# Posted 10:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

MY ADVICE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Or, Why Kerry Shouldn't Run Away from Democracy

As I've noted here once before, November's will be the sixth election to turn on a referendum for a foreign war - like 1812, 1844, 1896 (the latter two before the fact), 1954, and 1968 before it. The outcome will be decided not by reliably Democratic voters who are lining up to see Fahrenheit 9/11, but by swing voters who want American troops kept in Iraq to provide the security for a stable democracy to emerge, and who aren’t convinced by Bush’s record there.

Democrats should be careful of running away from democracy promotion and toward, of all things, the realpolitik foreign policy of Bush I – an administration which never saw an oppressive government it didn’t like. Kerry staffers privately admit to doing as much, saying that an Iraq-wearied public won’t stand for Wilsonianism and wants a return to cold national interests. The problem is, this will sell out most of what the Democratic legacy stands for at its root in foreign policy: from Wilson’s Fourteen Points to FDR’s Four Freedoms to the Clinton administration's intervention to halt genocide in Kosovo (another war fought without UN sanction). It would also be bad politics.

The Kerry campaign's syllogism runs something like this: 1. Bush is associated with democracy promotion, 2. the American people are tired of both, so 3. therefore, run on realism. However, both premises of the argument are faulty: 1. there are votes to be had in democracy, and 2. Bush's record there is assailable. That voters support promoting democracy is evident in the Chicago Council on Foreign Relation's latest poll, which finds 71 percent of Americans favoring democratic assistance. 85 percent of respondents in the same poll also find helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations to be 'very' or 'somewhat' important. Before hurrying to repudiate tout court the Democratic legacy in promoting democracy and human rights, Kerry might instead give pause to the votes of the swing 20 percent of Americans who are (according to a recent New York Times poll) committed to democracy in Iraq, but disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraqi reconstruction.

Furthermore, Kerry can make a convincing argument that he can do much better than the current administration, drawing on the easy overseas popularity coming to an Atlanticist, multilateralist Democrat who would strike Europeans as, subconsciously, one of them. The fact is, campaign rhetoric aside, Bush's performance in promoting democracy is neither uniformly good, nor is it uniformly bereft of accomplishment. On the one hand, in countries from Uzbekistan to Pakistan to Egypt, the Bush administration has pursued security alliances with undemocratic, frequently dictatorial leaders, ensuring that the next generation of anti-regime protesters view the U.S. as the enemy rather than friend of their nationalist or democratic aspirations. On the other hand, in August 2002, the U.S. applied intense pressure to the government of Egypt after its arrest of democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, including a moratorium on new aid to Egypt as long as Ibrahim remained in prison. The State Department announced on July 13 that it was freezing all aid to the government of Uzbekistan as a rebuke against its human rights record. Madeline Albright’s brainchild the Community of Democracies has since in this administration been carefully fostered by Paula Dobriansky. Like the Clinton administration's, the Bush administration's National Security Strategy gives pride of place to expansion of democracy in the world. There's more than enough here to make an argument on both sides.

To have two candidates running to convince the American people they can better advance democracy in the world, now that's a grand prospect. Instead of running for the vote of Richard Nixon’s ghost or Moore’s viewers, Kerry needs to convince voters in the center that not only is democracy promotion not the exclusive preserve of neocons, but multilateralist Democrats can in fact with their broader international support do the same job, better. Democracy promotion has the potential to be one of a core set of issues at the heart of a new bipartisan foreign policy consensus, along with prosecuting the war on terror and the reconstruction of Iraq, building up the nation’s pitiably overstretched army, and acting to shore up the degenerating security situation in Afghanistan, and with both tickets trying to convince the public they can pursue this centrist foreign policy better than the competition.

Optimistically, it now stands in the interests of both candidates— not merely the nation and its citizens —to reach for a centrist politics in foreign affairs to displace the fiery populism whose flames were stoked over the last decade by Gingrich and Gore, and which led to the heated partisanship in witness since the 2000 result. And the rest of us – those not munching on our popcorn this summer – can finally have some measured hope, for that reason. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion