Crawford: Dems Need to Toughen Up

Craig Crawford, who provides political analysis for the family of NBC channels and who used to be a staple of the Imus show, is also a columnist for Congressional Quarterly. He writes a piece today that looks at the recent Democratic debate and warns that the leading candidates might have come off sounding soft on terror:

Given the underlying fear of terrorist threats, it was not surprising that a question about responding to more attacks produced the most telling moment of last week's Democratic debate in South Carolina. Moderator Brian Williams of NBC News put forward a chilling hypothetical: "If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?"

Most candidates punted, ignoring the military thrust of Williams' haunting question. With a lone exception, their mushy answers stood in stark contrast to how most Republican presidential aspirants will probably answer a similar question, which they're sure to get at the debate at the Reagan Presidential Library this week.

Amazingly, only Hillary Rodham Clinton showed the presence of mind to immediately say that, first and foremost, she would track down the perpetrators. "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate," the New York senator said. "If we are attacked and we can determine who was behind that attack, and if there were nations that . . . gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond..."

Before last week's Democratic debate, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani already had voiced how his party views the terrorist threat, taunting Democrats in a way that will surely be echoed until Election Day 2008. "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us," he said.

If Democrats keep up the ambiguous chatter about national security in the way that most did in their first debate, even a tough-talking Clinton might not be able to erase the weakling image that Giuliani was trying to establish.

Crawford says that the candidates are probably playing to the 'peaceniks' among their core primary voters, but the problem goes deeper than that. The problem is that the 'peaceniks' control the nominating process, and Democratic leaders are conforming their platforms and policies to those views. In other words, it's not so much the rhetoric that's weak; it's the policies.

Go to Obama's website and try to find his plan for defeating al Qaeda. I'm not sure it's there, since the few mentions of AQ don't seem linked to any real policy statement. It doesn't even warrant a mention in the page on 'strengthening America overseas' (which does include however, a plan for Sierra Leone). It doesn't come up under "protecting our homeland," either.

How about Edwards? His site doesn't spell out a policy on al Qaeda and the war on terror--although there's lots on Iraq. That doesn't really tell us anything though, since Democratic leaders remind us endlessly that Iraq and al Qaeda have nothing to do with each other. Further, Edwards has recently been cowed by his party's base into dramatically 'dialing down' his language on Iran.

Consistent with her comments at the Democratic debate, Senator Clinton's 'position paper' on terror is more hawkish than her rivals. In her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, she said that we should increase troop levels in Afghanistan for the pursuit of al Qaeda. And with regard to Iran, she said that "Iran must not build or acquire nuclear weapons." How to prevent it? We must "keep all options on the table"--including direct negotiations.