True Believers Versus True Leadership: The Connecticut Primary and the War in Iraq

It seems like everyone is asking me about the Connecticut primary and the unseating of Senator Joseph Lieberman as the Democratic Party's nominee to represent that state in the Senate, and I'm not really sure if I understand why-- I generally prefer to focus on foreign and defense policies and how I think they might impact our future, as opposed to most bloggers (and, indeed, journalists) who seem to be focused (if not consumed) on the whole "inside politics" thing. But that said, my first sense is that-- like so many things-- we need to be really cautious about drawing instant lessons from any event, because it often leads us to make snap decisions that may or may not prove true.

For example, four months ago, when Governor Romney and the Massachusetts legislature passed a sweeping (almost universal) health care reform bill, the comments from the liberal and conservative talking heads was that it was a "great thing" (or, at times, "not great enough") or that it would be a "disaster" that would bankrupt Massachusetts. Think about this for a moment-- before the architecture had even been designed and it was still unclear as to how the plan would work, Democrats were already praising it as a success to be emulated elsewhere while Republicans were consigning any other states that followed this lead to Third World basketcase status. The rational thing to do, it seemed to me, would be to allow the experimentation of the federalist laboratories to play out across the country-- examine and follow, and if the Massachusetts system fails, then 49 other state legislatures can say "that didn't work!" and take it off the drawing board; if it succeeds, then it is something they will want to clone-- and oh, by the way, Bostonians will have already suffered through the growing pains of ironing out the minor kinks that needed to be addressed, thereby allowing the rest of us to learn their lessons rather than emulate their mistakes. But ideologues rarely allow for anything-- not even reality-- to intrude upon what they already know is a good or bad idea, so one can see their rush to praise or condemn a policy before they even know how it will perform.

Imagine if such a system were implemented in baseball-- franchise's would determine who the All-Stars were based on preliminary scouting reports, and wouldn't wait for the metrics to come in and verify whether a player's "sweet swing" can deliver a .300 batting average or 30 home runs, or a if pitcher's 95-mph fast ball can strike out any reasonable number of opposing hitters... If the Yankees operated that way, Brien Taylor would still be on the pitchers mound, with the likes of Hensley "Bam Bam" Meulens, Kevin Maas, and Jackson Melian on the baseball diamond-- and they never would have won a World Series title in the last decade, let alone four of them. If any franchise operated that way, they'd be so bad, they'd make the Kansas City Royals and the Florida Marlins look like world champions. Oddly (and tragically), it seems like there's more intelligence and intellectual fidelity in baseball than there is in American politics.

All of which is a very long, convoluted way of saying that we need to take the Connecticut primary in context: yes, Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman primarily on an anti-war platform, and yes, polls indicate that American opinion is turning strongly against the War in Iraq. However, the Connecticut primary-- for all the hype it received-- was not an accurate reflection of the American people-- it was a referendum expressed by only Democratic voters in the State of Connecticut. I think it has only limited predictive ability  to guess what is going to happen to, say, a Democratic Senator in New York or a Republican Senator in Texas, or indeed the 435 elections of the House of Representatives, each of which has entirely separate dynamics and constituencies from what we saw in Connecticut. Then, too, as Democrats will be quick to point out, just because politicians get elected on a given program (see the Contract With America) doesn't mean that every aspect of that program is a good thing to implement (as the bipartisan consensus cynically shelved Term Limits and the Balanced Budget Amendment).

Similarly, I think there's a tendency to inflate the role that blogs and the Internet might have had in influencing this election. To be sure, they did play a large role: raising funding and drawing widespread attention to the race empowered Ned Lamont with far more weapons that a normal candidate might have had in fighting an incumbent. Ultimately, though, many Democratic voters in Connecticut were clearly disenchanted with what their serving Senator had been doing in Washington, and he didn't successfully make the case that what he was doing was in their best interests, even if they themselves didn't like it. Lieberman fell out of favor with the Democrats because he couldn't sell his constituents that, by and large (and especially with Iraq), he was doing the right thing. He might not have lost but for the blogs (and that really isn't definitively so), but the blogs alone could not have unseated him if he didn't have these other issues.

