digamma.net - notes

Alec Oveis and Mark Leon Goldberg think “simply recruiting vets ought not be a substitute for the hard intellectual slog that the Democrats seem to be avoiding when it comes to debating a national security agenda.”

I’m a blogger on vacation, so I’m always in favor of a “hard intellectual slog". But is that really necessary to win elections? It seems to me that Bush and friends won the “national security vote” in 2002 and 2004 by saying and doing some pretty stupid things. Maybe the arguments were well-tested for efficacy, but the closest thing they had to hard policy analysis was the Project for the New American Century.

As much as I hate to say it, what the Democrats really need to win are silly sound bites.