I posted a diary yesterday [1] making disparaging note of the fact that Jonathan Tasini, running on an anti-war platform against Hillary Clinton, has lost the MoveOn endorsement vote by a whopping twelve points, 56% to 44%. Unsurprisingly, this provoked howls of outrage from supporters of the gentleman in question, including from someone whom a quick Google search identified as tied to the Democratic Socialists of America; not my favorite organization, to be excessively generous.
I have a problem with Tasini's candidacy on several levels, as follows.
Most importantly, he has run his entire campaign as a slash-and-burn attack on what he calls 'pro-war Democrats', employing infuriating phrases such as "Hillary Clinton has the blood of Iraqi children on her hands". The problem with that should be obvious, but I'll restate it for the benefit of the simple-minded: this is a republican war, started by republicans, led by republicans, driven over a cliff by republicans, supported by republicans, defended to this day by republicans. This was not our idea. To be sure, many Democrats, thinking they were learning the lessons of Vietnam, initially supported it; and however one may feel about that (and I am not a fan of this view), conventional wisdom had it at the time that this was the wise politically expedient choice. More importantly, we don't have any electoral evidence to date that anti-war sentiment gets rewarded where it matters, at the ballot box; all the evidence, from 2002 and 2004, points in exactly the opposite direction. That may have changed, and I think we're well positioned as Democrats to reap the harvest of this change; which is why, in turn, anyone who blurs the distinctions between us and the people who are responsible for this war – again for emphasis, this republican war - endangers those gains.
More seriously, Tasini's crushing defeat – I seriously doubt he'll break the ten percent hurdle – will demonstrate to the public and the media exactly the conclusion the anti-war movement should want them to avoid: that support of the war carries no political price. When the brief stories about Tasini get written ten days from today, they will not focus on the defects of his campaign, or the fact that New York One froze him out of the debates; rather, they will extol the impotence of the anti-war movement. I believe strongly that politics is not about "taking a stand" or "expressing feelings" or other such therapeutic drivel; it is about winning. And by that measure, sorry, Tasini has never played the game right.
Then, there is the little fact that, to the best of my knowledge, it is the executive branch that controls the military. As a matter of political reality, a Senator Tasini – to indulge that fantasy for a moment – won't stop the war. Nor will the Congress, unless it cuts off funds – and that, ladies and gentlemen, has never happened, and never will. George Bush has already made clear that he will not order withdrawal, and unless we extract a political price for that decision that his party finds to great to pay, this will not change.
In short, Tasini is actually doing harm to the anti-war movement. Politicians – that is, the men and women who will make the decisions in the Congress about this war, ineffectual as they may be in practice – know two coinages of the realm: votes and money. He has demonstrated that he can command neither. His 'pro-war' opponent can, in spades.
I'll gladly support an anti-war candidate who has his act together, such as Ned Lamont (though the circumstances obtaining in that race are vastly different from our Senatorial primary, as are the contenders); in fact, Lamont's victory stands alone to date as the sole example of the electoral clout of war opponents. Tasini simply does not measure up; and because I believe that the goal of politics is the acquisition and exercise of power, not the expression of my feelings, I'll support contenders who have demonstrated that they grasp this very simple calculus. Tasini has not. End of story.
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