Real Vague

The Democrats' national-security plan is bland and banal—but the Republicans' is worse.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, April 3, 2006, at 6:16 PM

The Democrats' biggest challenge these days is persuading the American public that they, too, have the cojones to storm shores and drop bombs should the need arise, and so last week the party's congressional honchos released a brief, stars-and-stripes-lined document titled Real Security: The Democratic Plan To Protect America and Restore Leadership in the World.

It's more a rough outline than a "plan"; it raises at least as many questions as it answers; it reeks of banality. Then again, it's a committee-drafted, election-year banner, not a treatise in Foreign Affairs or an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Does it do the job? Will it assuage independent voters who dislike Bush but worry that liberals lack resolve? Probably not, by itself, but it does introduce some themes that we'll be hearing a lot more of in the coming months.