Everyone now seems to agree that the November election is the Democrats’ to lose.  And since I’d prefer they not lose it, let me offer a few words of advice: Stop whining about President Bush politicizing 9/11, the war on terror, Iraq or anything else.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s all true.  President Bush has politicized national security policy and used foreign policy to divide the country more than any president in modern American history.  It’ll be a big part of what I believe will be the very dark verdict history will render on his presidency.  And, yes, ‘working the refs’ has its place.

But as politics and in terms of going to the public with issues that really matter, it’s always somewhere between irrelevance and disaster.

The simple truth is that those who are miffed with President Bush for politicizing 9/11 and Iraq are already voting Democratic.  And most voters are happy to see a president crow over his victories abroad so long as he or she keeps delivering them. 

And, really, that’s as it should be, since what matters most to voters is what a president has delivered in concrete terms, not how or how well he uses his victories to political advantage at home.

Remember back to President Bush’s now notorious “Mission Accomplished” extravaganza aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003.  Democrats complained that the event cost too much taxpayer money.  They said the party at sea delayed the return of the sailors.  There were a bunch of other gripes too.

But so long as the prevailing assumption was that President Bush had delivered a solid victory on the battlefield (a false assumption, but then still widely held), all these complaints only served to marginalize Democrats and help Republicans portray them as complainers on the sidelines of the great events of the day. 

As political strategy, they were little better than spitting into a strong wind.

It wasn’t until it became clear that the president’s declaration of victory was hollow and premature that the whole sorry spectacle became an albatross that still hangs around his neck. 

That didn’t change because anyone realized it was political when they hadn’t realized it before. It changed because the ‘victory’ he was crowing about started to seem more and more like a failure.  And once that was clear, his cocksure boasting only added to the perceptions of his shortcomings as a leader. People will accept a lot from someone who delivers. But they’re merciless when a leader fails.

And that’s the point.  Today the record is pretty clear.  To all but the president’s bedrock base of supporters, pretty much everything he’s done on foreign policy looks like a hash or an abysmal failure. Even the things that were legitimate successes early on, like taking down the Taliban, have turned into failures or brewing disasters.

If the president is politicizing 9/11, which he is, people who are open to seeing that can see it already. And the way to focus attention on that is not to state the obvious. It is rather to point out the almost countless ways in which his record is one of failure.

Where’s bin Laden?

Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

Is Iraq part of the problem or part of the solution in making the United States safer from terrorism?

All these questions all but answer themselves. And all in ways profoundly damaging to the president.

And there’s one point more.  Debates over national security send messages that transcend the surface meaning of the arguments politicians construct.  They contain a meta-message.  Politicians who send a clear and forthright message signal that those qualities are ones they would exhibit in their stewardship of the nation’s defense. 

Pols who complain about the tactics of their opponents send a message of fecklessness and distractions.  They sound, in a word, like losers. 

All of which means that over the next eight weeks Democrats would do well to expunge from their political vocabulary words like “politicize,” “ashamed,” “shameless,” “inappropriate” and all the rest.

The problem isn’t that the president is politicizing national security or 9/11.  What’s almost funny if it weren’t so tragic is that he’s trying to talk up his own failed policies.  Voters know that.  Democrats just need to ask voters again and again and again over the next eight weeks if they want more of the same or a change.

Had enough?

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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