DEFENSE: DEMS’ OPTIONS FOR ’04

The Democrats are toast in 2004 unless they can stand toe-​​to-​​toe with George W. Bush on national secu­rity. But lis­ten to most of their pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates talk, and you’d think the Democrats have only two options: morph into junior Rumsfelds, or make tracks to the near­est Rainbow Gathering, keep­ing as far away as pos­si­ble from any­thing hav­ing to do with American power.
Neither is going to get a Democrat elected, of course. So what stances can they take to make them­selves cred­i­ble on defense? My Tech Central Station arti­cle has four ideas.
THERE’S MORE: Lots and lots of feed­back on this story, much of it along the lines of this note:

All good ideas… Problem is, the Democrats just aren’t cred­i­ble on national secu­rity, and that goes all the way back to Carter. So if a can­di­date were to try your approach now, I think it would come off as (and prob­a­bly be) highly disin­gen­u­ous. Since they don’t have their own record of suc­cess to point to, it could be writ­ten off as par­ti­san snip­ing…
There’s a lot of rot in the party that has to be swept out before they can be taken seri­ously on this issue, and that’ll take a long time. Maybe by 2008? 2012? 

Many read­ers agree that home­land secu­rity is a poten­tial gold­mine for the Democrats in ’04. But sev­eral of these read­ers rec­om­mend a clam­p­down on ille­gal immi­gra­tion that’s more dra­con­ian than any Democrat — even the most hawk­ish one — would endorse.

Open a 90 day win­dow dur­ing which all ille­gal aliens can apply to remain in the United States. Subject to a back­ground check, those who pass get to remain… All ille­gal aliens found through any gov­ern­ment agency (includes fed, state, local, schools) after that 90 day period will be imme­di­ately, and with­out recourse removed from the country.

June 12th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.