Eric Alterman Responds
Well, I’m all for history informing contemporary debate, but I fear we liberals have already been condemned to repeat it. Will Marshall’s post sent me back to my old Huey Lewis and Martha and the Muffins albums, back to the days of intraparty fights over Central America, the nuclear freeze, and Jesse Jackson vs. what he (unfairly) called “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
It’s not as if liberals ever settled the question of just how much saber-rattling is necessary to ensure the trust of the American people regarding issues of national security, but presumably it is a great deal less than it was before approximately 67 percent of the country turned against a war that many liberals felt they had to support, regardless of its merits, to meet exactly these charges.
If the “tough-mindedness” of liberals were the central question facing Obama’s foreign policy, well, … the very notion is a logical non-sequiteur (sp?) because Obama would not be president. He was the more dovish of the two final candidates in the Democratic presidential primary and the more dovish of the two candidates in the general election. Indeed, it was this dovishness vis-à-vis Iraq back when it mattered that powered his candidacy and gave him the daylight he needed to run a credible campaign against Hillary Clinton in the first place. It was her “tough-mindedness” back in 2002 that destroyed her dreams of ever being president.
