The Sorry State of Public Discourse

In the interest of at least partial disclosure, I should note first of all that I'm a Democrat. I'm not, however, a yell0w-dog Democrat (that is, a Democrat who would vote for any candidate her party runs, even if it is a yellow dog). And I'm not the sort of party member who will back whatever any member of her party says in a debate with members of The Other Party. I'm a Democrat who isn't always towing the party line.

Now we've all had it with the talking heads on cable news shouting each other down. That is not the kind of public discourse that will lead to serious understanding, and (even more) found areas of agreement and compromise. We are also all tired of hearing politicians say what they think we want to hear, politicians who will say almost nothing that hasn't been market-tested in advance. We might differ as to which politicians provide the best example of this, but we agree that many are guilty. And we don't like it one bit.

So far so good. But there is another problem of public political discourse that is less obvious but also troubling. It's the decision to simply ignore the relevant, serious problems of one's position that are presented by one's political foes. While I'd like to be convinced that I'm wrong, I have to say that the most obvious recent examples of this come from the Demos. Exhibit #1: Reasonably (to my mind, anyway) the Democrats want to limit how long our troops stay in Iraq. It's been four long, costly years and there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that things will be better tomorrow, next month, or next year. But the President counters by saying that if we leave before Iraq is a stable democracy, then all hell will break loose. The country will likely become a Shiite theocracy that might well be run by extremists (think Taliban, only Shiite), and that will be a disaster for Iraq, the Middle East, and (ultimately) the U.S. What the President is saying here is not (to my ear) implausible. So I'd like to hear what the Democrats who want to push a time table for withdrawl have to say about it. What's that? I'm not hearing anything. What we get are lots of reasons why we've been in Iraq long enough (or even too long) and why the Iraqi's have to be responsible for their own security. But what do the Democrats say about what would happen if we leave on a certain date no matter what the country's condition is then? From what I can tell only Joe Biden takes this seriously (and he has a plan that doesn't involve withdrawl on a particular date).

Still related to the war in Iraq and withdrawl, there is the issue of to what extent telegraphing our pullout date to the enemy puts us in a bad military position. The Democrats, sure that the war was wrong to begin with and has been poorly managed (two points on which I am definitely in agreement), insist that we can't stay there forever and that we need to specify a date when we will pull out. While that is, in itself, not unreasonable, there is still the legitimate question about to what degree our announcing our date of departure might be a significant aid to our enemies. So far, I've heard no Democrat take this issue head on. Why is that? Why is it that the good concerns/objections of our political opponents aren't deemed worthy of response? From what I can tell the reason is that in our current political climate what matters is scoring points with voters/poll-respondents today and not with what is really in our long-term national interest. This is surely a deplorable state of affairs for anyone who cares about where our country is heading.

We should call upon our leaders to address the key objections to their policy views and to tell us why their position is correct even with their opponents best objections in mind.