One of my favorite Republicans is Kevin Phillips. For years, he’s turned against much of the GOP message and leaders and continues to do so in a book review in The Washington Post. He reviews both Howard Dean’s You Have the Power and Graydon Carter’s What We’ve Lost.
Kerry still gets slammed for his vote for and then against the appropriations for the Iraq war. The GOP spin the vote as against arming our soldiers. Even reporters who know his thinking behind the vote choose to ignore it and blame the candidate for waffling. Yet he has information, as Phillips points out, that could and should be used against Bush to demonstrate he’s been no friend to the soldier.
Additional shabby details show how the Bush administration sought to charge some returning troops a first-ever $250 fee to enroll in the Veterans Administration medical plan; to block expanded health care for returning reservists and National Guard members; to restrict officials of the Disabled American Veterans organization from visiting soldiers in the hospital; and to cut the extra $250 per month received by the families of combat soldiers to $100, calling the larger outlay “wasteful and unnecessary.” Besides the more than 1,000 military U.S. dead, the White House is also trying to avoid discussing the nearly 7,000 wounded, quite a few of whom have lost single or multiple limbs in attacks and explosions. Many families even face awful decisions about turning off life-support systems. The entertainer Cher, talking on C-SPAN, described a visit to Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital: “I wonder why Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president — why aren’t they taking pictures with all these guys? . . . Talking about the dead and the wounded, that’s two different things. But these wounded are so devastatingly wounded. . . . It’s unbelievable.”
Still, some of Phillips’s most stinging rebukes are directed toward the Democratic Party.: “…the phrase ‘top-flight Washington Democratic strategist’ was on its way to becoming a new oxymoron.”
The essence of Dean’s analysis is simple. His presidential campaign broke through suddenly in 2003, he writes, because so many voters had become so hungry for straight talk. The gutlessness of congressional Democrats, who provided critical votes for Bush’s programs, had worn down and disillusioned the party’s rank and file. “The Democratic Party has for some time failed to live up to its mission of being a party for ordinary people,” Dean writes. “The fatal combination of Republican cravenness and Democratic cowardice wasn’t having an awful effect solely on the U.S. economy. . . . Politics as usual was smothering the American will to believe.”
…As a longtime Bush critic with Republican antecedents, I believe that Dean is basically correct in his perceptions and in his conclusion that “when you trade your values for the hope of winning, you end up losing and having no values — so you keep losing.” The big questions for the next six weeks are whether the Democrats have the will and smarts to change — and if so, whether they also have enough time.
That’s the story I keep hearing in gatherings of Democrats. We’ll do anything to beat Bush, but Kerry doesn’t inspire us. In fact, the challenge for liberal activists will be even greater with a Kerry win. Democratic leaders will say a Kerry win proves their cautious approach. Dental exams of gift horses are always problematic.