If Power Shifts In 2008

The Washington Post ^ | Sunday, May 28, 2006 | Robert Kagan

[MinorityRepublican]

Could the United States be better off with Democrat in the White House in 2009? Here are couple of reasons the answer might be yes, even if you're not a Democrat.

The Democrats need to take ownership of American foreign policy again, for their sake as well as the country's. Long stretches in opposition sometimes drive parties toward defeatism, utopianism, isolationism or permutations of all three. What starts off as legitimate attacks on inevitable errors of the party in power can veer off into wholesale rejection of the opposition party's own foreign policy principles. Republicans in 1990s, after supporting an expansive internationalism under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, drifted toward quasi-isolationism against the Clinton administration's quasi-internationalism. During Woodrow Wilson's two terms, the internationalist party of Theodore Roosevelt began transforming itself into the isolationist party of William Borah. During the Nixon-Ford years, the party of John F. Kennedy became the party of George McGovern.

Eight years of Bill Clinton brought the Democrats mostly out of their post-Vietnam trauma and revived liberal interventionism. But the George W. Bush years have driven many back. Buffeted between the administration's failures and their party's left-wing critics, the Clintonites either disavowed what they once believed or kept their heads down. Lately they're starting to show signs of life and could still take the reins again if the right Democrat won in 2008. That wouldn't be such a bad thing. No one can claim any more that the old Clinton foreign policy team is less competent than the Republicans who succeeded it. But what happens to these Democrats if their standard-bearer loses in 2008?

The case for electing a Democrat is not only to save the party's soul, though that's a worthy task, but to pull the country together to face the difficult times ahead.

[facedown]

...the European powers' drive to incorporate new lands...

You make excellent points, but if that's what he talking about, it's a strange title.

He's a strange man.

[hosepipe]

[ Could the United States be better off with Democrat in the White House in 2009? Here are couple of reasons the answer might be yes, even if you're not a Democrat. ]

Absolutely not.. BUT 20 plus million brand democrats inducted into the democrat party (AMNESTY) will insure that WILL HAPPEN.. Thats 20 miilion MORE than the normal massive democrat voter fraud.. All the more heinous since it was REPUBLICANS that caused it to happen..

Elephant sized DUUUUUUgh..