The myth of President Nunn.
Michael Crowley writes at TNR's blog and reminds me of one of my hobbyhorses:
I think [E.J. Dionne, writing about the lead-up to the IWR vote in Congress] omits a critical factor that pressured queasy-feeling Democrats to embrace Bush's war: Their memories of the 1991 Gulf War. The 2002 debate was filled with discussions about who got the Gulf War "right" and who was "wrong," and how the anti-war folks--who predicted all sorts of disasters that never came to pass--could have miscalculated so badly. Back in '91, anti-war votes killed the near-term presidential aspirations of some key Democratic senators, which may help to explain why ambitious people like John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and even Hillary Clinton all voted the way they did (pro-war) in 2002. Scare tactics or not, they may have felt they couldn't afford, politically, to risk the sort of damage incurred by people like Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, who wound up on the "wrong" side of the 1991 vote and retired soon after instead of running for president as once expected.
Dionne's article and Crowley's response launched a flurry of discussion about the first Gulf War (Dionne praising Bush the Elder's relative non-manipulation of Congress; Matthew Yglesias suggesting that the Gulf War wasn't such a big success afterall. An added bonus was Matt linking to this old Atlantic article by Christopher Layne, which is interesting if for no other reason than how much its anti-war arguments conform to the meta anti-war arguments about the current Iraq adventure, despite the vast circumstantial differences between the two interventions). Honestly, this is a topic of some interest to me. I'm not ambivolent in my feelings about the Balkan interventions (good idea; should have come sooner) or about the current Iraq war (spectacularly bad idea). But the first Gulf War -- strategically hard to oppose; in every other way hard to support -- was a war to feel deeply ambivolant about.
I was 11 at the time the debate was going on, so this is purely retrospective on my part. And I agree with Crowley's (and Digby's) assessment that faced with Saddam Take II, the desire not to screw it up twice forced hands -- like John Kerry's -- that wouldn't otherwise have been forced. Bob Graham, for instance, who also voted aye on the Gulf War, felt confident enough to reject the 2002 Iraq resolution (though largely because he thought it didn't go far enough), even though he had a presidential campaign in the works. For long-time heavyweights like Gephardt, the prospect of facing off in the 2004 primary against Gore (who was still the frontrunner at the time) probably magnified the seeming importance of getting some hawkish legs to stand on.
The problem is that however entrenched as conventional wisdom, the notion that getting the Gulf War "wrong" was political suicide for ambitious senators has always struck me as pretty weak. Crowley explicitly brings up the reason I think this was such a half-assed theory: Sam Nunn's shattered presidential dreams. To argue that Nunn's nay-vote undermined his national prospects ignores the fact that Nunn was actually far, far too conservative to ever win a Democratic nomination in the first place. Moreover, he was far, far too conservative to hold the liberal coaltion together if by some fluke he did win the Democratic nomination. In an otherwise relatively flattering Washington Monthly profile from 1989, Timothy Noah explained Nunn's basic problem:
There may have been another factor behind Nunn's decision not to run [in 1988]: his conservative voting record on many nondefense issues. Nunn has supported a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, supported a balanced budget amendment, and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. His civil rights record is spotty [he opposed bussing, for instance]. Although he voted for the 1982 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, Nunn supported several weakening amendments.
Nunn is not too hot on economic fairness issues, either; he leans toward supporting [Bush the Elder's] capital gains tax cut, provided it can be accompanied by other deficit-reducing measures. In other words, a tax cut for the very rich is fine as long as we make sure that other taxpayers pay for it. That's responsible, but it doesn't exactly foster social justice.
If anything, I think Noah understated the case. By 1992 -- in fact, by 1988 -- you could not be anti-choice and win a Democratic nomination. As for economic fairness, Gephardt had been pounded mercilessly by his opponents in the 1988 primary for having voted for Reagan's tax cuts back in 1981. Nunn, who according to Kenny Baer had an ADA rating of 30 in 1986, would have had it far worse. Whatever his remarkable defence credentials, he was essentially a neoconservative without the mitigating domestic and social liberalism of the famous Democratic neocons like Moynihan, Jackson, Lieberman, or Humphrey. In fact, voting with the Dem Senate leadership and the prevailing liberal and neoliberal concensus against the first Gulf War might even have been Nunn's best political option: along with his role in the derailment of John Tower, it helped him look more like a mainstream Democrat. But voting for the military removal of Saddam from Kuwait, regardless of what he actually believed at the time, wasn't likely to make him a viable presidential or even vice-presidential candidate among a primary electorate that had already, in recent years, rejected Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore and was about to reject Paul Tsongas as presidential contenders roughly on the grounds that they were too conservative. All four were far more liberal than Nunn.
It's true, of course, that Nunn didn't make the Clinton cabinet (although rumours from 2000 were that he would have made Gore's) and that Les Aspin (who voted aye in the House) did. But another nay-voter -- Lloyd Bentsen -- did make the Clinton cabinet as Treasury Secretary. And so long as we're playing this game, it took Harry Reid, the other non-blue-dog aye on the Gulf War, another 14 years for that miracle vote to pan out into a Senate leadership position, and then only after a nay-voter from 1991 had just won the most votes for president for a Democrat in history.
Which is why the fact that Crowley is right about the Dem strategic thinking back to 1991 is so bloody depressing. Had the Democratic foreign policy establishment exhibited anything close to the unity it displayed in opposing Gulf War I in opposing Gulf War II, the party might (emphasis on "might") have made the invasion diplomatically impossible, or at least made it into a a political juggernaut that would have sunk Bush in 2004 as Iraq descended into its current state of chaos. But they didn't, and part of the reason that they didn't is because they were nursing the myth of a dark political fate that always was just that: a myth.
