Over the past few weeks, Congressman Harold Ford Jr. has stepped up to the plate and lead the fight on national security in America.In doing so, he has helped the Democratic Party find its voice on security.
The Hamilton Spectator has the full story:
'President Bush wants to sell (six American ports) to the United Arab Emirates -- a country that had diplomatic ties with the Taliban," says Harold Ford, a bright young Democratic congressman from Tennessee.
In a television ad promoting his bid for a Senate seat, he says that, unlike George Bush, he believes that "we shouldn't outsource our national security to anyone."
At last, the Democrats have found a national security issue they can agree to sound tough on.
DP World, a firm owned by the Dubai government, is buying P&O, a British firm that operates six American ports.
The public is outraged. Never mind that the UAE is an American ally, or that port security will remain in federal hands, or that a port-management firm has a financial interest in not blowing up the ports it manages. Some two-thirds of Americans oppose the deal.
For the Democrats, this is a great opportunity. For years, they have enjoyed a consistent advantage over Republicans on "mommy" issues, such as education and health care. But Republicans have trounced them on "daddy" issues, such as killing terrorists and defending the homeland.
The Democrats have lost a lot of elections because they are easy to caricature as the party that thinks "there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated," as Mark Steyn, a conservative columnist, once put it.
To turn this around, the Democrats need to sound both resolute and united. And the fortuitous thing about the Dubai ports deal is that it unites disparate strands of Democratic thought.
Opposing the deal is not just about protecting American ports from Islamist terrorists. It also appeals to the party's protectionist wing -- hence Ford's use of that dog-whistle word "outsource."
And it appeals to those who see the Bush administration as a conspiracy to benefit rapacious corporations.
Democratic blogs are going wild about the fact that John Snow, Bush's treasury secretary and also the chairman of the committee that approved the Dubai deal, used to be head of CSX, an American firm that sold its port operations to DP World in 2004.
That was after Snow had left CSX, and no one has managed to explain how he might have profited from approving the Dubai deal, but it sounds fishy, at least to those who have written off the Bush team as a bunch of crooks.
There are three further reasons why Democrats have seized on the ports issue.
It gives them a soundbite "Arab hands off our ports" -- that even the dimmest voter can understand. (Such soundbites have traditionally been a Republican strong point.) It allows them to pander to racist voters with plausible deniability. (Again, this is usually Republican turf.) And it looks like an opportunity to defeat the hated Bush, not least because Republicans are nearly as suspicious of the deal as Democrats are.
On Wednesday, a House panel dominated by Republicans voted 62-2 to block the DP World deal -- even though Bush has promised to veto any such attempt.
All this hoohah comes at a time when Bush's national-security credentials are already looking tarnished. Terrorists continue to blow up mosques in Iraq (and a Hindu temple in India). The administration does not know how to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb. Hamas's electoral victory casts doubt on the notion that spreading democracy in the Middle East will curb terrorism.
Could it be that the Daddy party is not, in fact, keeping Americans safe? Will Americans turn to Mommy instead?
Recent polls suggest the Republicans are indeed losing their lead on national security. A recent Gallup poll found 40 per cent of respondents thought the Democrats would do a better job of protecting America against terrorism and military threats, while 45 per cent preferred the Republicans.
So the Republican Party's advantage has not disappeared, but it is half what it was in September and only a third as large as it was in 2003, when Republicans led Democrats by 51 per cent to 36 per cent on this issue.
If this trend were to continue, the Democrats could reasonably expect to start winning elections. But Michael O'Hanlon, a security analyst at the Brookings Institution, warns against complacency.
"Bush has taken a short-term hit. But it is wishful thinking for Democrats to suppose that one month of bad news has wiped out 30 years of Republican advantage on national security," he says.
Republicans may have lost some of their lustre, but Democrats haven't gained much, argues O'Hanlon. Bush may not have shown much skill, but he has shown resolve in Iraq. And at home, his Department of Homeland Security has done as good a job "as you could reasonably expect."
Databases have been integrated and border security tightened to the extent that al-Qaeda has a hard time getting into America.
There remain serious weaknesses, of course. America's borders are still porous, its chemical plants vulnerable, and it is a long way from winning the battle for Muslim hearts and minds, as a young man named Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar demonstrated last week by allegedly driving a Jeep Cherokee across a college campus in North Carolina, running down students.
Since Taheri-azar was born in Iran, his one-man jihad has strengthened the hand of those who think that America's chief national-security problem is unassimilated immigrants. This view is most common among Republicans.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was trying this week to cobble together an immigration bill that combined stricter controls with a guest-worker program, as Bush wants.
But Republicans on the committee are divided, and if they cannot agree, an enforcement-only bill might pass.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has published a list of Republican "failures on homeland security," which consists mostly of Republican failures to back Democrat-sponsored extra spending.
The Democrats have struggled to offer a coherent alternative.
On Iraq, the party is divided between those who think America should pull out now and those who would prefer to stabilize the place first. The former course would probably spark an Iraqi civil war (which, to be fair, most Americans expect to happen anyway), while the latter approach is the same as Bush's.
One problem for the Democrats is that since Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were not found, Bush has justified his war on idealistic grounds: replacing tyranny with democracy.
Other Republicans, such as Senator Sam Brownback, take an even more moralistic line on foreign policy.
Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, such liberal internationalism has traditionally been a Democratic position. Democrats who oppose Bush find themselves arguing for a more "realist" approach -- that America should be more cautious about trying to democratize the Islamic world.
Many old liberals are uncomfortable with sounding so Kissingerian, which is one reason why the party now struggles to find a platform it can unite around, argues Peter Beinart, author of The Good Fight, a forthcoming book on liberals and foreign policy.
Both at home and abroad, the Democrats' best bet is probably to harp on about the Bush administration's undoubted incompetence. Bumper stickers of the "I've fixed Iraq, now I'll fix New Orleans" type will doubtless help.
From her perch in the Senate, Hillary Clinton, the party's current front-runner in the 2008 presidential stakes, is doing a fair job of sounding both hawkish and competent.
For every threat, from terrorism to bird flu, she issues a timely, carefully-worded press release. She is also mastering the art of the empty patriotic gesture, long a Republican speciality: for example, co-sponsoring a bill to ban flag-burning.
Other Democrats think the party should go further. Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, two Democratic consultants, want to "hold the Republicans' feet to the fire" on national security, by pointing out how many top Republicans have dodged military service.
The pair has an impressive record of wooing elusive rural, white male votes for Democrats, such as when they helped Mark Warner win the governorship of Virginia, a Republican stronghold, in 2001.
But both sides can play hardball: Republicans gleefully point out that Bill Clinton was advising Dubai officials on the ports deal even as his wife was denouncing it.
For the foreseeable future, the Democrats will find it hard to supplant the Republicans as the party of national security. But to win elections, they don't need to beat them; only to neutralize their advantage. And that could happen.
Tennesseans have taken notice of Congressman Ford's leadership skills.
I am confident that will be reflected in November.
Read about Congressman Ford's efforts on national security here!
