After the election comes the hard part -- governing. For the incoming executive, national security should be, in some respects, much easier than domestic issues. The president largely has a free hand with which to conduct foreign policy, and contemporary interpretations of the commander in chief's authority let the White House do just about whatever it wants on the military. No need to worry about Republican filibusters or recalcitrant Blue Dogs.
On the other hand, on domestic policy Democrats normally stride confidently, sure that, at a minimum, they know what they want to do. On national security, it's a very different matter. And the politics, too, are treacherous. Yesterday's resounding progressive win reflects less a public embrace of liberal solutions to security problems, and more the fact that public attention to national security fell off the cliff. According to exit polls, Obama did worse than John Kerry (59 percent versus 73 percent) among voters who cited Iraq as their top concern, and worse (13 percent versus 14 percent) among voters who cited terrorism as their top concern. But the proportion of voters citing one of those two issues plummeted from 34 percent to 19 percent.
To be sure, Democrats did win in 2006 on a message that had a heavy foreign-policy focus. And, at a minimum, winning big in 2008 shows that liberals have passed the "threshold" of acceptability. Nobody would vote for a president who they thought was likely to lead to the violent death of themselves, their family, or their neighbors, no matter how serious they think national economic problems are. The American people have shown that they're willing to give progressive ideas a chance.
Still, unlike on domestic issues, an Obama administration won't be able to simply assume that public opinion supports them on crucial national-security questions. There remains considerable evidence that the public has more implicit faith in the GOP's ability to keep the country safe.
But the good news is that Obama could conceivably get a lot of Republican support for his ideas. Given how closely associated both the Bush administration and the McCain campaign have been with the neoconservative approach to foreign affairs, it's easy to forget how recent a development neocon dominance over the GOP is. The Reagan administration was balanced between a neoconservative element and a pragmatic element, with pragmatism mostly reigning in the key areas while neocons ran sideshows. George H.W. Bush's administration was clearly guided by pragmatic realism, with Dick Cheney's Defense Department serving as a redoubt of unimplemented neocon ideas. George W. Bush came into office seemingly determined to replicate Reaganite balance. But after wisely siding with Colin Powell and pragmatism in the now-forgotten Hainan Island Incident (a U.S. spy plane crashed on China's Hainan Island and the crew was detained until we agreed to offer a rote apology, denounced by Bill Kristol and other neocons as a "national humiliation" and the dawn of a new era of appeasement) came 9-11. Bush spent the years from 2002 to 2005 steadily upping his neocon quotient, dumping Iraq War skeptic Powell from his second-term Cabinet while clinging fast to Don Rumsfeld at the Defense Department. After the 2006 midterms came a partial rebalancing and administration policy characterized by improved security in Iraq but drift and paralysis in terms of America's larger strategic posture.
Against this background, McCain chose, somewhat perversely, to tie himself firmly to the mast of neoconservatism -- tapping Randy Scheuenemann as his head foreign-policy operative and offering unsparing confrontational rhetoric about Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and every other country that happened to come up in the course of a campaign -- as even Bush was realizing that its tenets were fundamentally unworkable.
This creates an important opportunity for Obama to co-opt the pragmatic faction of the Republican coalition into his own. Endorsements by Powell and former Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, combined with Sen. Chuck Hagel's refusal to endorse and the under-noticed absence of Sen. Richard Lugar as a McCain surrogate in Indiana even as the state achieved "swing" status, hint at what might come down the road. And, clearly, talk, widespread in Washington, of keeping Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense is motivated by similar sentiments. The sense is that Gates, co-author of a 2004 task-force report calling for engagement with Iran, knows that a bigger break with neoconservatism than what we've seen thus far is necessary.
By the same token, tapping a Hagel or a Leach for secretary of state or U.N. ambassador could serve to illustrate that a multilateral foreign policy isn't just the preference of cultural liberals from the coasts but reflects a real judgment about American security that the heartland can and should embrace.
But the trick with these bipartisan concepts is to make sure that the credibility is flowing in the right direction. Bill Clinton's choice of former Sen. Bill Cohen, a Republican, to head the Defense Department mostly seemed to signal the idea that Democrats weren't up to the job. The new administration needs to do the reverse -- build support for progressive policies by showing that it can be supported by a politically diverse group of people. The key to that is combining a bipartisan approach to personnel with a bold approach on substance. Bringing Republicans into the administration to implement a timid agenda would suggest that Obama doesn't really believe in himself. But bringing Republicans into the administration while acting decisively to fulfill Obama's campaign pledges on withdrawal from Iraq, diplomacy with Iran and Syria, and steps toward global nuclear disarmament would be just what the doctor ordered. All are good ideas on the merits, all are politically risky, but all have nontrivial levels of support among pragmatic Republican foreign-policy types. Bringing a few Republicans on board to help sell those ideas would provide political cover in the short term and help decisively cleave this bloc of elites from the conservative coalition and bring it into the progressive one.
