Latino Advocates Learn Lesson From Election; NAACP Clueless?

Darryl Fears reports in today’s Washington Post that the 2004 elections taught at least one ethnic-advocacy group the dangers of a strictly adversarial relationship with Republicans, and the incoming leadership has decided to shift directions:

At [the National Council of] La Raza, a change in strategy is in the works. Yzaguirre, who was the group’s president for more than 30 years, approached issues and politics with direct confrontation. “My posture has been we are going to award our friends and come down on our enemies,” Yzaguirre said. “We are going to speak out on [Bush’s] policies if they hurt our people.”
But [Janet] Murguia, who served as deputy director for legislative affairs for the Clinton White House and as a liaison between the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign and constituent groups in 2000, said she is planning to improve La Raza’s relations with the White House.
“One of the first lessons you learn in Washington is you have to work with people on both sides of the aisle,” she said. “I am certainly going to take every opportunity I can to reach out to this administration.”

Part of the impetus for Murguia’s strategic shift is Bush’s increasing popularity among Hispanics; he took over 40% of their vote this year, narrowing what had been a normally substantive gap that favored Democrats. Her constituency has pushed NCLR to adapt its rhetoric to the new reality on the ground. When almost half of your target audience remains sympathetic to the GOP, you have to engage them in a positive manner to maintain your own credibility.
On the other hand, the NAACP has not yet felt that kind of pressure from their membership, and so far their leadership does not feel particularly interested in leading their constituency away from the patronizing relationship the Democrats have offered for decades:

At the NAACP, the committee searching for Mfume’s successor is being led by Julian Bond, the organization’s chairman, who dismissed recent reports that his fiery rhetoric did not mesh with his president’s attempts at diplomacy.
“Mfume and I have met at least every other week face to face, and we have communicated almost daily,” Bond said. “I disagree that we’ve had a difficult relationship.”
Still, their differences in approach were clear. The day after this year’s U.S. presidential election, for example, Mfume sought to end the chilly relationship between the White House and the NAACP with a congratulatory letter. But Bond had repeatedly disparaged Bush and his party over the years — in the days leading up to November’s voting, he said the Republicans “draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban wing of American politics” — and now the IRS is investigating whether his remarks during the campaign violated the NAACP’s tax-exempt status.

Some voices in the African-American community speak out against the perpetual war footing that the NAACP takes with the GOP. Earl Ofari Hutchinson warns against taking an outdated approach to civil rights, and recommends focusing on social issues and reaching out to the Bush administration to push that agenda. “This is not 1960,” Hutchinson warns in the article.
However, other forces feel that Mfume was simply too diplomatic with Bush and that the NAACP needs a leader like Julian Bond. Ronald Waters argues that the GOP wants to “marginalize” the black community, but what Walters doesn’t see is that their lock-step voting pattern has marginalized themselves. Why should the GOP prioritize for the African-American community when their votes are in the bag for Democrats? After all, Bush went to the NAACP as a candidate in 2000, only to be rewarded by an ad campaign that accused him of sympathizing with the lynchers who dragged James Byrd to death. After assigning prominent and historic positions to African-Americans in his cabinet, the GOP only took a paltry 11% of the vote in his re-election.
Bush won without them, and that’s why the NAACP strategy is doomed to failure. The bloc-voting threat only works until its shown to be an empty bluff, and that’s happened in two successive presidential elections. The GOP doesn’t need the current black leadership, and everyone except Julian Bond, Ronald Waters, and Jesse Jackson appears to understand that. Janet Murguia certainly does, and she’s bright enough to keep her community from marginalizing itself.

And Now The Loyalists Spring To The Defense

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finally got a show of support from GOP leaders in the Senate after taking a beating all week long from his own party. Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell both spoke out in Rumsfeld’s defense today:

“I am confident that Secretary Rumsfeld is fully capable of leading the Department of Defense and our military forces to victory in Iraq and the war on terror,” Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said in a written statement. “Most importantly he has the confidence of his commanders in the field and our commander in chief.”
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the GOP whip, said Rumsfeld “is an excellent secretary of defense and we are fortunate to have a man of his courage and vision serving the president at this critical time.”

