You Live by the Sword.... blah, blah, blah

I read a great article in Slate magazine arguing the Democrats deserve to win, though he doubted they will accomplish much of anything when they do. Based on what I have been reading, it looks pretty clear the Dems will win the house, but the Senate is a crap shoot. If past years are any indicator, Republicans will keep the senate since they have better 'get out the vote' drives. Make no mistake about it, referendums on state ballots against gay marriage, etc, get a whole lot of voters to the polls.

My analysis is that the Republicans made a crucial mistake. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Americans typically vote their pocketbooks. There are certain groups: academics, impressionable students, successful and educated professionals, etc, who will vote more on rational calculations of policy, but the vast majority of Joe Six Packs in America will vote for their pocketbooks and for religion, the two guiding principles of the American voter. However, after 9/11 Bush and the Republicans took all of their eggs and quite hastily put them in the foreign policy basket. By repeating the same jingoistic phrases over and over and over again, Bush turned himself into a one-trick-pony.

Bush has convinced Americans to think foreign policy is the most important thing in the world. Granted, it may be, but the reality is that the political parties have always had basically the same foreign policy, or at least far more similar foreign policies than people realize. Clinton, Reagan, Bush 1, Carter, etc., foreign policy was largely the same under all of them. The mistake Bush 2 made, in my opinion, is that he did two things: (1) he convinced Americans to forget about the economy, jobs, education, etc, and turned everyone's attention on the Middle East. He did this at the same time he (2) for the first time in 50 years substantially changed American foreign policy, by interjecting the caveat that America actually cares if other states are democracies, and forcefully arguing we can use our military to interject democratic governments in hostile situations. This is based on Democratic Peace Theory; a theory which WAS an accurate projection during the Cold War, but is no longer valid. This is what Bush critics mean when they accuse the Bush foreign policy team of being "Cold War Dinosaurs." Even my Republican foreign policy professors at the UofU thought Bush was insane for relying on this theory. As we are observing, proposition (2) is in many ways turning out to be a failing endeavor. Consequently, the fact that the stock market is at an all time high has nothing to do with this election. The handling of the war is criminally incompetent, even the Army Times, the Army's de facto own friggin' newspaper is now calling for Rumsfeld to resign. The Iraq War is beyond a level of 'mere mistakes.' For a country of our size, power and wealth to be having this much trouble in executing this war against a powerless and crappy little country like Iraq, we honestly are at the level of criminal incompetence. If this were a third world state, the military planners would have been hung by now, and I am not kidding. A chain-smoking monkey at a typewriter could have drawn up a better war plan than what Bush implemented and is currently operating by.

Bush convinced the American voters to focus all of their attention on what turned out to be this Administration's LEAST competent area. In other words, it is hard to accuse the Democrats of having bad foreign policy if the Republican foreign policy is currently floating away in the sewer. There is a great quote by George Bernard Shaw: "Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."

If you want to see an example of how our country should operate, watch CSPAN on Sunday evening at 11:00pm or so. They show 'The Prime Ministers Questions,' where Tony Blair, or whoever the Prime Minister is, is literally standing on his feet for an hour while all members of Parliament can stand up one by one and scream at him about whatever the hell they feel like. Watching Tony Blair handle these people and artfully and competently answer their questions is amazing. Bush can barely handle a five minute press conference fielding softball questions without resorting to 10 year old level reasoning. Until we as Americans are willing to elect politicians based on their POLICIES rather than the cheap heuristics we now use, we will always be in this predicament.