I think [E.J. Dionne, writing about the lead-up to the IWR vote in Congress] omits a critical factor that pressured queasy-feeling Democrats to embrace Bush's war: Their memories of the 1991 Gulf War. The 2002 debate was filled with discussions about who got the Gulf War "right" and who was "wrong," and how the anti-war folks--who predicted all sorts of disasters that never came to pass--could have miscalculated so badly. Back in '91, anti-war votes killed the near-term presidential aspirations of some key Democratic senators, which may help to explain why ambitious people like John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and even Hillary Clinton all voted the way they did (pro-war) in 2002. Scare tactics or not, they may have felt they couldn't afford, politically, to risk the sort of damage incurred by people like Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, who wound up on the "wrong" side of the 1991 vote and retired soon after instead of running for president as once expected.
Dionne's article and Crowley's response launched a flurry of discussion about the first Gulf War (Dionne praising Bush the Elder's relative non-manipulation of Congress; Matthew Yglesias suggesting that the Gulf War wasn't such a big success afterall. An added bonus was Matt linking to this old Atlantic article by Christopher Layne, which is interesting if for no other reason than how much its anti-war arguments conform to the meta anti-war arguments about the current Iraq adventure, despite the vast circumstantial differences between the two interventions). Honestly, this is a topic of some interest to me. I'm not ambivolent in my feelings about the Balkan interventions (good idea; should have come sooner) or about the current Iraq war (spectacularly bad idea). But the first Gulf War -- strategically hard to oppose; in every other way hard to support -- was a war to feel deeply ambivolant about.
I was 11 at the time the debate was going on, so this is purely retrospective on my part. And I agree with Crowley's (and Digby's) assessment that faced with Saddam Take II, the desire not to screw it up twice forced hands -- like John Kerry's -- that wouldn't otherwise have been forced. Bob Graham, for instance, who also voted aye on the Gulf War, felt confident enough to reject the 2002 Iraq resolution (though largely because he thought it didn't go far enough), even though he had a presidential campaign in the works. For long-time heavyweights like Gephardt, the prospect of facing off in the 2004 primary against Gore (who was still the frontrunner at the time) probably magnified the seeming importance of getting some hawkish legs to stand on.
The problem is that however entrenched as conventional wisdom, the notion that getting the Gulf War "wrong" was political suicide for ambitious senators has always struck me as pretty weak. Crowley explicitly brings up the reason I think this was such a half-assed theory: Sam Nunn's shattered presidential dreams. To argue that Nunn's nay-vote undermined his national prospects ignores the fact that Nunn was actually far, far too conservative to ever win a Democratic nomination in the first place. Moreover, he was far, far too conservative to hold the liberal coaltion together if by some fluke he did win the Democratic nomination. In an otherwise relatively flattering Washington Monthly profile from 1989, Timothy Noah explained Nunn's basic problem:
There may have been another factor behind Nunn's decision not to run [in 1988]: his conservative voting record on many nondefense issues. Nunn has supported a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, supported a balanced budget amendment, and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. His civil rights record is spotty [he opposed bussing, for instance]. Although he voted for the 1982 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, Nunn supported several weakening amendments.
Nunn is not too hot on economic fairness issues, either; he leans toward supporting [Bush the Elder's] capital gains tax cut, provided it can be accompanied by other deficit-reducing measures. In other words, a tax cut for the very rich is fine as long as we make sure that other taxpayers pay for it. That's responsible, but it doesn't exactly foster social justice.
If anything, I think Noah understated the case. By 1992 -- in fact, by 1988 -- you could not be anti-choice and win a Democratic nomination. As for economic fairness, Gephardt had been pounded mercilessly by his opponents in the 1988 primary for having voted for Reagan's tax cuts back in 1981. Nunn, who according to Kenny Baer had an ADA rating of 30 in 1986, would have had it far worse. Whatever his remarkable defence credentials, he was essentially a neoconservative without the mitigating domestic and social liberalism of the famous Democratic neocons like Moynihan, Jackson, Lieberman, or Humphrey. In fact, voting with the Dem Senate leadership and the prevailing liberal and neoliberal concensus against the first Gulf War might even have been Nunn's best political option: along with his role in the derailment of John Tower, it helped him look more like a mainstream Democrat. But voting for the military removal of Saddam from Kuwait, regardless of what he actually believed at the time, wasn't likely to make him a viable presidential or even vice-presidential candidate among a primary electorate that had already, in recent years, rejected Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore and was about to reject Paul Tsongas as presidential contenders roughly on the grounds that they were too conservative. All four were far more liberal than Nunn.
It's true, of course, that Nunn didn't make the Clinton cabinet (although rumours from 2000 were that he would have made Gore's) and that Les Aspin (who voted aye in the House) did. But another nay-voter -- Lloyd Bentsen -- did make the Clinton cabinet as Treasury Secretary. And so long as we're playing this game, it took Harry Reid, the other non-blue-dog aye on the Gulf War, another 14 years for that miracle vote to pan out into a Senate leadership position, and then only after a nay-voter from 1991 had just won the most votes for president for a Democrat in history.
Which is why the fact that Crowley is right about the Dem strategic thinking back to 1991 is so bloody depressing. Had the Democratic foreign policy establishment exhibited anything close to the unity it displayed in opposing Gulf War I in opposing Gulf War II, the party might (emphasis on "might") have made the invasion diplomatically impossible, or at least made it into a a political juggernaut that would have sunk Bush in 2004 as Iraq descended into its current state of chaos. But they didn't, and part of the reason that they didn't is because they were nursing the myth of a dark political fate that always was just that: a myth.
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