It certainly took Frist and McConnell long enough to speak up. Perhaps the eruption of dissatisfaction with Rumsfeld among the Republican ranks took them by surprise, but after Wednesday the momentum should have been obvious to both. Quelling the public revolt should have been their highest priority; instead, they appear to have dithered until the end of the week, when their statements of support would receive less attention.
In some cases, this would be called “damning with faint praise.”
If Frist and McConnell seriously wish to support Rumsfeld, then they need to get Coleman and Lott back on board. McCain, Hagel, and Collins can be disregarded. As whip, that is McConnell’s job, and as Senate Majority Leader, it’s Frist’s job to get McConnell on the case. The lack of urgency in their response suggests that their enthusiasm for the task leaves something to be desired. Bush needs to call both men to the White House — and the woodshed — and get the troops back in line. If he can’t, and Frist and McConnell fail, then the second term risks failure even before it begins.

Norm Coleman Sends Warning Message On Rumsfeld

Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, usually a staunch ally of the Bush administration, sent a message to the White House yesterday with a warning that explanations about the slow supply of armor to Iraq has not satisfied him. He said he didn’t want to point fingers, but he intends on opening hearings if better explanations are not forthcoming:

Sen. Norm Coleman said he had “serious misgivings” about the process of providing armored vehicles for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I have reservations about what the secretary and the Army have done in this regard,” the Minnesota Republican said, but later added, “I’m not at the point of pointing fingers. I don’t who did this. I don’t know what happened.”
Coleman said he anticipates an Armed Services Committee investigation, but if that doesn’t happen he would consider looking into the matter as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

This came at the end of a day where a number of Republican Senators gave unprecedented GOP criticism of Rumsfeld. John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Susan Collins all belong to a centrist-left coalition that the Bush administration could conceivably ignore on Rumsfeld’s status. Trent Lott, more conservative but at odds with Bush since his fall from the Senate leadership position, might also be easily written off as a sorehead. But Norm Coleman has been a loyal voice for Bush in the Senate, so much so that the freshman Senator was given the lead in the UN investigation and is the subject of speculation for the national ticket in 2008.
If Coleman has lost confidence in Rumsfeld to the point of threatening an investigation over the armor issue, then the White House — as I said yesterday — has a potential meltdown with its own loyalists in the Senate. It’s becoming apparent that the GOP expected Bush to replace Rumsfeld in the second term and are quite unhappy with his failure to do so. This has to be about more than up-armoring Humvees; something else is at play here. Whatever it is, the White House needs to either tamp it down quickly or start exploring its options for SecDef in 2005. The issues of Social Security reform and judicial nominations — not to mention the successful prosecution of the war — cannot be risked due to disunity over a Cabinet officer.

Eroding, Eroding

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took another political body blow yesterday as a key Republican Senator called for his removal in the coming months. Joining John McCain’s no-confidence remark earlier this week, Trent Lott told a Biloxi Chamber of Commerce audience that he wants Rumsfeld out in 2005:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be replaced sometime in the next year, Sen. Trent Lott says.
“I’m not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld,” Lott told the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. “I don’t think he listens enough to his uniformed officers.” … Lott, speaking to the civic club Wednesday, said the United States needs more troops to help with the war and a plan to leave Iraq once elections take place in late January. The Mississippi Republican doesn’t think Rumsfeld is the person to carry out that plan.
“I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year or so,” Lott said. “I’m not calling for his resignation, but I think we do need a change at some point.”

