Hugh Hewitt, contributing writer
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DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES for the White House, Senate, and House face a huge difficulty in 2004: They are on the wrong side of the national security gap. The public doesn't trust their party's collective judgment on the key issues of war and terrorism. The 2002 elections underscored the vulnerability of the Democrats on these issues, and the prospect of a presidential campaign dominated by national security concerns unnerves even veteran operatives.
Which explains a series of partisan attacks on the president, including the "Bush knew" campaign, the "16 words campaign," criticism over reconstruction in Iraq, and now the Wilson affair. In each instance prominent Democrats have attempted to undermine the Bush administration on issues relating to national security.
The first two attempts to close the national security gap failed to impress the public. The postwar difficulties in Iraq have brought down the president's approval ratings, and the jury is out on whether Robert Novak's column will have any lasting impact.
Perhaps the most daring tactic in the race to fill the gap is the attempt to immunize Democratic candidates from criticism of their judgment on matters of national security. The perfect example of this campaign came in last week's New Republic, in the now much-discussed article on Bush hatred by Jonathan Chait.
Deep in the article Chait wrote:
Having spent the better part of a year denying the need for any Homeland Security Department at all, Bush aides secretly wrote up a plan with civil service provisions they knew Democrats would oppose and then
used it to impugn the patriotism of any Democrats who did--most notably Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee veteran running for reelection who, despite his support for the war and general hawkishness, lost his Senate race thanks to an ugly GOP ad linking him to Osama bin Laden.
The Cleland refrain is now as familiar as it is bogus, and the ad does not lead viewers to question Cleland's patriotism. The key attack in Chait's argument was not the Cleland campaign, however, but the much broader charge that "Bush aides . . . impugn[ed] the patriotism of any Democrats" who opposed the creation of the Homeland Security Department.
That's a charge of McCarthyism, of course, and false charges of such vile tactics are McCarthyite themselves. They are useful in scaring off discussion of judgment on matters of national security. If any Republican who challenges any Democrat's record on terrorism or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be successfully charged with attacking another citizen's patriotism, the national security issues will get swept under the rug in a hurry.
On air I questioned Peter Beinart, the editor of the New Republic, closely on the evidence for Chait's broad accusation of McCarthyism among Bush aides. He hadn't edited the article, he told me, but would be pleased to send me "chapter and verse" supporting the allegation. Chait wrote the next day:
I plead guilty to constructing the sentence somewhat imprecisely. It was the Bush aides who wrote a Homeland Security bill that was almost certainly designed as a wedge issue. But it was not Bush aides who impugned the patriotism of Democrats who supported a slightly different version of a Homeland Security Department--it was Bush himself.
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