BARONE HITS THE JACKPOT – AT 7:29 A.M. ET:  In a superb column that had to be written by a political expert like Michael Barone, Barone lifts the veil and exposes the truth about today's Democratic Party and the real beliefs of its much-heralded "base."  This is required reading.  Barone will be called a McCarthyite – that's the standard line on the left – but what he is saying is what many of us observed firsthand, starting in the late 1960s:

The money quote:

The uncomfortable truth is that many -- not most, but many -- Democratic politicians and Democratic voters saw political benefit in an American defeat in Iraq. Many, including Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, then boss of Obama's new chief of staff Pete Rouse, thronged to the Washington premiere of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." They tried to give every appearance of agreeing with the "Bush-lied-people-died" crowd and with those who charged that high-ranking officials colluded in systematic torture.

It was a lot of fun while it lasted, up to election night 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009. But then Obama had to govern. Knowing little of military affairs, he retained Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has loyally served presidents of both parties. Understanding even if not admitting the great headway Americans had made in Iraq, Obama declined to throw it all away.

Appreciating that Afghanistan was critical to protecting Americans, he made a commitment to increase troop levels there in May 2009, reconsidered it from August to November, then restated it Dec. 1, with a commitment to begin withdrawals in July 2011.

In so doing, Obama implicitly confessed that the view of the world held with quasi-religious fervor by the Democratic left was delusional all along. Bush didn't lie, we didn't go into Afghanistan and Iraq without allies and against their wishes, we didn't carry out policies of torture, etc. The effort to cast Iraq as another Vietnam and America under Bush as an oppressive rogue power were perhaps emotionally satisfying but unconnected to reality.

I remember – because I was in that party – when the Democrats were the national defense party.  Jack Kennedy ran to the right of Richard Nixon in 1960 on defense issues.  It was the Democrats, with some enlightened Republican help, who formed the institutions, like NATO, that helped win the Cold War.  Mr. Kennedy spoke of "paying any price" and "bearing any burden" in defense of freedom.  His own party would laugh at him today.

But it changed in the sixties, over Vietnam.  And it changed in part because some elements of the Democratic coalition, like the civil-rights movement and the women's movement, had powerful, if sad, connections to Marxism.  The nomination of George McGovern, a political flake, in 1972, was the symbolic moment when many sane people began to leave the Democratic Party and walk in the wilderness until pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Thus began the time of the "Reagan Democrats," who played a crucial role in the Reagan Revolution.

Today the Democratic base is angry and disillusioned.  We've been very critical of Mr. Obama here, but the fact is that he has refused to run from Iraq or Afghanistan, and maintains many of President Bush's national-security policies, although perhaps with minimal enthusiasm.  His heart may not be in these policies, but he knows the consequences for the nation of abandoning them. 

There is a fight brewing for the soul of the Democratic Party.  Will the party correct its ways and return as a center-left party, or will it go the route of the George Soros crowd, and become simply an adjunct of the European left? 

The trends are not good.  The Dems who will be defeated next month will come largely from the moderate wing of the party, in swing districts.  The liberals and leftists have safe seats, many of them in minority districts.  Ironically, the party will probably be more leftist after this election because the leftists will be the ones who survive. 

Party of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy?  No more.

October 6, 2010