Why Democrats will lose (again)

Democrats lost the 2004 election (or as I prefer to cal it, “the easiest election ever”) basically for two reasons: Kerry and Iraq.

Even though they don’t have to worry about Kerry now, Iraq will again be their demise. It is easy to understand why.

Like Bill Maher said last week, if someone woke you up in the middle of the night and asked you what was the Republican strategy for Iraq you would answer quickly: stay the course. It might be the wrong choice. But it is a clear and well defined one.

Democrats are again trying to play both sides. They try to convince people that they are tough terrorism fighters but at the same time say Iraq is too bloody and expensive. They want to capture terrorists but they also want to block spying programs. We should have more soldiers on Iraq but we should also leave pretty soon. Bin Laden is important but Saddam is not. And so on and so forth. People just don’t understand exactly what Democrats would do besides not doing whatever Republicans do. Sometimes this lack of ideas is so evident that they are forced to go along with Republicans (like in this recent Detainee Interrogation Bill). That just doesn’t work.

Another problem is that Democrats prefer to focus on the past. For example, they go nuts (literally) when someone says that they didn’t do enough to stop terrorism. But Republicans don’t mind very much when Democrats accuse Bush of no doing enough before 9/11. Republicans prefer to say that “9/11 changed everything”. That’s a huge difference. Since Democrats never say where Clinton went wrong, people naturally assume they want to go back to the pre-9/11 Clinton model.

In the battle between a party of ideas (even if they are bad ones) and the party of no ideas, the result will always be the same.