The Capitulation Strategy

I was listening to Cenk ranting on The Young Turks this morning about the wireless wiretapping law. A caller, Keith from Baton Rouge, phoned in to say that the Blue Dog Democrats who supported the measure had no choice - they needed to innoculate themselves from the possiblity of the Republicans running ads next year accusing them of not supporting the War on Terror.

This idea is, no doubt, a large part of many Democrats' motivation to support the Bush administration's many assaults on the Constitution.

I had to get out of the car, so I didn't hear Cenk's response, but here is my response: the Republicans are going to run those ads anyway.

No amount of capitulation to Bush will stop the GOP from running ads accusing the Democrats of being soft on terror. No matter what the Democrats do, the Republicans will characterize them as allies of Osama bin Laden.

Here, from Glenn Greenwald, is what every Democrat should keep in mind about those inevitable GOP attacks.

Rove made national security -- specifically the Democrats' opposition to coercive interrogation, lawless detention and warrantless eavesdropping -- the centerpiece of the GOP 2006 midterm campaign. From a Washington Post article reporting on Rove's October, 2006 speech outlining the GOP's strategy:

"You can't say I want to win the war but not be willing to fight the war," said Rove, Bush's top political adviser. "And if leading Democrats have their way, our nation will be weaker and the enemies of our nation will be stronger. And that's a stark fact, and it's the reason that this fall election will turn very heavily on national security" . . .

For instance, he needled congressional Democrats for voting against a GOP plan to try terrorist suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Many Democrats said the plan violated basic rights, but Rove rejected that. "You need to have the ability to try these people without worrying about the ACLU showing up saying, 'Wait a minute, did you Mirandize them when you found them on the battlefield,'" he said. "With all due respect, I don't happen to remember that in World War II, that when we captured Nazis and Japanese and took them to camps, that the first thing we did was provide them legal aid."

He also went after the would-be House speaker for voting against renewing the USA Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping program and the war in Iraq. "With a record like that, you can see why Nancy Pelosi wouldn't want this election to be about national security," Rove said.

How did that big, bad, scary "Soft-on-Terrorism" strategy work out? The Democrats crushed the Republicans in an historic election, re-taking control of both houses of Congress, protecting every single one of their incumbents, and vastly increasing their hold over governorships and states houses. Democrats won in every region of the country outside of the Deep South. Karl Rove's strategy of accusing Democrats of being "soft on terror" due to their opposition to warrantless eavesdropping, lawless detention and torture was a complete failure on every level.

In other words, the desperate GOP strategy of name-calling doesn't work as well as it did in 2002 or in 2004. It didn't work in 2006, and won't work in 2008. What the Democrats who roll over for Bush don't seem to understand is that having the Republicans call you "weak" doesn't make you look weak. Being weak makes you look weak.

The American people are deeply worried about the erosion of civil liberties that has taken place under the Bush administration. One of the things the Democratic congressional majority was elected to do was to push back against Bush in this arena. The Democrats' failure to do that places them at greater electoral peril than anything the Republicans can, and certainly will, say about them.