NYT: The Democrats: "Antiwar" and Other Fighting Words

[DeepModem Mom]

‘Antiwar’ and Other Fighting Words
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: October 29, 2006


(Chris Gash)

Democrats have spent three decades trying to exorcise the ghost of Senator George S. McGovern, whose losing 1972 presidential campaign calling for a withdrawal from Vietnam crystallized his party’s image as soft on national defense.

But surveying the midterm elections last week, Mr. McGovern, 84, said he sees an opportunity for an antiwar campaign in the 2008 presidential race.

“I would love to be running again if I were 25 years younger,” he said in an interview from his Montana home. “I think I would win.”

On the eve of the midterms, dismay over the Iraq war has propelled the Democrats to a political status they have not enjoyed since before Mr. McGovern: for the first time in decades, polls show that the public trusts Democrats as much as Republicans to handle foreign affairs.

But as they look ahead, Democrats are torn between two visions of their history. Some potential candidates in the 2008 Democratic primary and many liberal activists argue that the Republican responsibility for the Iraq war has, in effect, freed the Democrats from Mr. McGovern’s legacy. They say the 2006 elections will provide a mandate for a new antiwar argument: that troops can be pulled from Iraq in order to shore up American security elsewhere in the world.

Other strategists and political scientists argue that the Iraq war has given the Democrats a different opportunity to lay to rest their McGovernite image, in part by rejecting calls for a quick withdrawal in Iraq....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/weekinreview/29kirkpatrick.html