The Vietnam Party

[darrels joy]

The Vietnam Party
Presidential candidate John Kerry never misses an opportunity to remind America that he served in Vietnam; his service is supposed to prove that he is a patriot (which he no doubt is) as well as that he is prepared to offer leadership in national security (a dubious proposition). But while Kerry wears his Vietnam service with pride bordering on vanity, other Democrats talk endlessly about Vietnam also. For them, however, Vietnam is a symbol not of patriotism but of American failure--a failure they fear, or hope, the country is now repeating.

Yesterday Iowa's Sen. Tom Harkin--who in October voted in favor of declaring war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq--took to the Senate floor to inveigh against President Bush's request for $87 billion to fund Iraq's postwar reconstruction and other aspects of the war on terror. "This may not be Vietnam, but boy it sure smells like it," Harkin declared. (What does Vietnam "smell like"?) "And every time I see these bills coming down for the money, it's costing like Vietnam, too."

The Diamondback, a student newspaper, reports on a University of Maryland appearance by peevish peacenik Howard Dean:

Dean repeatedly referred to the war in Iraq as a "quagmire," invoking a sensitive term that symbolizes the struggles of the Vietnam War.

"Before I get back into my speech, let me tell you, when I was your age, government didn't tell us the truth about Vietnam," he said. "And my generation did what your generation is going to do. You're going to change presidents and change foreign policy in this country."

So the great triumph of Howard Dean's generation, and the model for his own presidential aspirations, is the election of . . . Richard Nixon!

Hasn't the nation moved on from Vietnam? Yes, but the Democratic Party clearly has not. Vietnam may have traumatized the country, but it utterly transformed the Democrats, helping make them what they are today: a minority party.

Vietnam started out, in Bob Dole's words, as a "Democrat war." The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate the fighting, passed an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress with little dissent. By 1968, when LBJ decided not to seek a second full term, his party was deeply divided, and in 1972 it nominated a radical peacenik, George McGovern, for president.

The result of the Democratic crack-up over Vietnam was a Republican lock on the presidency. Beginning in 1968, the GOP won five of six presidential elections, four of them by landslides, in substantial part because voters could not trust Democrats on national security--a perception that Jimmy Carter's disastrous presidency bolstered. Aside from Carter, whose election resulted from a confluence of anomalous factors (above all the aftermath of Watergate), no Democrat would be elected president until 1992, after the Cold War was over and national security seemed less pressing.

Is the war on terror Vietnam all over again? Perhaps so, but only for the Democrats, who seem to be reliving their Vietnam drama speeded up roughly fourfold. The September 2001 declaration of war against al Qaeda and the Taliban passed Congress with only one "no" vote; as in 1964, the Democrats were united behind the president. By October 2002, when the time came to declare war on Iraq, the Democrats were bitterly divided, as in 1968. In November, again following the '68 pattern, the Democrats suffered electoral losses, though not devastating ones. Now, as in 1972, a presidential election is approaching and antiwar Democrats, led by Dean, are pulling the whole party to the left.

Historical analogies, of course, only get you so far, and of course the war on terror itself has virtually nothing in common with Vietnam. Yet doesn't it seem more plausible to think of Dean as another McGovern than another Nixon?

[Jerry D]

I remember Richard Nixon and Howard Dean is definitely not another Nixon , I agree he is much like George McGovern.