For most blogs-- at least, so far-- this has been the limits of their contribution: because they are written for a single-minded audience (one that shares their most fundamental beliefs about the world around them) they are excellent at organizing and rallying, and raising funds for any given cause. But they have very limited ability to influence the center-mass of the electorate-- their use of extreme rhetoric (and generally foul language), their oversimplification of complex issues (which is apparently necessary in order to resonate with the True Believers), and the self-referring nature of their own memberships, all of these things tend to decrease their ability to reach out to voters in the middle, which is what influence really means (you haven't "influenced" anyone if you get someone to do something that they were already going to do-- that's not influence, at all). Blogs don't get that-- they truly believe they're influencing people when they bring in like-minded people to validate their opinions. Or as I wrote in a letter (some of which was inadvertently published in the July 24th edition of the Weekly Standard):

As a fellow blogger, I can acknowledge that not just Kos, but the majority of the blogosphere tends to draw in like-minded thinkers and posters in order to create something of an "Amen!" corner for their particular subjects. Yet, when compared to more mainstream forms of media, is that really much different than the majority of people who choose to listen to Rush Limbaugh or NPR, to watch Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore, or to read The National Review, The New Republic, or (dare I say it?) The Weekly Standard? In each of these instances, the average listener/viewer/reader is likely to share the fundamental assumptions of these mediums, which is precisely why they choose it over another (perhaps competing) alternative. Whether we like it or not, most humans simply prefer to have their pre-conceived notions about the world continutously confirmed, rather than to be challenged to explore new intellectual frontiers.

And, in fact, it's entirely possible that Senator Lieberman may retain his Senate seat in the fall, precisely because of the tactics used against him by the True Believers in this election. I don't know that to be true, of course, but it's worth waiting to see.

Indeed, if there's anything that worries me about this election, it's this notion that security-minded moderates may be leaving the Democratic Party-- something that will only drive the remaining Party further to the left, or that the Democrats themselves might take this as a harbinger that an "immediate withdrawal" is a good idea and can win them elections this fall and in 2008. In fact, it might very well win them elections; but popularity alone does not always make a good idea and there could be potentially disastrous consequences for the country if Nancy Pelosi, Russ Feingold, or Jack Murtha were to be put in positions where they could influence foreign and defense policy. For that matter, the question may very well become: how long can Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden maintain their positions on the War in Iraq if the Democratic Party uniformly turns against them? Again, it's all contextual: Senator Lieberman's potential replacement by a rabid anti-war opponent may mean nothing at all for a former Governor from Virginia seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination-- or it may convince him that his victory in those primaries will require a drastic move to the left, with potentially tragic results for all of us.

In the final address of the Combat Studies Institute Symposium (which I do promise to talk about in greater detail), Andrew Krepinevich noted that many Democrats (and even some Republicans) have actually convinced themselves that because Operation Iraqi Freedom began as a "war of choice," they don't understand that it has become a "war of necessity." They don't realize that while Iraq was not the central front in the Long War against jihadist extremism, it has become that central front today. And they truly believe that an immediate withdrawal of Coalition troops in Iraq would not have second- and third-order ramifications for American security-- potentially disastrous ones, such as: even greater Iranian influence over Iraqi Shi'ite political society; Saudi Arabia (which isn't going to allow Iran to de-stabilize their own regime from Iraq) joining with Egypt and Jordan to support the Iraqi Sunnis in order to bolster their own positions; Turkey de-stabilizing the Kurdish regions in order to ensure (militarily, if necessary) that an independent Kurdistan does not become a reality; ceding the information operations campaign to the jihadists, who would be able to claim (with some truth) that they had defeated the infidels and that the future lies not with the moderate Muslims like Al-Maliki and Allawi, but with the radical extremists (talk about a major recruiting boon for them...), and emboldening jihadist terrorists to commit future strikes against Western and American people. Mark my words, an immediate withdrawal-- indeed, any withdrawal before the conditions have been established for the enduring security of Iraq-- is to invite a future US catastrophe.

But, sadly, perhaps a catastrophe-- on the watch of a Democratic President so that there won't be a partisan opportunity to excuse it-- is what is needed in order for the American people to realize just how intense our struggle is. It is tragic sometimes that enormous lives must be lost before we understand that the Japanese intended to displace us from Southeast Asia, or that Nazi Germany had no intention of confining its territorial expansions to "historic Germany" (even though Czechs were living there). And yet this is what happens when "leadership" is defined as finding out what sells, and selling it-- as opposed to genuine leadership, which is finding out what people need, and finding a way to sell it to them. Unfortunately for Americans, the Democratic opposition appear to be heading toward the former, while the Administration has thus far proven incapable of accomplishing the latter. It's a regular three-ring circus, with a high diver who won't climb the platform and another who doesn't understand that the jump itself is meaningless if others don't understand what the diver has done.

But, okay, that's all. I promise to stick to what I know in the future!