WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign of 2004 starts long on emotion and short on ideas. Ultimately that is not good for the Democrats and more importantly, not good for the country.
Fear and anger wear competing partisan colors as this primary season moves into high gear. Howard Dean’s rush to front-running status has been fueled by resentments rubbed raw three years after the Florida recount. At the other end of the spectrum, George W. Bush’s appeals for national solidarity resonate against a still-present menace of global terrorism and horror-filled memories of 9/11.
A contest of fear vs. anger is likely to favor the incumbent, who will urge continuity on an electorate made anxious not only by conflict abroad but also by an economy that is growing in ways that are difficult to read.
To change this situation, the Democrats must lay out clear and practical alternatives to Bush’s policies on the two greatest challenges that will face the next president: the greater Middle East and a global economy that is rapidly shifting manufacturing jobs and financial assets out of the United States to Asia.
A look back bolsters the point: The last time Democrats ran against an incumbent named Bush, a young challenger named Bill Clinton had already established the basis for an idea-driven campaign by early January 1992. As Clinton developed a "laser-like" focus on the economy and globalization, George H.W. Bush stood on emotion and ran a lackluster, idea-free campaign: He could not believe Americans would elect an upstart with such obviously unreliable character traits.
Thus far the still-coalescing new Democratic leadership has not shown the kind of ability to identify and articulate commanding themes that helped Clinton to his 1992 upset victory.
On Iraq, for example, Dean and others have retreated into fanciful notions of replacing U.S. troops with nonexistent United Nations peacekeepers. They also promise to bring in new multinational forces from France, Germany and other countries. Yet those nations have made it clear that they will not send troops to Iraq until the hard tasks of establishing security and a new political order have already been accomplished.
Focusing on such illusionary short-term alternatives impedes a serious debate on Bush’s military and economic policies — and the global forces that shape them — that would benefit the nation. The 1992 campaign marked the first time that many Americans heard of globalization and began to consider the implications it held for them. There is no reason that this election year should not be equally educational and formative, whatever the final outcome.
One urgent example of what I have in mind is energy policy. The road to getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and the greater Middle East does not pass through short-term fixes at the U.N. or in Paris. It eventually runs through the fashioning of a new comprehensive global energy policy that ends excessive American dependence on a few unstable oil producers in the Middle East. U.S. relations with Russia and China are also increasingly shaped by the politics of energy.
The nation dodged a bullet when Congress failed to pass the pork-laden and ineffective Bush energy bill late last year. The Democrats now have a clear field to put forward a vision of a future in which Americans are induced to change their egotistical energy-wasting habits and international producers and consumers agree to stabilize prices and supply.
One Democrat who has sketched how such a policy might work is Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics and former Treasury official during the Carter administration.
Bergsten suggested in a recent conversation, and argues in detail in an article to be published in the next issue of Foreign Affairs, that crafting a new approach on energy is vital to national security goals such as cutting terrorist financing and diminishing the influence of Saudi Arabia and other undemocratic states on U.S. foreign policy.
"The next president will also confront the great changes that are occurring in a world in which China and perhaps India will come to dominate global manufacturing. It will be essential to decisively overcome domestic backlash against globalization" with a politically sustainable new foreign economic policy, Bergsten says, adding:
"Globalization — more than terrorism, the end of the Cold War or any other phenomenon — represents the dominant change in world affairs."
You don’t have to agree fully with the vast sweep of that idea to recognize it as one worth debating in the context of a political campaign. The nation has a lot more to gain from the venting of ideas than of emotion through the next 10 months.
Jim Hoagland is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to
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