Democrats without a home.(on the right)

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 6

DEMOCRATS concerned about the 2008 elections will be looking closely at the midterm elections. Hard thought upon these elections tells us interesting things, salient among them that there is no policy extant, among Democratic leaders, on which strategic political building can be done with any confidence.

Peter Beinart, shining young light of The New Republic, scolded Democratic leaders in Congress recently for carrying on stupidly when Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq came to town. What provoked the Democratic leadership was his rebuking Israel for the extremity of the war in Lebanon. What he had done, Beinart explained in the Washington Post, was to speak as a Middle Eastern leader of a predominantly Shiite country. Maliki's criticism of Israel's war against Hezbollah had several objectives, but one of them was to voice a position on U.S. foreign policy a little less slavish in the matter of Israel than that of the Anti-Defamation League. Beinart was objecting to the threat by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Harry Reid to rescind the invitation to Maliki to address Congress. The Democrats were purporting to instruct Maliki on how to "play a constructive role" in the Middle East. But Reid's letter, writes Beinart, "wasn't really about strengthening the Iraqi government at all; that's George W. Bush's problem. It was about appearing more pro-Israel than the White House and thus pandering to Jewish voters."

The flurry is one of many that will happen before there is anything that can be classified as consolidated Democratic policy on Iraq. "The Democratic party's single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft. It is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience."

The final public evaluation of our Iraq venture probably will not be fully illuminated until the 2008 election season. But coming very soon is a clue to national Democratic orientation. It is the election ...