Pressure continues to build on Rumsfeld, surprising after the near sweep that the GOP engineered in this last election. Normally such a mandate would have embraced those cabinet members Bush chose to stay on for the second term. It appears that Rumsfeld has had significantly less support from Capitol Hill Republicans than previously thought. I suspect that many assumed Rumsfeld would have been replaced this term and are unhappy that Bush kept him aboard.
The primary issue appears to be the handling of post-war Iraq. Earlier the White House (or someone in the GOP) leaked that Colin Powell was the one who fought for an extended occupation rather than Rumsfeld, who purportedly wanted to turn the keys over to the Iraqi National Congress in May 2003. That dog apparently won’t hunt on the Hill. Rumsfeld’s brilliant campaign in the spring invasion has passed from memory, and whether he opposed it or not, he owns the debate over troop commitments for the occupation.
For my part, I think the criticisms have been unfair and more than a little hysterical — but I also think that Rumsfeld’s characteristic bluntness and stubbornness has contributed mightily to both his victories and his losses and probably inspired much of the hostility from the GOP. Bush’s stubbornness can be legendary, too, but he also understands politics. If Rumsfeld has lost the confidence of the GOP leadership, Rumsfeld should go.
UPDATE: Senator Susan Collins, one of the GOP’s liberal contingent and a key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, adds her voice to the mix today:

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has joined other Republicans in criticizing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. …
“I am very concerned that it appears the Pentagon failed to do everything in its power to increase production” of the vehicles, Collins wrote.

Collins stopped short of asking Rumsfeld to step down, but the long knives are out, and it’s the GOP who’s holding them. Having some knowledge about procurement issues, I find it difficult to believe that all of this is over armor for Humvees. I think Rumsfeld has generated an extraordinary amount of ill will amongst Republican lawmakers and they’re using the armor issue as an excuse. At this point, the real truth about the armor is secondary to the political support that Rumsfeld has obviously lost. If Trent Lott was willing to go on record with John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Susan Collins, then the Bush administration has a real problem on its hands.

Intelligence Reform: The New Way To Get Kicked Upstairs

If anyone harbors doubts that the new intelligence-reform act represents anything more significant than an expansion of the American patronage system, this Washington Post report by Walter Pincus should remove them all. Titled “President Gets To Fill Ranks Of New Intelligence Superstructure,” Pincus blithely lists the lengthy list of new managers sitting atop an already hidebound intelligence bureaucracy:

President Bush is searching not only for a new director of national intelligence to become his chief adviser on intelligence but also for three other senior officials who will work atop the new organization created by the intelligence reform act he is scheduled to sign into law tomorrow.
Along with the job of the intelligence director, or DNI, there is to be a principal deputy DNI, a director of a new national counterterrorism center, and a general counsel to the DNI, all of whom must be presidential appointees subject to Senate confirmation.
In addition, the new chief information officer for the DNI, who is to put together a computerized information-sharing system for the 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, will also be a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate, under a provision of the fiscal 2005 intelligence authorization bill.
Further, the intelligence reform bill requires the president to name a chairman and a vice chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, which will review regulations and policies related to the war on terrorism. They, too, are subject to a Senate vote.
The intelligence reorganization, set in motion by the Sept. 11 commission and approved earlier this month by Congress, has created a personnel challenge for the Bush administration, which must fill a range of new senior positions as it embarks on the task of making a new intelligence organization work.

It creates more than a personnel challenge; the new positions give Congress even more opportunity to hold televised hearings while adding at least a half-dozen more filters to intelligence analysis before the President sees anything. This list of political appointees requiring Bush’s attention shows that Congress and the 9/11 Commission, being bureaucrats themselves, gave the critical intelligence-reform exercize the only solution with which they have any familiarity.
And who will the President select for these open positions? Apparently not analysts or operatives, but the same people who created this “superstructure” — politicians and bureaucrats. Porter Goss originally was considered for DNI until he cleaned house at the CIA. Now John Lehman, not coincidentally a member of the commission, has had his name added to the short list. Pincus also notes that retired military leaders would suit the new position well, in a turn of phrase that probably has Pincus’ journalism professors pounding their heads on tables this morning:

One possibility for DNI is an active or retired military officer, because another provision of the bill indicates that Congress expects either the DNI or his principal deputy to be an active or retired military person.

I suppose that a job description with that expectation might make a military officer a “possibility”. Tommy Franks might get the DNI position with those expectations, especially since Franks has been so supportive of Bush during the past election season. Pincus also mentions Brent Scowcroft, although he does note that Scowcroft’s numerous editorials opposing Bush’s foreign policy makes that rather unlikely. (No kidding.)
So what do we expect from this new superstructure that just got welded onto the defective machinery that failed to catch 9/11, missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and fell asleep while India and Pakistan tested nukes? A dumping ground for retirees and political allies. Mind you, all of these people have good records in serving their country, but with that list of candidates, the notion of reform seems to have flown out the window in favor of adding to the status quo.
Wake us when all of that additional management results in better production.

Lieberman Says No

CNN reports that the Bush administration has made at least two overtures to Senator Joe Lieberman to join the Cabinet — but Lieberman has passed on both occasions:

Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman has twice in recent days said “no” when approached about the possibility of a major job in the second Bush administration, CNN has learned.
The Cabinet vacancy at the Department of Homeland Security was the subject of the latest overture, according to congressional and other government sources. Those sources said the earlier overture was to see whether Lieberman might be interested in becoming the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

I’m not sure why the White House would have considered Lieberman for the DHS post, except for Lieberman’s role in creating the department. Senators do not make great executives, for the most part, which is one of the reasons why none have been elected directly from the Senate to the presidency since 1960. The UN position would have been a better fit for Lieberman, whose credibility there and his tough stance on American security here could have helped melt some diplomatic ice between Turtle Bay and Washington DC.
CNN has no speculation on Lieberman’s reluctance to represent Democrats in the second Bush term. It’s possible that Lieberman simply likes being in the Senate. If he’s contemplating another run at the presidency in 2008 — he could have won this election if Democrats had been smart enough to nominate him — joining Bush’s cabinet would probably be too damaging in the primaries.
Bush could have demonstrated a great deal of bipartisanship if Lieberman had agreed, but he also would have lost one of the more moderate Senate Democrats to approach for deals and advice. Since Bush already won his last election opportunity, that transaction would have been a net loss, especially since it looks like Harry Reid intends on being every bit as instransigent as Tom Daschle in working with the White House. Lieberman may be doing Bush a favor.

McCain: Still No Confidence In Rumsfeld

In an indication to everyone except the John Kerry Perpetual Campaign For Political Martyrdom that the presidential election is over, Senator John McCain made clear the feelings towards Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to which he alluded last week with only slightly veiled rhetoric. McCain bluntly told an AP interviewer that he had “no confidence” in Rumsfeld:

U.S. Sen. John McCain said Monday that he has “no confidence” in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, citing Rumsfeld’s handling of the war in Iraq and the failure to send more troops.
McCain, speaking to The Associated Press in an hourlong interview, said his comments were not a call for Rumsfeld’s resignation, explaining that President Bush “can have the team that he wants around him.”
Asked about his confidence in the secretary’s leadership, McCain recalled fielding a similar question a couple weeks ago.
“I said no. My answer is still no. No confidence,” McCain said.

McCain has no problem with the decision to go to war in Iraq, nor apparently with the initial invasion phase, in either planning or execution. Rather, McCain cited differences in opinions on troop levels, troop constituencies, and the overall post-invasion strategy — sounding themes consistent with criticism from many across the aisle. The difference is in the timing, of course; McCain did not make these kinds of broad criticisms before the election. One suspects that he did not trust Democrats to use his words constructively — and that he saw little to his liking in the contradictory and mostly isolationist strategies of the opposition.
It’s no secret that McCain would love to be SecDef, but with Rumsfeld deciding to stay on (and with a Democratic governor to appoint his replacement), that opportunity simply will not appear during this term. McCain instead seems to be positioning himself from the hawkish center for a Presidential run in 2008, even though he will be 72 years old at that time. Another AP analysis shows McCain taking steroids (as an issue!!) to beef up his visibility on domestic politics.
All of this may well launch John McCain to the front of a crowded pack for the GOP’s 2008 nomination. One wonders, however, if the GOP mainstream will have any enthusiasm for a maverick Senator who launched his bid by undermining confidence in a Defense secretary in what looks suspiciously like a ploy to suck up to the national news media.

