is critical to separate strategy from implementation. The failure--or even perceived failure--of a plan may or may not indicate a flaw in the underlying strategic objective.

IMHO, there are certainly Democrats who understand all of these points--Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson all come to mind, as do Richard Holbrooke and Sandy Berger. On the punditry side, Chris Hitchens, Peter Beinart, and Will Marshall all get it (which explains, in part, why many Democratic activists view all three as traitors to the left). Many Americans, notoriously uninterested in any foreign policy questions not implicated in an immediate crisis, do not. They tend to form their opinions by considering, comparing, and contrasting the statements emanating from leaders they trust and from leaders they distrust.

In the past five years, Joe Lieberman was the only Democratic leader to emphasize these lessons with the sort of consistency necessary to educate the public. The party responded by ejecting him--to the point that he told Chris Wallace yesterday morning that he would evaluate every member of the 2008 Presidential field without regard to party label. In the absence of such guidance from the leadership, vocal grassroots activists have come to define the “Democratic position.” This activist base started with a coalition of socialists, pacifists, anti-Americans, anti-liberals, anti-Westerners, and anti-Semites, and has grown to include those who will simply oppose anything that Bush (or Republicans) favor. Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore have become its iconic poster children.

The response from the folks who are supposed to be running the Democratic Party has been disastrous. The Party has split between those comfortable with this base (Kucinich, Feingold, Dean, etc.), and those simply cowed into submission. I don’t know of a single Democratic leader who publicly repudiated Cindy Sheehan even after she met with Hugo Chavez (and hugged him, if memory serves). Moore’s film opening in DC drew the entire party glitterati, and received gushing reviews from many, including then-DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe, who are rarely associated with the loony left.

By refusing to educate Democratic voters, even those leaders who do get it are complicating the possibility of developing an appropriate American foreign policy. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see anyone making it through the Democratic primary season without pandering to the activist base, and almost as hard to see how any Democrat could implement a viable foreign policy once in office.

None of this, of course, lets the Republicans off the hook. The dominant stream of post-Cold War Republican foreign policy has blended the Realists and the Nativists--both of whom are at least as damaging to American interests as are the groups on the left. The difference, however, is that there is a real debate within the Republican Party. Among the Democrats, I see only capitulation.

That said, I have not chosen a party affiliation at the moment because I am not certain where the parties will end up. By the end of the Clinton Administration, a respectable group of Democrats (myself included) were active proponents of nation building; the Republicans chose a nominee with strong Realist roots and rhetoric.

So where does that leave me? As I noted, McCain and Giuliani strike me as the only candidates capable of educating the American public about what needs to be done, and then of implementing the necessary policy. Neither is popular among large parts of the Republican base, and it is unclear that either can weather a tough primary season.

If the Republicans choose another direction, my own choice becomes harder. I believe that Hillary Clinton is the best of the rest. She alone may be able to retain enough independence from the loony left to implement a sound foreign policy as a Democrat, and she alone seems poised to return the Party to its 1990s Clintonism, and away from the 1970s McGovernism that now seems ascendant. Hillary also brings some significant negatives with her. Though I personally have always liked her, there is no way that a Hillary Clinton presidency could possibly heal the partisan rift plaguing the country. Because I consider this poisonous partisanship to be our single greatest domestic problem, I am less than enamored with the prospect of yet another polarizing figure in the White House.

Beyond Hillary, Richardson and Biden would also be good choices, but it’s hard to see either of them rising to the fore without compromising everything that makes them palatable. I know little of Obama’s foreign policy stands, though his lack of experience and the necessity of his appealing to the party base suggest that the prospects for his arriving in the right place are slim; he is likely to fall under the sway of his advisory team, and it remains to be seen who they are. The same is true for Vilsack. Edwards, Dodd, and Gore have all embarrassed themselves by championing a variety of positions that I consider detrimental to the long- and short-term welfare of the country. Though I was once an enthusiastic Gore supporter, and I told Edwards as recently as 2002 (at a small TechNet breakfast held in Palo Alto) that I wanted to help make him the next Democratic President, I would have a hard time supporting any of them. If I’ve omitted anyone noteworthy, they probably fall into one of these categories.

If none of McCain, Giuliani, Clinton, Richardson, or Biden are in the race, I would have to turn my attention back to the Republicans. My take on Gingrich is similar to my take on Hillary. He gets our basic foreign policy needs, but would be a polarizing mess at home. Furthermore, I consider him far less likely than Clinton to get the nomination, but far freer (and thus more likely) to get foreign policy right if he wins. In a Clinton-Gingrich race, I would almost certainly break for Gingrich. (I do not, however, consider this to be a realistic possibility). Brownback is hard to read; some of his comments suggest that he gets foreign policy, others do not. My general discomfort with his domestic stances would make it impossible for me to support him actively, but I would probably vote for him over any Democrat running on a realist/pacifist platform. I classify Romney with Obama and Vilsack as an unknown on foreign policy; I would have to see who his advisors are before I could form an opinion. The same is probably true for Huckabee, though his domestic stances means that, at best, I would group him with Brownback.

My absolute last choice among the names currently being bandied about is Chuck Hagel. Hagel represents the worst of the Republican realists, and would be a disaster for the country. I cannot think of a single Democratic candidate with even a plausible chance of gaining the nomination who would induce me to vote for Hagel.

So that’s pretty much my thinking on this matter at the moment. I’m waiting to see how things develop, but at this point, I’m looking for ways to help Giuliani and McCain.

If you’ve read this far and have contacts with either campaign (or, for that matter, with Gingrich or even Hillary), I believe that I can help a campaign craft message/policies in three specific areas:

1. Technology policy, broadly conceived to include all of the ways that we regulate information, ideas, innovation, and communication.

2. Economic policy, specifically policies designed to promote growth at home and abroad (i.e., including significant tax reform, as well as the more obvious issues of trade and adjustment assistance).

3. Foreign policy, specifically related to confronting the anti-modern and anti-liberal elements of the world, whether in their violent Islamic guise, their confrontational Latin/leftist guise, or their elitist/reactionary guise common among the intelligentsia of the European and American left.

I’m tired of approaching campaigns with offers of help only to be relegated to phone banks and donor lists. I’ve got skills and experience that I would like to use to help make my country--and the world--a better place. Perhaps if I approach the candidates I like early enough, they will invite me to help them achieve these objectives.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 01/29 at 02:04 PM in American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies