It's the Terrorism, Stupid

Why

did the Democrats lose? forget the tactics. Forget the fund raising. Forget even the President's popularity. This election was about Sept. 11. And just as no one saw 9/11 coming, no one saw the 9/11 election coming. Worse yet, the Democrats don't see it even now. Sure, some Democrats acknowledge that 9/11 played a part. But they trivialize its effect, as when Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe says 9/11 intensified the bond between the President and the people, giving Bush a popularity that rubbed off on Republican candidates and helped sway the election.

The Sept. 11 effect was far more subtle and far more profound. It returned America to a world of danger, a world we thought we had escaped, perhaps for good, with the end of the cold war. For two generations after the late 1930s, Americans faced one great existential threat after another — world war, cold war, the threat of nuclear war. During the age of anxiety, anyone aspiring to serious national office had to pass the elementary test: seriousness on national security.

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When the cold war ended, the sense of emergency ended too. During the holiday from history that was the 1990s, that fundamental question — Do you feel safe entrusting the national security to this person?--lost its urgency. Not until 1992 could a Bill Clinton win the presidency. It was not just that he was untested but that he was a Democrat. After the Vietnam debacle, the Democratic Party was perceived as uncertain and unreliable on national security. Which is why in the last quarter-century of the cold war, between the late '60s and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Democrats were denied the presidency in every election (with the exception of the 1976 post-Watergate anomaly).

With the end of the cold war, that threshold question was no longer vital. Absent a direct threat to American national security, foreign policy in general disappeared from U.S. political discourse. The past three presidential campaigns--1992, 1996 and 2000--may well have been the most devoid of foreign-policy discussion of any during the 20th century. It stood to reason. If the homeland was secure, if there was no deadly adversary stalking us, who cared what was going on out there?

Sept. 11 made us care again. James Carville got it exactly right in 1992: It was the economy, stupid. Today it is not. Today it's national security.

What single issue proved the most politically deadly in this campaign? A bill to create a Department of Homeland Security. Who'd have thunk it? It had the appearance of mere bureaucratic shuffling. It had none of the drama of the war-and-peace Iraq vote. Democrats figured they could safely block the bill over a dispute about job protection. Big mistake. Republicans made the issue into a surrogate for post-9/11 national security. Everyone supports the war on terror. The homeland-security bill, however, made the platitude concrete by asking the question: Are you ready to put antiterrorism above everything else, even such desirable things as workers' rights?

When an issue like this can topple a true war hero like Georgia Senator Max Cleland, something very profound is going on. His opponent, Saxby Chambliss, attacked Cleland for voting against the homeland-security bill. Critics assailed Chambliss for questioning Cleland's patriotism. But they missed the point. It is absurd to question the patriotism of a man who left much of his body on the battlefield in Vietnam. The question raised by the homeland-security bill — in Georgia as everywhere else, it was a staple of the Republican campaign — was not patriotism but seriousness. In times of emergency, do you feel the emergency acutely enough to make national security trump everything else?

It is no accident that in this election Democrats did best in races for Governor, the office with the least connection to foreign policy. This election was the first 9/11 election. The Democrats lost it badly. And they will continue to lose elections until they can pass that old cold war threshold test: trust on fundamental national security. Yes, Democrats need a message. Yes, they need coherence. But if they conclude from this election that they need to move left on foreign policy — becoming coherently softer on national security — they are ensuring themselves even greater defeats.

We are at war. It doesn't feel like it in our everyday life, but it didn't always feel that way day to day during the cold war either. Nonetheless, during the cold war we knew at the deepest level that there were implacable enemies out there arming and organizing against us. Sept. 11 brought back that feeling, however unacknowledged, however subconscious. Until this war, like the cold war, is won, all elections will be 9/11 elections — elections that those who ignore this unhappy truth will continue to lose.