What Iraq Means for Democrats

This week's New Yorker has a good summary of the state of the party, and the candidates it appears to be sending into the 2008 primaries.

The Democratic Party’s base may be dovish, but it accounts for less than twenty-five per cent of the American voting public. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine a serious general-election candidate who does not favor some sort of “enlightened internationalism,” with its possible military implications. (Lieberman’s ultimate victory as an Independent seemed to demonstrate that dovish voters, even in a liberal state such as Connecticut, cannot by themselves unseat a hawkish senator.) But the Democratic Party’s chief problem may be finding a way to arrive at a coherent and persuasive post-Bush foreign policy. Michael E. O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution, and Kurt M. Campbell, a former National Security Council official under Bill Clinton, argue in a recent book, “Hard Power: The Politics of National Security,” that Bush Administration incompetence, not Democratic foreign-policy wisdom, accounts for the Democrats’ success in last November’s midterm election. “Without answers of their own to the questions they pose to the Bush Administration about how to keep the country safe and secure, Democrats are likely to find current gains in national polls to be fleeting or illusory,” they wrote. They might have added that, whether or not the public hopes for a period of international tranquillity, the next President, Democrat or Republican, will inherit an extraordinarily difficult set of problems.