The Democratic Domino Effect

Dale Franks is fisking a New York Times editorial. The NYT is coming around the Republican way of thinking, albeit ever so slowly. Perhaps the Dominoes that are falling will not only be in foreign lands. Dale harkens this back to the halcyon days of the 1980s:

When we look back on the 1980s now, it's not remembered as a decade in which a dim cowboy president courted global thermonuclear war, but as the decade when the USSR was brought down, the Warsaw Pact eliminated, and democratic governance came to Eastern Europe.

I also remember it as the decade of leg-warmers, big bad hair, god-awful Cosby sweaters, and soul-less soul music sung by white men like Phil Collins or Hall & Oates myself. But I digress...

Remember Reagan's funeral? All these current liberal politicians who made their careers opposing the Gipper now praise him as if he were the second coming. Meanwhile they proclaimed that Reagan was a uniter while Bush is a divider. This is of course only true because Reagan had the old guard of pre-1994 congressional democrats to work with. It is also untrue in that the Reagan era was a period without deep partisan tensions.

I wish someone had done a then and now special on what John Kerry or Teddy Kennedy said about Reagan while he was president and after he had died. I remember Patty Davis talking about how she protested her father for putting missile in Europe. She now says it was the wrong thing to do because she divided the family. Granted that's true. But it's also true that her predictions (It'll start WWIII!) were completely and totally wrong.

It wouldn't surprise me if, in 15 or 20 years, a future Democratic presidential candidate began regaling us with the tales of his support for the Bush Administration's policy in the Mideast.

It wouldn't surprise me if they were doing it as early as 2008. By 2008 Bush's success in foreign affairs will be so obvious that there won't be any other alternative.

I expect the next presidential candidate to have been conspicuously absent from anti-war demonstrations for the last few years. Hillary has been smart about her support, or lack thereof, for instance. On the other hand Teddy Kennedy will never be able to run for president and has been one of the most outspoken critics. I expect to see a lot of moderates like Diamond Joe Biden pulling 180 degree bat-turns in the next few months. Maybe some will admit they have been wrong while they're at it.

I think when we talk about Bush's Democratic Domino Effect in ten years, it will not only be in terms of democratic foreign governments, but the realignment of Democratic Party foriegn policy back to the traditional American position of exporting democracy abroad.