It was great to start downloading and listening to Wes Clark's "clarkcast" podcasts. I was especially pleased to hear the first one say that they would take a non-partisan tone, but that the policies of the Republican administration and Congress had to be gotten rid of. Listening to Clarkcasts is going to be a priority for me from now on.
I was also glad to hear that Clark had joined the increasing calls of other retired generals for replacement of Donald Rumsfeld. I'd like to add an additional reason for getting rid of Rumsfeld that I haven't seen offered by others yet. Rumsfeld is a Republican.
No, I'm not suggesting that Bush's cabinet should be replaced with Democrats. I'm still in favor of replacing Bush with a Democrat. When that Democrat (and I hope it's Wes Clark) takes office, I hope he replaces the Secretary of Defense with a Republican. We're at war.
It makes good political sense for the President and the Secretary of Defense to be from opposite parties, but no one figured that out before Honest Abe Lincoln appointed Democratic politician Edwin M. Stanton his Secretary of War. Secretary Stanton not only helped rally Democrats to the war effort but he eventually became a Republican himself.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt imitated Lincoln by appointing William Howard Taft's old Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, as his own Secretary of War as the United States prepared for World War II. Again this paid off by helping assure Republican support for the war.
Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson appointed a non-political technocrat, Robert McNamara, as Secretary of Defense. He may not have been the best Secretary, but he did help to keep the Republicans on board during the Vietnam War. Nixon had Republican Secretaries of Defense, Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger, and (gasp) Donald Rumsfeld, but that only left Democrats more free to oppose the War.
Woodrow Wilson also had a Secretary of War from his own party, Newton D. Baker, during World War I. Of course the Republicans weren't about to oppose World War I. They'd been screaming for it when Wilson was campaigning as the guy who kept us out of it. But they sure weren't going to cut him any slack about his "League of Nations" idea when he came home from France with the Treaty of Versailles. He may have sold it to the Europeans but he couldn't sell it to the Republicans, not after he left them out of both the war cabinet and the peace negotiations. Reductionists might blame World War II on Wilson's decision (and it should bear part of the blame - it did doom US participation in the League of Nations, which might have helped stop the war before it got out of hand) but that would be going too far. Hoover's Secretary of State Henry Stimson (yes, the same Stimson) offered to help the League stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria if they would grow a backbone, but they turned him down. Still, it's easy to find fault with Wilson's "my way or the highway" attitude and most historians today would.
The lesson of history in this case? Yes, we need a Democrat president to replace Bush, but we also need a non-partisan administration that can unite the country afterwards. That means whichever of the Democrats who wins in 2008 should appoint a sane, honest, qualified Republican (assuming one can be found at this late date) as Secretary of Defense for the duration of the War against Al-Qa'ida and possibly beyond.
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By asking for a sane, honest, qualified Republican I may have raised the bar impossibly high. I certainly wouldn't appoint an unqualified Republican just as a kind of political affirmative action. DLC connections aside, Clark is not Clinton, and the military experience is a big part of the difference. Someone on D-Kos claimed that appointing a Republican would reinforce the perception that Democrats couldn't handle security issues. (Indeed, from Roosevelt on, Democrats were appointing Republicans, and so were Republicans, not because Dems were unqualified, but because Republicans were more partisan. Maybe Clinton was trying to insinuate that Republicans couldn't handle security when he appointed Cohen. Maybe Bush was doing the same.)
Right now I can't think of a Republican to appoint. Can you? How about a non-partisan technocrat? I'm certainly not holding my breath waiting for Bush to appoint a qualified Democrat, much less a potential rival presidential candidate.
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