November 12, 2002, 8:40 a.m. The Great Dem Hope Senator McCain, care to switch?

The Democrats are in trouble. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, consider the following scenario, wherein the Democrats take back the Senate within months. Step one is Mary Landrieu's successful defense of her Senate seat on December 7. Step two: Lincoln Chafee and John McCain simultaneously become Democrats next January, moving the Senate back to a 51/49 Democrat majority (with Jeffords still supporting the Democrats).

Since the election, there's been some speculation about a Chafee switch, but little said about McCain. Yet the signs are there. Shortly before the election, McCain hired as his legislative director Christine Dodd, formerly a staffer for a liberal Democratic congressman. And now Marshall Wittmann (known by his online sobriquet, "The Moose") has signed on as McCain's director of communications (after having changed his registration from Republican to Independent).

Prior to the election, there was speculation (much of it by the Moose himself) about a McCain run for president, either as an Independent or as a Democrat. At the time, McCain's office dampened the speculation of a presidential run by downplaying rumors of Wittmann's immanent appointment as communications director. But Wittmann is on board now, and it seems very likely that McCain is on the verge of announcing his presidential candidacy.

From McCain's point of view, the Democratic nomination must look mighty tantalizing right now. With antiwar liberal Nancy Pelosi as its newest high-profile spokesman, the party is digging itself ever more deeply into its rut. Even more mainstream Democratic presidential hopefuls will find it difficult to distance themselves from their party's leftist and anti-war base during the primaries. If McCain sails into the fray with his tough-minded foreign policy, war-hero credentials, and moderate-liberal domestic platform, it could electrify the public and bring moderate primary voters to the polls in droves. The other Democrats would split the leftist base, handing McCain the nomination.

By switching parties early next year, shifting the Senate, and announcing a run for the presidency, McCain would precipitate a media firestorm, and immediately set himself up as the most-credible Democratic critic of the president's war policy. Given that dynamic, moderate and even liberal Democrats will seize upon McCain as the only realistic option for taking the presidency away from Bush in '04.

This Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked John Kerry if he'd be willing to bring McCain on as his running mate. McCain, of course, would reverse the order, but the interesting thing is that Stephanopoulos was asking at all. Obviously, a McCain party-switch was on Stephanopoulos' mind. (The idea of a McCain-Kerry ticket, by the way, was first floated by Marshall Wittmann.)

Let's play out our scenario. McCain takes the Democratic nomination. Certainly, a McCain victory is imaginable. Once the issue ceases to be Bush's national-security strength against the Democrats' weakness, setbacks in the war on terror or problems with the occupation of Iraq will cut against the president. McCain will claim to have a plan. He will know how to truly transform Iraq and Afghanistan, stand up to al Qaeda, etc.

But the more-likely scenario in the event of a McCain candidacy would be Democratic meltdown and schism. With a complex and troubled occupation of Iraq, more war on the horizon, and a growing worldwide anti-American peace movement, the Democratic Left will not stick around to vote for McCain. It will bolt to the Greens, leaving Bush in the driver's seat, and the Democrats in tatters.

Of course this wild scenario will probably never play out. But it is surprisingly plausible. A Democratic recapture of the Senate is unlikely, of course. Everything has to break the right way, and Zell Miller would have to stay put. But even if a bit less electrifying, a McCain party switch that did not return power to the Democrats would still get huge media attention.

What's important here, though, is not the particular scenario, but the underlying split in the Democrats' ranks that makes all this speculation plausible. I'm stuck by how many Democrats honestly seem to believe that they would have done better in the election had they opposed the president on the war. I'm amazed that the Democrats have turned on Dick Gephardt instead of on McDermott and Bonior. None of this ought to surprise me, but I do nonetheless find it hard to believe that the case for this war is so little credited, or even understood, by the Democrats.

The exodus from Egypt keeps popping into my head — the way the Jews were forced to wander the desert for 40 years, forbidden to enter the Promised Land until the slave generation died off. I think our Vietnam syndrome is of similarly biblical proportion. Not until the baby boomers are dead and gone (and maybe not even then) will the Vietnam syndrome cease to be a fundamental factor in our national life. Have a look at Heather Hurlburt's cover piece in the latest issue of The Washington Monthly. The story it tells is of a Democratic party that cannot talk — or even think — about matters of defense and national security. The Democrats seem to be suffering from a kind of deep internal taboo on the subject of national defense.

All the talk about "chicken hawks" hasn't done much to deter or discourage the hawks from pressing their case, but I do think the "chicken hawk" theme helps explain why the Democrats are incapable of coming to grips with this war (even to coherently critique it, much less embrace it — as their Democratic forbears surely would have).

You see, when they talk about the so-called chicken hawks, the Democratic Left is really talking about themselves — about the way they would feel about themselves were they to accept the case for this war. To become a hawk, even in circumstances very different from Vietnam, would activate intolerable shame and self-doubt in those who avoided service under the banner of the peace movement. These people went beyond mere opposition to the tactics or pragmatics of Vietnam and turned anti-militarism into a kind of quasi-religious imperative. So to acknowledge that there are circumstances when patriotism, strength, and the use of force are not only justified, but noble, would shatter a moral self-image cultivated over literally decades.

That is the sort of thing that can break a party in two. For the Vietnam generation, the war issue touches on core issues of self-understanding, which clearly trumps party affiliation. Republicans don't harp on the fact that Ralph Nader's candidacy cost Gore the presidency. That only highlights the tenuous nature of the president's victory. Embarrassed by the Nader debacle, the Democrats don't have much to say about it either. But today, that remarkable, yet too little remarked episode should be very much on our minds.

The inability of the Vietnam generation to reconcile itself to a just war fought in the national interest spells potential disaster for the Democratic party. So long as the Democrats come off as weak (and how can they not?) they are doomed. Yet any Democratic leader tough enough to win over the American people on the war will drive at least a portion of his party into the arms of the Greens. If Nader could sink the Democrats when the country was evenly split and there was no war, or overriding issue, what will happen when we face a serious peace movement?

But the problem for the Democrats doesn't depend on any single scenario. Even without a McCain candidacy, or a Nader figure on the Left, a hawkish Democratic candidate means that disgruntled leftists will stay home on Election Day. I do think, though, that some sort of multiparty scenario (either a revived Green candidacy, a McCain independent candidacy, or both) is now a realistic possibility.

Of course, much depends on what happens with the war itself. Quick and unexpected success in Iraq, and in the post-war occupation, could cut both ways — discrediting the anti-war Democrats, yet also shifting the country back to domestic issues. But the war doesn't look to be ending any time soon. A difficult occupation of Iraq and a spiraling war on terror would accentuate the split in the country, energizing Republicans behind the war and the president, encouraging moderate Democratic critics, but also generating a peace movement that would demand a Green Party protest candidacy. So almost any war scenario is mostly bad for the Democrats.

The Sixties ethos will not go gentle into that goodnight. Just ask McDermott, Bonior, and Pelosi. Decades after the fact, the Vietnam protestors are trapped by their rhetoric, by their self-image, by their actions, by their very souls. They will not change. They cannot change. And because of that, it will likely be a while before the Democrats reach the Promised Lan

-- Anonymous, November 12, 2002