. . . sorta makes you nostalgic for Mike Dukakis and his tank helment, doesn't it? ;)IMHO the question the Democrats should be asked during each presidential campaign is,
"Who is the last successful Democratic Secretary of Defense?"That's a pointed question in the sense that Cohen was a Republican senator, and Clinton's first choice--Les Aspen--resigned after the Black Hawk Down incident demonstrated his incompetence to his own satisfaction.Reagan/Cap Weinberger built DoD budgets UP dramatically as part of a markedly successful foreign policy which ended the Energy Crisis and won the Cold War--so the idea that Carter/Harold Brown had good defense policy is a pretty slender reed. And the last Democratic SecDef before that was Robert McNamara--who in later life basically disavowed Vietnam--was at the time its cheerleader . . .
There's a pretty good case that the Democrats haven't had a good SecDef in half a century!