Alex Rosmiller, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Ilan Goldenberg all have thoughtful posts on the foreign policy media and political problem brought up by John Edwards advisor Michael Signer. Here's Ilan, who works at the excellent and very necessary National Security Network.
If you are someone who truly deeply cares about domestic policy then you might just decide to become a State Senator. Through that experience you learn that to get your agenda passed you have to be able to play politics and you learn how issues like trade, immigration, or healthcare play at the local level and how to use them politically. But if you are someone who wants to devote your career to foreign policy or national security, you are not going to start at the Iowa state legislature. You are going to come to Washington and probably work for the Executive Branch, where what matters is bureaucratic ability to push your agenda - not political ability. We don't have national security experts working their way through the political system. Most of the strong Congressional Democrats with serious national security credentials never ran a campaign before running for national office (See Jim Webb or Joe Sestak). Or they have been in the Senate for so long that they have become experts on this issue (See Joe Biden or Carl Levin).
This problem also translates to the consultants. Consultants make their way up the ladder by first winning local races. So all those direct mailing skills that they learn about domestic issues just don't apply to foreign policy and national security. Then they find themselves in national races and are not nearly as comfortable with the issue and prefer to fall back on domestic issues. Of course there is the traditional Democratic aversion to these issues, which traditionally have been a Republican strength.
So in short. Part of the problem is with the foreign policy wonks who need to play a more active role in politics and accept that fact. But part of the problem is also with progressive and Democratic politicians who haven't always been comfortable with these issues. What needs to change here is that there needs to be some responsibility on the part of local politicians who aspire for national office to get interested in national security issues earlier. And there needs to be more work in the progressive community to build that kind of support system that helps these types of politicians and also trains more foreign policy wonks in the ways of politics.
Though there are policy areas beyond foreignp olicy that national politicians have to tackle that local ones do not, Goldenberg is generally right, and the gist of what Yglesias, Ezra, and Rosmiller have to say is also spot-on. Wonks need to get more political and more in touch with what it means to organize and fight for your foreign policy vision among voters themselves. But the other side of the coin is that, from what I've noticed, political operatives in the Democratic Party tend to seriously undervalue substantive arguments for a different way of governing. That is, there's a lot of political tradition and polling around being hawkish and nationalistic, there's just not that much tradition around mocking nationalists and warmongers. There aren't very many races run against war profiteers and on peace platforms, not because it's not a viable platform but because no one knows if it's a viable platform. It's never tried or even polled. Who knows whether it will work? People want change, and peace is certainly change.
Operatives like what's worked before, it's what they trust and what they know. If a foreign policy wonk came in and said 'I want 10% of the campaign budget to go to foreign policy ideas', most senior staffers would probably laugh them out of the room except... the candidate, who is the only one involved in the campaign that structurally cannot look ahead to their next campaign (note that I don't think 10% of the budget going to foreign policy is a good or even workable idea, it's just a thought experiment). The candidate is thinking about how to win that campaign and how to govern, and usually is very interested in new policy ideas. It's the pollster and the media consultant that don't know how to sell a progressive foreign policy as part of a narrative that are a big problem. During a foreign policy crisis, Democratic campaigns get defensive and often wait for the right to chime in first. That's shifting, but it was a big problem.
This problem, of course, extends way beyond foreign policy. It extends towards all policy areas, since progressive policy groups often lock themselves into the closet of wonkery and come out with policy books that are useless for political messaging. They don't teach media consultants how to sell their ideas and so those ideas don't get sold, and media consultants are often really bad at selling narratives, period, and lobby for their real money while doing cute campaign work on the side (look at Tony Podesta working Pennsylvania for Clinton).
Anyway, the answer really has to be a cultural and institutional shift in organizing. We need cross-training, that is, a lot more mixing among foreign policy types and campaign operatives, so that the conventional wisdom can gradually be moved away from 'let's take the edge off the withdrawal plan so we don't look like crazy lefties' to 'let's make sure we talk about zero nuclear weapons so we don't look like crazy conservatives'. The right does this through their think tanks, but also through their innumerable defense contractors, lobby shops, and corporate strongholds, all of whom are intertwined with their political campaign apparatus. We're seeing it with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank-ish group that is now actually and clumsily running ads against Democrats.
Already, mixing our communities is working. Look at today's vote on FISA, where Democrats in the House voted down a serious Bush national security initiative for the first time I can remember because of substantive arguments tied to political campaigning. So we're solving the problem as we speak, though it could be solved faster if donors would more aggressively support groups like the National Security Network, where a lot of the new thinking in progressive foreign policy is being organized around political sustainability.
Anyway, those are some more thoughts. I got a lot of positive feedback around my post on foreign policy organizing so I figured I'd do a follow-up.
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