Failing a sensible position on foreign policy (see, if you haven't, how Bolton skewered Senator Kerry in yesterday's hearings for an extraordinary example), the Democrats have been trying to pull the wool over our eyes in a way that is at the same time transparent and counter—productive.
After years of struggling to define their own approach to post—Sept. 11 foreign policy, Democrats seem finally to have hit on one. It's called pandering. In those rare cases when George W. Bush shows genuine sensitivity to America's allies and propounds a broader, more enlightened view of the national interest, Democrats will make him pay. It's jingoism with a liberal face [snip]
Privately, some Democrats, while admitting that they haven't exactly been taking the high road, say they have no choice, that in a competition with Karl Rove, nice guys finish last. But even politically, that's probably wrong. The Democratic Party's single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft. It is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience. And given the party's behavior over the past several months, it is not hard to understand why.