The Other Shoes Keep Dropping On Kerik

As I suspected on Saturday, the nanny problem Bernard Kerik cited when he withdrew his nomination as DHS chief does not appear to be the only issue that his confirmation hearing would have revealed. Today, two new revelations about Kerik’s tenure in New York demonstrate the poor job done in vetting his candidacy prior to the nomination.
First, the Daily News reveals that Kerik managed to conduct two simultaneous extramarital affairs, using a “secret” corporate-rental apartment. One of the women was a publishing magnate, while the other worked for Kerik in Corrections:

The first relationship, spanning nearly a decade, was with city Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero; the second, and more startling, was with famed publishing titan Judith Regan.
His affair with Regan, the stunningly attractive head of her own book publishing company, lasted for almost a year.
Dramatically, each woman learned of the existence of the other after Pinero discovered a love note left by Regan in the apartment.

Who sleeps with whom does not usually concern me in regards to job qualificiations — except when a manager or executive carries on a sexual affair with an underling. Jeanette Pinero worked in Kerik’s command structure, a gross violation of ethics for any manager or executive, the exact same kind as we saw in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. This relationship has led to two separate lawsuits against the city of New York, both claiming that Kerik retaliated against managers who disciplined Pinero for job violations. The city settled one suit for a quarter-million dollars; the other id now in depositions and subject to a gag order. (Newsweek reports that Regan hired bodyguards to keep Kerik away after the affair collapsed.)
The New York Times picked up on another potential problem in Kerik’s administration in NYC, first reported by the Daily News. Kerik had been accused of taking payoffs, a fact that seems to have been missed by the White House staff, although the charges were under review by New York:

While serving as New York City correction commissioner in the late 1990’s, Bernard B. Kerik spoke to the city’s Trade Waste Commission on behalf of a close friend who was helping a company suspected of mob connections try to get a license from the city, according to a former commission executive.
The conversation was part of a web of relationships Mr. Kerik developed with officials of a New Jersey construction company long suspected by New York authorities of connections to organized crime. The company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, hired Mr. Kerik’s close friend Lawrence Ray, the best man at Mr. Kerik’s wedding, to help with its licensing problems. Mr. Ray said yesterday that he gave Mr. Kerik more than $7,000 in cash and other gifts while Mr. Kerik was commissioner of correction and the police. The gifts were first reported in The Daily News yesterday.

Put all of this together and it adds up to political toxic waste, the kind that vetting staffs are supposed to keep well away from presidents. For the most part, the White House staff has done a good job in keeping this administration clean of scandal — which makes the revelation-a-day embarrassment of the Kerik nomination difficult to fathom. Obviously, Rudy Giuliani’s considerable assistance in the election gave him huge credibility with the Bush team. Perhaps it gave Rudy too much credibility, which is why he went out of his way to apologize to Bush this weekend:

Giuliani was at the White House on Sunday night, one of several dozen guests at holiday dinner party. The former mayor and his wife, Judith, also rode in the presidential limousine with Bush and his wife, Laura, back to the White House after they attended the taping of the annual “Christmas in Washington” concert.
McClellan noted that even though Giuliani offered an apology Sunday night to Bush, “I don’t think the president felt that one was necessary.”
Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel said in New York that the White House dinner Sunday had been planned several weeks ago. “The president was very gracious,” she said. “They remain good friends.”

