The Long View 2007-10-02: Gore's War; Dragon Party; Blimp
The prophesied re-alignment of American politics never quite happens, probably for what are fundamentally tribal reasons rather than policy preferences or ideology, which are probably downstream of a more durable identity for the average person.
A party that would be both inherently stable and would do best in general elections would combine Gary Bauer's social views, La Clinton's views on health care, and Senator Joe Lieberman's foreign policy. A third party that tried to resurrect the politics of Ronald Reagan or George McGovern (we'll see more of the latter as MoveOn.org panics about the mellowing of the Democratic front-runners) would be just a fund-raiser's scam.
I do think this is related to recent polling that seems to indicate that Americans both broadly support protests related to the death of George Floyd, and also favor using the National Guard to restore order. Since the existing political divide sees those as either/or instead of both/and, it might be impossible to satisfy what the American people seem to want.
Gore's War; Dragon Party; Blimp
President Gore's War in Iraq: That was the subject of a bit of alternative history with which Roger L. Simon favored us recently:
Unlike a lot of people I know, I am not overly concerned about the outcome of the presidential election of 2008. ...[This is] not just because the supposedly more pacifistic Democrats finally admitted in the last debate that they just might not be out of Iraq by 2013. ...I believe in my heart that had Al Gore been elected president in 2000 (and as we all know he almost was – he won the popular vote), he would be just as knee deep in the War on Terror as George Bush is right now and fighting it in more or less the same manner. He would be in Iraq.
[In] fact, Bill and Al are the guys who started the whole democracy promotion thing...September 2002 the former Vice President opposed giving Bush the power to wage war in Iraq and warned against the dangers of “nation building,” largely because there was, he said, no specific connection between Saddam and terrorists. Of course ten years earlier he said precisely the opposite when opposing Bush père. Then he attacked Bush I for ignoring Saddam’s links to terrorism...[W]e have very little idea how the political candidates are going to behave “under fire.”
My enthusiasm for the Bush Administration has always been kept under rigid control, as visitors to this blog will have gathered. I might not have supported the Iraq War at all, had it not been for the cogent arguments for removing the Baathist government that President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore had made both in office and during their successful campaign of 1992.
Simon, in his column, just alludes to the possibility that President Gore might have found himself battling an anti-war opposition party in Congress. That notion should be developed. The Clinton Administration favored social-work diplomacy, but possibly no Congress in American history, not even the post-Watergate Democratic Congress, was as persistently oblivious to the effect of its actions on the international standing of the United States. The shutdown of the federal government because of a budget dispute was bad enough; that is not the kind of thing you do if you want people to use your money as a reserve currency. Worse still was actually impeaching the president, for nothing in particular, during a period when the US assets in the Middle East were being subjected to spectacular terrorist attacks and the US was about to be engaged in actual wars in the Balkans.
What would House Republican Leader Tom DeLay have done with a Democrat War in Iraq, had there been a Democrat in the White House?
The irony here, of course, is that, in our universe and perhaps the Land of the Goracle, it looks at this point as if the task of the next Administration will not be to distance itself from a defeat, but how to embrace a victory. It would be a victory more serious than the short photo-op war that President Bush seems to have envisaged originally. Baathism and Suicide Belt Jihadism would be discredited. It would also be demonstrated that insurgencies are vincible, and without using Russian methods.
Absorbing such a situation would be more difficult than we might suppose.
* * *
Once upon a time, there lived a noble scholar named Lord Shen, and he was a great lover of dragons. He collected all the books he could find about dragons. He extended invitations for interviews to everyone who claimed to have seen a dragon. Lord Shen's collection of paintings of dragons was world-renowned. One day, however, a dragon actually came to Lord Shen's mansion to visit him. Lord Shen hid under his bed until the dragon went away.
Similarly, there has been a great deal of talk in recent months, some of it in this space, about the need for a third party. Alarmed by the prospect that the Republican Party might nominate Rudolph Giuliani for president, some social conservatives have actually begun to consider forming such a party. It seems that Lord Shen is nowhere to be found:
The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians...Gary Bauer...urged the group to proceed with caution...[and] added, “But I do believe there are certain core issues for the Republican Party—low taxes, strong defense and pro life— and if we nominate some who is hostile on one of those three thing it will blow up the GOP.”
Yes, nominating someone hostile to one of those core issues would blow up the GOP, but that is because the fissures of the GOP are already stuffed with unstable explosives; the party is going to blow up sooner or later anyway. The same is true of the Democrats, though the situation is masked by the more ideologically homogeneous nature of its small-but-opulent donor base.
A party that would be both inherently stable and would do best in general elections would combine Gary Bauer's social views, La Clinton's views on health care, and Senator Joe Lieberman's foreign policy. A third party that tried to resurrect the politics of Ronald Reagan or George McGovern (we'll see more of the latter as MoveOn.org panics about the mellowing of the Democratic front-runners) would be just a fund-raiser's scam.
* * *
A Blimp, not a Dragon: A blimp was what I saw at 11:30 AM on September 28 when I had occasion to visit the waterfront business district at Exchange Place in Jersey City. The blimp was making very low passes, maybe 300 feet, over the Hudson River and New York Bay.
The blimp was battleship gray and unmarked. It seemed to me to be 100 to 150 feet long. It had four large rear fins that stuck out behind the aft of the hull; an American flag fluttered on a line strung between the top and bottom fins. The gondola was longer than is usual on a blimp, maybe a third the length of the hull, and enclosed by windows. Two long cables drooped from the nose, like whiskers from a catfish.
I assumed that the blimp was some novelty from the Department of Homeland Security, which seems to be the most active security service for the water off lower Manhattan. However, if this information is correct, the airship was owned by a private enterprise:
This post is a pointer to a set of Flickr photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/sets/72157602060974418/ from [a] trip last week aboard Airship Management's blimp, cruising around New York City. If you see/saw a white blimp cruising around the city, it's probably the one I was on...The three major revenue sources are advertising, paid tours...and surveillance. One ship is used full-time hunting drug-runners and other miscreants in the Caribbean.
There is no need to hide under the bed, at least not yet.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
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