On September 7, 2004 Dick Cheney summed up the Republican campaign against John Kerry, warning a crowd in Des Moines, "It is absolutely essential that...on November 2 we make the right choice because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll be hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."
A campaign of fear worked. Under Karl Roves direction, Bush and Cheney constantly warned Americans that if they elected John Kerry, they were likely to die. Post-election polls showed overwhelmingly that a belief that Bush and Cheney could better protect America from foreign danger than John Kerry was the key to Bush's reelection.
Following 11 straight primary and caucus defeats, Hillary Clinton has now turned to imitating Rove's and Cheney's fear tactics in a last attempt to stop Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas.
Soft music opens over a picture of a typical American home. Cut to several small children sleeping peacefully in their beds. As we pan across the children, a phone rings with increasing urgency. An anxious mother opens the door to the children's bedroom. A narrator tells us, "It's 3 AM and your children are safe and asleep...who do you want answering the phone?" We see Hillary pick up the telephone.
The clear implication -- if it's Hillary Clinton answering the phone, your children will be safe. If it's Barack Obama you should be scared, very scared.
Karl Rove and many other political consultants have proven that fearmongering often works. While voters tell pollsters they dislike negative ads, negative ads are often effective. In close primary contests in Texas and Ohio this fearmongering ad and Clinton's other recent negative campaign tactics might be successful in changing the minds of a few percentage points worth of voters, pulling out narrow victories, and allowing her to continue her campaign all the way to the Democratic convention.
But Democrats should be angered by these kind of scare tactics at this stage of the campaign. For the past week, both Clinton and McCain have been attacking Obama as unfit to be Commander in Chief. If nonetheless Obama wins the nomination, Clinton is handing McCain lines to use in his own general election campaign ads against Obama.
A little bit of examination shows how foolish the contents of the "3 AM" ad are.
First, most foreign policy crises develop over a period of days and weeks, giving a president time to consult with her or his advisors and make a considered decision. It is mostly on TV shows like 24 and The West Wing that the phone rings to an unexpected crisis in the middle of the night. It might happen...but it's rare.
Second, Hillary has never had to answer the phone and respond to a foreign policy crisis in the middle of the night. Although she counts her 8 years as first lady as foreign policy experience, she never had security clearance and legally could not have been privy to high level national security discussions. Her foreign travels under Bill Clinton's presidency were largely of a ceremonial nature. Hillary does deserve credit for giving a speech in China challenging Chinese leaders on women's rights. But those were just words -- the very thing she says are meaningless when coming out of Obama's mouth -- and created no change in the treatment of Chinese women. To use an analogy, because a doctor might receive a call in the middle of the night to rush to a medical emergency, it doesn't mean that one would send her or his spouse out to treat an injured patient.
Third, Hillary has already had her "3 am moment," and in the most important national security test of the 21st century, miserably flunked the test by voting to give George Bush the authority to invade Iraq.
Hillary claims that all she meant to do was authorize Bush to conduct coercive inspections. But that claim is disingenuous. The very title of the bill was "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of the United States Armed Forces Against Iraq". Does anyone who was alive and aware at the time really think that George Bush meant to do anything but invade Iraq? Moreover, Clinton voted against the Levin Amendment that would have required Bush, if he failed to achieve a UN resolution explicitly approving the use of force, to come back to Congress for further authorization for a go-it-alone unilateral war resolution.
Clinton also claims that she voted based on the "the facts and assurances that I had at the time." That claim, too, is disingenuous. Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged Hillary to read the 90 page National Intelligence Estimate which raised doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After reading the report, Graham was so shaken by the questionable evidence that he voted against the war resolution. Hillary never bothered to read the report, so in the most important national security decision in her "35 years of public service," she was not only wrong but willfully uninformed.
There are two possibilities: Maybe, in voting for the Iraq War Resolution, Hillary really believed that Iraq was an imminent threat to America's national security. In that event she showed bad judgment in the most important foreign policy decision of her career. Alternatively, she was simply afraid that voting against the Iraq War would make her look weak on national security and harm her chances for a future presidential run. She may have been following Bill Clinton's advice that in politics, "It's better to be strong and wrong than weak and right." In that case, her vote was even worse, sending American soldiers off to kill and die out of political expediency to advance her own political career.
In either event, Hillary Clinton must take partial responsibility for the worst American foreign policy fiasco since the Vietnam War, costing tens of thousands of American casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, and close to a trillion dollars that could have been used for education, health care, disaster relief, infrastructure repair and other needs at home.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, a State Senator from Illinois, who had access to no classified briefings and had to rely only on his own innate intelligence, good judgment, and information he could learn from public sources, was prescient enough not only to oppose the Iraq War, but to predict its disastrous consequences.
At noon on October 2, 2002 -- the very day and hour that Pres. Bush and Congressional leaders announced their agreement on the Iraq War Resolution (a week before it passed) -- Obama told a crowd in Chicago's Federal Plaza, "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."
"Only words," says Clinton. Perhaps. But if the nation ever does face a "3 AM Moment," I would sooner put my trust in the man who spoke those prescient words than the candidtate who, out of bad judgment, willful ignorance, or calculated careerism put her trust in George Bush, helped send America into its worst foreign policy fiasco of the 21st century, and made America less safe.