Word has it that Kerik will return to his former position with Giuliani Partners now that he has withdrawn from the nomination, and that Giuliani will welcome him back. Expect that welcome to be short if Giuliani entertains any ideas about jumping into the presidential race in 2008.
UPDATE: I missed this excellent post on the subject by Michelle Malkin until she linked back to this one. I like her pick for the DHS position, too:

My dream pick: Peter Nunez, former United States Attorney, Southern District of California (1982-1988), former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement (1990-1993) overseeing all law enforcement components of the Treasury Department including Customs and BATF, lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego and Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Nunez has been in the trenches, has demonstrated his ability and determination to enforce our immigration laws, and has worked with law enforcement officials and agencies on both the northern and southern borders. He gets it.

If he doesn’t get the DHS nod, let’s hope whoever does has the sense to put Nunez in charge of immigration issues.
Just to recap Kerik’s disastrous nomination:
* Don’t be fooled by the notion that the process has been too rough for Kerik and that we won’t get anyone to serve if our standards are this high. Plenty of good people remain and are willing to serve.
* The nanny problem is no mere distraction. If Kerik had followed the law, he would have paid her Social Security taxes, which would have immediately shown whether the servant had work eligibility in the US. As a law-enforcement agent, Kerik knew the requirement, and as a politician, he knew the Kimba Wood/Zoe Baird precedent. The failure to pay the taxes demonstrates that he knew her status and lied about it.
* Sleeping with your employees may not be illegal, but it’s highly unethical, and the city of New York continues to pay for it. It destroys morale, and more so, it demonstrates a self-centeredness that we really don’t need at DHS. Either we take homeland security seriously or we don’t. The White House should.
Kerik turned out to be a bad candidate, a huge mistake for the White House, and fortunately flamed out before the Senate confirmation hearings. No excuses necessary.

Brownstein: Beinart Is Wrong

Peter Beinart wrote a long column two weeks ago for the New Republic that called on Democrats to hearken back to post-WWII tradition and coalesce around a strategy of muscular liberalism in a Trumanesque fashion in order to restore their credibility on foreign policy and especially terrorism. Beinart argued that today’s Democrats lack the anti-totalitarian fire they had during the Cold War and fail to recognize Islamofascism as the same enemy as Communist oppression. During his appearance on Hugh Hewitt when we filled in, we questioned Beinart’s recollection of Democratic resistance to totalitarianism, especially in places like Nicaragua and Cuba, challenges that Beinart left unanswered.
Ronald Brownstein picks up the thread in today’s Los Angeles Times and also questions Beinart’s analysis, this time in his assumptions regarding the circumstances in which Americans for Democratic Action formed and set Democratic foreign policy until the late 1960s:

Beinart is surely right that in this uneasy new era, as at the height of the Cold War, Democrats are unlikely to win the White House unless voters trust the party to protect them. But he glosses over the principal reason the ADA generation could articulate a positive foreign policy agenda more easily than Democrats can today.
When the ADA was formed, a Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, was developing America’s strategy against the spread of Soviet communism. Although Truman didn’t neglect military might, his vision of “containment” put much greater emphasis on economic aid (through the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan for Europe) and international alliances (NATO). Truman made it easier for the ADA to embrace a positive agenda, because he set a course for the Cold War most Democrats could support.

