THE LOW POST: Observations About the First Democratic Debate

The key moment of the debate, as far as I was concerned, came toward the end, when Williams hit Hillary with this question:

Senator Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, a friend of yours from back home, said this past week, quote: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us." Another quote: "America will be safer with a Republican president." How do you think, Senator, it happened that that notion of Republicans as protectors in a post-9/11 world has taken on so?

Translated into human speech, that question read something like this:

Senator Clinton, a Republican presidential candidate recently said Americans feel more safe under Republicans. How do you think the notion that Americans are more safe under Republicans came about?

I mean, seriously, folks, this is not a tough question to answer. All Hillary had to say was, "Rudy Giuliani says Americans are safer with Republicans, and suddenly you think it's true? How did you ever get a job in journalism?" and that would have been that. But the Democrats never balk at the inane questions that get thrown their way. For instance, no one ever accuses a Republican candidate of being "too conservative." But every Democrat politely and nervously answers charges of being "too liberal" every election. It is the Democrats' cowering, craven responses to these questions that validate their otherwise fallacious premises.

When media figures hound them with the same list of witch-hunting talking points each season -- Dems are incapable of protecting the country, middle America won't tolerate a "liberal," voters won't elect an "intellectual," etc. -- the Democrats unfailingly become accomplices in the conspiracy by dignifying the questions with serious responses. We first saw this back in the famous Bush I-Dukakis debate, when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Mike Dukakis if he would advocate the death penalty if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered. Instead of angrily telling Shaw to fuck off, Dukakis calmly answered the question in a professorial tone, solidifying his reputation as a spineless wuss in the eyes of the whole country.

In this case, a string of Democrats again swallowed the Giuliani premise whole. Hillary began her answer by saying, "Well, Brian, I think that, as a senator from New York, it is something that I've worked on very hard ever since 9/11 to try to convince the administration to do those things that would actually work to make us safer..." Blah blah blah blah. Dodd was even worse. His answer began with the line, "Well, that's a great question, Brian..."

That's a great question, Brian? Is Dodd fucking kidding? He might as well have said, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" And the thing is...While I have to believe Dukakis really was blindsided by the Shaw ploy, and also genuinely a turd when it came these matters of spine and toughness, these modern Democrats have had plenty of time to prepare for and study these questions. And yet they refuse to take their media inquisitors on, making sure at all times to play by the rules and keep in sniveling, wusslike character. As a result the debates smell suspiciously like a rigged game. I don't want to say the Democrats are throwing the races, but what stands out to me is that rather than simply show some balls before the Brian Williamses of the world, the Democratic Party's response to its "toughness problem" is always to try frantically to match Republican defense spending, and to vote for wars it plays at not really believing in -- as if that's the only way to look "tough."

That is a suspiciously convenient solution to a "toughness problem" that suspiciously never goes away, no matter how many wars the Democrats vote for or how many hundreds of billions they spend on defense. Seriously, think about it -- the Democrats in this Congress, who include debaters Obama and Clinton and Biden and Dodd, just decided, on their own, to spend nearly seven hundred billion dollars on defense this year, smashing the old record. And yet they were still very fast to concede in this debate that the "notion" that they are not tough persists. So... gosh, we'll just have to spend more on the F-18 next year! Quel dommage! Is no one struck by how absurd this all is?

Of course, this is just the beginning. They have eighteen months to make this process even more disgusting...

[From Issue 1025 — May 3, 2007]