'Pubs are from Mars, Dems from venus?

[dude1394]

This article pretty much sums up the choices.

war and peace

Politics: Two parties? It's more like two planets. Republicans have embraced the struggle against terror as their defining cause. Democrats keep trying to change the subject, but reality gets in their way.

We can say at least this much after watching the conventions, hearing the speeches and digesting all the political debate of the past several weeks: Voters have real choice this fall, a choice both stark and profound.

It's not just that the Republicans and Democrats have their usual programmatic differences. These are significant, especially in health care, taxes and entitlement reform. But the divide this year runs deeper than usual, right down to basic definitions of reality.

Republicans, in last week's convention, made it clear that their defining event is 9-11 and that the war on terror trumps all other concerns. There's that war — framed as a fight for liberty, not just security — and then there's everything else, with a distinctly lower degree of importance.

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What of the Democrats? This party has strong views about the war, too. But those views are sharply divided, especially on Iraq, and they have found expression in the confused rhetoric coming from the top of the party.

Sen. John Kerry is everywhere and nowhere on Iraq, neither backing nor opposing the war consistently, and offering no coherent plan for dealing with Iraq when he takes office.

When pressed to answer a charge or take a stand, his impulse is to change the subject to a war 35 years ago. That tactic has blown up in his face, reminding Vietnam vets of his old slanders against them. But he can't let it go. The last we heard, he was trying to make some kind of case out of Dick Cheney's draft deferments.

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After Democrat Sen. Zell Miller blasted his party over security, Edwards asked why he wasn't hearing "anger and venom" about all the Americans who lost jobs and health insurance. The Democrats like to note that Bush has overseen the largest one-term loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover, as if today's economy is anything remotely like that of the Depression.

That "anger and venom" line gives us some idea of the Democrats' target voter. It's someone who puts the economy front and center as an issue and doesn't require clarity from a presidential ticket on matters of war and peace. A few people may fit this description, and millions of others (who really don't care about the economy) will vote for Kerry simply because they hate Bush.

But with unemployment at 5.4%, the same level it was when Bush's father was elected in 1988 and Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996, the jobs picture just isn't bad enough to rattle people and get 9-11 out of their heads.

The Democrats can pretend all they want to be running against Hoover in 1932. But Bush wears the mantle of a wartime leader — think of FDR in 1944 — and his is the more convincing reality.