Feel Safer? - Part II

John Dickerson suggests that the Democrats should use scare tactics of their own.

Of course Republicans are trying to scare voters into voting for them. Why shouldn't they? As a policy matter, asking which party will keep us from being killed by jihadists in a plane or at a shopping mall seems a pretty fundamental question in any national election. As a political tactic, how could the GOP resist? Scaring voters has worked in past elections, allows Republicans to highlight issues of law and order and national security that have been their traditional strengths, and it forces Democrats into fits and unforced errors.

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Here's my advice: The Democrats should embrace fear-mongering more passionately. They should embrace the tradition of the "missile gap"—the idea that the United States dangerously trailed the Soviet Union in missile firepower—that in the late 1950s helped young Sen. John Kennedy attack then-President Dwight Eisenhower. This would be good politics, and it would stir a good and currently muffled policy debate.

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The question the Democrats should be asking is whether Bush's policies are inspiring the people who want to kill us. Since Republicans argue that if you elect Democrats, more Americans will die, it's logical for Democrats to ask whether continuing the current policies will cause more American deaths. Were the London plotters captured last week hyper-motivated by Bush's policies? The idea is to shift the debate from whether the Democrats would do a better job if they were in charge to whether giving them some control—a majority in one house of Congress, for starters—might lessen the degree to which George Bush and his Republican majority represent an ever-better recruitment tool for extremists.

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My fear is that Democrats won't have the guts to fight fear with fear, perhaps because they don't want to be accused of being politically craven on an issue where they are weak. Maybe in the end, as a political matter they won't pay a stiff price for failing to. Polling suggests that the GOP effort to fan the fear-mongering flames in the wake of the London arrests and Ned Lamont victory have not increased the GOP's standing. Still, if Democrats don't aggressively ask whether the Republican policies are inspiring a greater number of people to devote their lives to killing Americans than would otherwise be the case, we'll miss a chance to have the kind of messy, realism-filled public debate we somehow continue to skirt. Democrats should stretch beyond the bumper sticker and ask the really scary questions.

The one thing the GOP seems to be afraid of is that if we really do have the kind of messy, realism-filled public debate that Mr. Dickerson advocates -- and he's absolutely right on that score -- they will lose. All the Republicans can do is point to their scary questions, because when it comes to actually improving the protection of this country and quelling the anti-American feelings, they have failed miserably on both points. You can't take your exploding Prell on your shuttle flight from Traverse City to Minneapolis, but you can bring it in by the shipload to Port Everglades. Meanwhile, our swaggering paper-tiger arrogance has cost us allies and posioned the fragile well of good will that we were slowly restoring in the thirty years after Vietnam. The golden opportunity of winning friends and influencing good government in the vacuum of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact has been pissed away like Coors Light at a DKE frat party.

So, yes, the Democrats should be asking the scary questions such as, Do you want to live in world where every teenager in an Islamic country grows up with the burning desire to kill himself and take out the nearest American with him? Do you want to live in a world where every dictator uses the threat of Yankee imperialism as their excuse for repression? Do you want to live in a world where rogue nations build nuclear weapons because they know there's no other way to get the attention of the world's last superpower? And do you want to live in a world where history is stuck in a feedback loop of teaching the same tragic lessons over and over because the leaders -- who were there the last time -- didn't pay attention the first time?