THE VIRGINIA ELECTIONS PART I: DEMISE OF THE DEMOCRATS? NOT SO FAST!

                                                             

A Republican victory in Virginia’s off-year elections (and a closer than expected win by incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy in New Jersey’s governor’s race) prompted a spate of media stories about the Democratic Party’s supposedly dismal

electoral prospects. Coupled with President Biden’s falling poll numbers, the loss by former Governor Terry McAuliffe to Glenn Youngkin and GOP gains in the Virginia legislature generated rampant speculation about Democratic prospects in the 2022 midterms and through 2024.  Some

pundits suggested it’s a foregone conclusion we’ll have a Republican Congress in 2023 and a Republican in the White House in January 2025.   We don’t subscribe to the hype, but we recognize the Virginia outcome merits discussion of where Democrats stand and what they must do so they can keep a sufficient numerical advantage.

The question takes on so much importance because

of our fractured political landscape. Republicans seem bent on destroying Democracy. Only the Democratic Party obstructs the way. It’s essential, therefore, to evaluate where Democrats stand with the electorate

and understand how the country maintains this precarious equilibrium and doesn’t buy into the Republican zero-sum game.

 

The Narrative

Virginia has trended increasingly Democratic in

recent years. Biden won the state 54-44 in 2020. George W. Bush, with a 53-45 victory over John Kerry in 2004, was the last Republican presidential candidate who won the state.  Both Virginia’s Democratic senators, 2016 vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine and Mark

Warner, easily won reelection the last time they ran (Kaine, 57-41 in 2018 and Warner, 56-44 in 2020). In 2017, in addition to the 53-45 gubernatorial victory of Ralph Northam, Democrats won majorities in both houses

of the Virginia legislature. A year later, they flipped control of the state’s congressional delegation. Because of these outcomes, the view of Virginia as a swing state eroded. Before the 2021 elections, many observers saw it as safe Democratic territory.

                                              

That prognosis, however, masked another truth

about Virginia. In its quirky odd-year races that follow election of a new president, the candidate of the party that lost the presidency usually wins the Virginia governor’s chair the next year. That happened when Northam won in 2017 following Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. After Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, the next year Republican Bob McDonald took the Virginia governor’s race. In 2001, after George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential triumph, Warner captured the Virginia governorship. Republican George Allen won in Virginia in 1993 after Bill Clinton took the White House in 1992. Democrat Doug Wilder, the state’s first black governor, won in 1989 after George H.W. Bush captured the 1988 presidential election.

Virginia’s voters apparently like this arrangement, since they’ve engineered it so often. Perhaps analysts need not look beyond the history books for an understanding of the 2021 outcome.    

 

The Other Explanations             

Despite the history, however, political observers offered other explanations for Youngkin’s win and McAuliffe’s defeat:

·    The fact House Democrats didn’t pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill before the election. They approved it a few days later, but Warner asserted McAuliffe might have won if he could have campaigned on the roads, bridges, and other improvements the state would receive under the bill.

·    The Critical Race Theory boogey man. Despite no evidence any Virginia school district teaches Critical Race Theory or anything like it, Youngkin capitalized on the concerns of white parents about what’s being taught about race in public schools. McAuliffe made things worse with a tone-deaf comment that he didn’t “believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

·    Biden’s performance as president. This explanation begins with the messy Afghanistan exit. McAuliffe tied himself closely to Biden. Some conservative commentators argued that as Biden’s poll numbers fell in the wake of the bad Afghanistan optics, McAuliffe suffered some of the fallout.

·    Economic anxiety. Even if the economy is doing reasonably well in bouncing back from the pandemic, fears about inflation have ramped up. Some thought that hurt McAuliffe as well.  

 

Virginia and Malcom Gladwell

We’ve taken note before of the work of social commentator Malcom Gladwell who observed in

his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, that one thing seldom causes an airplane crash. Instead, most air disasters result from a cascading series of events piled on top of each other. We think that also applies to political outcomes. Races one candidate should win but doesn’t – as happened with McAuliffe – usually have many explanations, not one.

Our list of what may have created the Virginia result probably isn’t all inclusive. Other things could have played a role.  But the cause is important in light of the question we began with: What does the Virginia outcome say about where the Democratic Party stands with the electorate as the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential cycle approach?

We adhere to Gladwell’s basic principle – one thing seldom causes a disaster. We point to the things we’ve listed and raise the possibility that winning

in 2022 and 2024 requires that Democrats look at the question in an entirely different way. While not ignoring the list of  possible reasons for the 2021 Virginia loss, perhaps Democrats should focus on the broader question of what policies they must offer that will insure their

standing with the electorate in the upcoming elections. Just on the politics, the Virginia outcome suggests Democrats are not now in a good place with voters. In our next post, we’ll offer suggestions about how they might rectify that situation. 

