Hank Kalet

Perhaps it’s time for Richard Cohen to retire. The Washington Post columnist today offers one of those silly retread opinions that purport to lend context to a difficult public issue by viewing it through the lens of history, but that badly misrepresents the historical record to make it fit his sense of what should happen now.

Cohen’s basic premise is that the Democratic presidential candidates are fighting with each other to see who can be more antiwar, which will lead to a candidate out of step with the majority of Americans. He then trots out the hoary cliche about soft-on-defense Dems and misrepresents the Nixon landslide to support his point.

The history I have in mind is 1972. By the end of that year, 56,844 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, a war that almost no one thought could still be won and that no one could quite figure out how to end. Nevertheless, the winner in that year’s presidential election was Richard M. Nixon. He won 49 of 50 states — and the war, of course, went on. Just as it is hard to understand how the British ousted Winston Churchill after he had led them to victory in Europe in World War II, so it may be hard now to appreciate how Nixon won such a landslide while presiding over such a dismal war. In the first place, he was the incumbent, with all its advantages and with enormous amounts of money at his disposal. In the second place, back then the Vietnam War was not as unpopular as you might think — or, for that matter, as the Iraq war is now. In 1972, almost 60 percent of Americans approved of the way Nixon was handling the war.

Maybe more to the point, most Americans did not endorse the way the Democrats would handle the war — nor the way the antiwar movement was behaving. Nixon seized on those sentiments and, in a feat that historians will be challenged to explain, characterized George McGovern as something of a sissy. In fact, the Democratic presidential nominee was a genuine World War II hero, a B-24 pilot with 35 combat missions under his belt and a Distinguished Flying Cross on his chest. Nixon, in contrast, had served during the war but never saw combat. He had, however, seen the polls.

Yes, he did. Cohen, of course, ignores a good chunk of real history, but he has a point to make.

It is among the Democrats that the war is a divisive issue — John Edwards sniping at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Obama sniping at Edwards and Clinton. Everyone now opposes the war, but the issue is not so much their positions as the intensity of their feelings. Antiwar Democrats in key primary and caucus states, particularly New Hampshire and Iowa, will not vote for a lukewarm antiwar candidate. This explains why Clinton recently reversed herself and voted to end funding for the war. The one Democratic presidential candidate from the Senate who did not was Joseph Biden. He said he opposed the war but saw no choice but to fund the troops.

Precisely right, Joe. But more than right, prescient as well. As if to suggest what an issue this will become, Rudolph Giuliani called Clinton and Obama’s vote a significant
flip-flop.” Since then the Republicans have mostly trained their fire on each other. You can bet, though, that if either candidate gets the nomination, this vote will be hung around Clinton or Obama’s neck, and the hoariest of cliches will be trotted out: weak on defense. It will have added resonance for Clinton because she is a woman.

This is where history raises its ugly head. The GOP is adept at painting Democrats as soft on national security. It is equally adept at saying so in the most scurrilous way. And while most Americans would like the war to end, they do not favor a precipitous withdrawal and neither have they forgotten Sept. 11, 2001 — the entirety of Giuliani’s case for the presidency, after all.

Cohen avoids making an actual prediction, but his point is clear.

The problem with all of this, of course, is Cohen’s rather selective use of history. The simple fact is that 1972 and 2008 are alike only in that a presidential election campaign will be waged during an unpopular war. The basic facts of 1972 — incumbent president, cultural civil war, still simmering backlash by Southern voters against the Democrats — just don’t apply.

And while Nixon was not the most popular president in history, he was not as unpopular at this point in his presidency as we might thing. In April 1971, 19 months before the presidential election, he was still at about 50 percent in the polls, a far cry from President Bush’s minuscule ratings at about the same point in time. And September polls of the same year were showing that Nixon would best all three of the Democrats’ best shots — Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy.

And there is the not-so-small point that McGovern self-destructed, making bad choices for vice president, while the entire Democratic Party apparatus sat on the sidelines. That’s not likely to happen this time out (Democrats are still smarting from the 2000 election).

Cohen certainly is correct in reminding everyone that it is too early to write off the Republicans in this race. But his subtle attempt at swaying the Democrats away from their focus on Iraq is based on a misreading if history and is the kind of tired analysis that too often emanates from the Beltway.

A friend of mine once told me she thought there should be term limits for political pundits. Perhaps she’s right.

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