Brownstein makes a good point; not only did Democrats control the executive branch when the ADA was founded, but Democratic executives had just successfully prosecuted a global war — a brutal, costly, but necessary and transformative war that changed America from an isolationist backwater to a global power. They had credibility on foreign policy unlike anything we have seen since the late 1960s, when the party began its slow sell-out to the countercultural, radical elements that MoveOn, International ANSWER, and Hollywood represent today.
But Brownstein misses more than Beinart does with that focus, mostly because neither one of them see the profound changes that have occurred since the ADA. To both Beinart and Brownstein, this is still their fathers’ Democratic Party. Yes, with Democrats mostly out of power in the executive branch for the past generation, Democratic foreign policy has necessarily been reactive. Neither, however, answer the question as to why Democrats have been shut out of the White House since Viet Nam, with two exceptions: two Southern governors, one whose election came in reaction to one of the worst political scandals in American history, and the other who won when conservatives split the ticket (and governed from the center out of political survival).
Put simply, the cacaphony of the American Left, which Beinart casts as a fringe element that receives inordinate attention, causes the American electorate to mistrust Democratic commitment to represent American interests instead of utopian, one-world ideals. That doesn’t spring from Hollywood idiots such as Michael Moore getting too much press; that mistrust has been underscored by a generation of Democrats getting essential parts of foreign policy badly mistaken. Jimmy Carter kissed Leonid Brezhnev and scolded Americans for fearing Communism — and then watched as the Soviets overran Afghanistan, threatening our vital security issues in the Persian Gulf.
Senators such as John Kerry insisted that Communists in Central America represented the will of the people and refused to address Communist expansion on our doorstep. When the US pressed the Sandanistas in Nicaragua by supporting the contras and forcing elections, Kerry and his friends on the left (notably Ed Asner) predicted that Daniel Ortega would win handily and give the Reagan Administration a well-deserved bloody nose. When the Nicaraguans tossed Ortega and his minions from office, they recovered from the shock just long enough to complain about voting “irregularities”. (Sound familiar?)
Finally, in the Cold War to which Beinart asks Democrats to hearken, the party opposed every measure meant to win that conflict without military action. They believed — believed — that the world was condemned to a binary existence. Indeed, as John Kerry has said on more than one occasion, they did not consider Communism a problem to be solved, but just another strategy in governing that worked for some people. The Democrats fueled No Nuke rallies when Reagan updating aging weapons systems; they fought against defense spending when Reagan wanted to engage the Soviets on the economic front; and they made their preference for the status quo plain, even though millions of Eastern Europeans suffered under Soviet occupation for decades.
The Democrats didn’t pursue all of these foreign-policy objectives strictly out of gainsay of the Republican executive as Brownstein proposes. These represented the Democratic core values! Moral relativism in the face of evil and an isolationist, none-of-our-business outlook results in retreat and surrender. Those policies and that track record does not represent mainstream American values any more, if they ever did at all.
That is the hurdle that Democrats must clear if they expect America to trust them on foreign policy in the executive — or they have to win on every other issue besides war and diplomacy. Beinart comes closer than Brownstein in diagnosing the true illness, but neither of them understands that the issue runs so deep that a party split may be the only cure. Until the Democrats cut the Hollywood and International ANSWER crowd loose — and I mean overtly rejecting them and their apologetics for Stalinism — Americans will never trust them to represent our interests abroad.

Call It The Shotgun Approach

After enduring days of innuendo, character assassinations, and pseudoscandals, Bernard Kerik finally withdrew his nomination for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security for a surprising reason — hiring an illegal immigrant as a domestic worker:

Bernard Kerik, New York City’s former top cop, withdrew his name from consideration to be President Bush’s homeland security secretary, a victim of the embarrassing “nanny problem” that has killed the nominations of other prominent officials. …
While assembling paperwork for his Senate confirmation, Kerik said he uncovered questions about the immigration status of a housekeeper-nanny that he employed. As homeland security secretary, Kerik would oversee the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“I am convinced that, for personal reasons, moving forward would not be in the best interests of your administration, the Department of Homeland Security or the American people,” Kerik said in a letter to Bush.
He said he could not allow personal matters “distract from the focus and progress of the Department of Homeland Security and its crucial endeavors.”

Kerik only now had questions about the status of his housekeeper? That sounds awfully convenient. I like Kerik, but he’s been in law enforcement for a long time now. He should have known to check her out when he first hired her. He became Corrections Department commissioner four years ago, a position of fairly high visibility in New York. Didn’t he think that having an illegal immigrant as a personal servant would be a problem there? I find it difficult to believe that this is the real reason, although you could make the same arguments about Kimba Wood, I suppose.
I believe that Kerik would have done a fine job at DHS, and it’s a shame that this — or something else — derailed the opportunity. Don’t expect to wait too long for a replacement to be named; the Bush administration usually fills these slots rapidly.