                                      

GETTING INTO AND OUT OF AFGHANISTAN PART II: WAS THERE A BETTER WAY?

                 

As the headlines screamed the story of

America’s messy exit from Afghanistan, we decided we should focus on how the United States got involved there in the first place. What lessons can we learn from two decades there and the ultimate failure that precipitated the sloppy exit?

Our last post began that examination when we looked at the legal mechanisms for committing the United States to war and the history of skirting them. We noted that Congress doesn’t declare war anymore, even though the constitution gives it, and it alone, that power. We looked at the 1973 War Powers Act and its purpose in reigning in executive

power to make war without legislative authority. We observed how it’s been ineffective in preventing presidents from starting and

waging wars on their own.  We closed by suggesting Afghanistan perhaps demonstrated how presidents have violated the constitution and that statue.

War Fever

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror

attacks on New York and Washington, Americans were angry.  They wanted retaliation against those responsible. U.S. intelligence quickly pinned

the blame on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorists operating from safe havens provided by the Taliban in Afghanistan. President George W. Bush decided the U.S. would launch military operations against that regime.

Bush didn’t seek a declaration of war against Afghanistan. He asked for, and got, a resolution from Congress called an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It targeted anybody and everybody responsible for September 11. It passed Congress with one dissenting vote, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

That AUMF imposed no time or geographic limits. It’s still in effect. It’s been used to justify military action in all kinds of places. A lot happened that was never contemplated in either the language or the intent of that AUMF. We ask now if Bush violated the constitution and/or the War Powers Act in starting and prosecuting the Afghanistan war. What about the two presidents – Barack Obama and Donald Trump – who followed him and continued the war?

The Start

Bush and the legislators who supported the AUMF didn’t say much about how the president could use it, except that it provided the tools for avenging the deaths of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11. The public, as measured by polls, overwhelmingly supported use of military force in Afghanistan. Hardly anyone said anything except, “Go for it!”

The War Powers Act never entered into the discussion because of the AUMF. Even if Congress hadn’t declared war, even if Bush didn’t stop military action after 60 days, the AUMF seemingly gave him authority for whatever he thought necessary. The problem was that the war dragged on and on and the issues of why we went there and remained there became embroiled in the deadly combination of politics and patriotism.

Nation Building

After a while, some political leaders

questioned what the United States was doing in Afghanistan and how long we should stay. Joe Biden, as Obama’s vice president, argued that once the United States captured and killed Bin Laden, no reason existed for a continued American presence.  Among

Obama’s senior advisors, only Biden took that position. The rest either thought American interests, or Obama’s political fortunes, or both required staying. Let no president, especially a Democratic one, stand accused of being unpatriotic about U.S. military involvement in a war.

It became obvious the U.S. role was no longer avenging the September 11 attacks, or even deterring future attacks, given how the American military degraded Al Qaeda’s terrorism capacity. No, the United States became engaged in a massive nation building exercise. We tried making Afghanistan, a backward, tribal county with no history of a stable, central government, into a western-style democracy. For some Americans the war became a crusade for Afghan women and shielding them from the Taliban’s brutal interpretation of Islamic law.

It Wasn't Working

Gradually American public opinion soured on

the Afghanistan war – indeed on foreign interventions generally. Donald Trump got elected president – unexpectedly – for many reasons. One was that he pledged he’d end what he called “stupid wars” that were really about nation building. Some feared Hillary Clinton wasn’t on board with that. It may have been another of the factors that sealed her fate.

As Trump’s term wore on, he became increasingly determined to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. He too likely had concerns about the political price of an exit that might look very ugly. Trump, therefore, may simply have preferred leaving the departure to his second term, or his successor if he lost in 2020. Regardless, the public wanted out. Biden ran for president as the anti-Trump, but the two agreed the time for ending American presence in Afghanistan had come.

The way the U.S. got into Afghanistan played a role in how the country came to see the war. We got in amidst the fever generated by September 11. We accomplished the things Americans saw as reasonable objectives – catching Bin Laden and preventing Afghanistan from being used as a staging ground for attacks on the American homeland. With those done, it was time to go.

                                                      

Neither the AUMF nor the common understanding of American purpose in Afghanistan included nation building. We never debated that in the halls of Congress or on cable television, the place these things play out now. Because there was no such debate,many Americans finally saw little or no point in the war. Perhaps if we’d set limited objectives and stuck to them, we could have had a better entry and a better exit.