POLITICAL ANALYSIS:

The Peculiar Strategies of Jeremy Rosner, Democratic Party Consultant

Mr. Rosner writes,

“Over the next two years, Democrats need to make several principles clear at every turn. First, whether measured in floor time or rhetoric, we place as much emphasis on national security as domestic priorities. Second, we offer a broad program for fighting terror and strengthening our security that goes beyond opposition to Bush’s policies in Iraq. Third, we have a long-term commitment to rebuilding our over-stretched military, caring for this war’s veterans, and creating stronger relations with the military leadership. Fourth, despite the costs and setbacks in Iraq, we remain committed to an outward-looking and idealistic foreign policy that promotes the expansion of democracy, human rights, global environmental quality, trade, and economic opportunity for the world’s poorest citizens.”

In his very clear and explicit statement, Mr. Rosner advises the Democratic opposition to the neoconservative Bush administration that it should adopt its failed and unpopular policies; increase the military budgets that have led to the largest deficits in the history of the world and leverage this bloated and obese military as the primary method of enforcing the failed interventionist and myopic foreign policy modeled on the Bush Doctrine. Nowhere in his prescription for the Democratic Party does Mr. Rosner suggest that he has any quarrel with the pre-emptive war policy of the Bush Doctrine, a policy that has just been rebuked by the American voters in the recent elections and been castigated by the world’s leading authorities on international law. From his own writings, it is impossible to distinguish him from the neoconservative mainstream that dominates the Republican Party.

In his current state, Mr. Rosner is now unquestionably a fount of unsound advice, and he should no longer be taken any more seriously by Democrats than his fellow neocons, including Joseph Lieberman, Al From, Bruce Reed, Stephen Hadley, Douglas Feith or William Kristol.

Mr. Rosner launched his dubious analysis on the premise that 2006 represented the third 'national security' election in America. Bafflingly, Mr. Rosner must have read this year’s election as a defeat for those Democrats who advocated a change of course in Iraq in particular and on neoconservative theory in general by moving away from the ideological extremism that has led to the US calamity in the Middle East and to the global collapse of America's standing in the world. Nowhere in his latest writings does Mr. Rosner criticize the ideology underpinning our going to war against Iraq.

In adopting his counterintuitive position, Mr. Rosner is now decisively to the right of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that is headed by Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton.

Embarrassingly for Mr. Rosner, a new poll has just demolished all of his central recommendations. World Public Opinion just published their latest findings that not merely undermine, but explode the myths at the heart of Mr. Rosner’s curious theory of the American electorate. Thanks to World Public Opinion, we now know that American voters not only reject the overly aggressive neoconservative agenda that defines the Bush Era, but they also believe that the excesses of that egregious policy have been bad for America and made us less safe.

By a margin of two to one, Americans reject the overt aggression of the Bush-Cheney White House. By a margin of five to one, Americans repudiate the absurd notion that our diplomats should refuse to talk to nations with whom we disagree, i.e. Iran, Syria and the Palestinians. The World Public Opinion poll turns Mr. Rosner’s laundry list of right-wing recommendations to toast.

You might well ask, "Who is Jeremy Rosner?" According to his own online biography, he is a card-carrying member of the Public Policy Institute (PPI)—the think tank controlled by the notorious, right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). A former staff member of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rosner is a co-author of With All Our Might, A Progressive [sic] Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, a book launched by the DLC last year that advocated a starkly Islamophobic and stridently neoconservative agenda based on increasing the size and cost of the US military, as well as the policy of frequent and reflexive military interventions into the internal affairs of foreign nations. As a longstanding supporter of the war in Iraq, Mr. Rosner and his co-authors sought to continue the neoconservative program of global hegemony and American imperialism that are the dreams of George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice – not to mention the bevy of neoconservative intellectuals from William Kristol and Elliot Abrams to Richard Perle and John Bolton.

Today, American taxpayers spend ten times as much money on their groaning military budget as the second largest military spender in the world—Russia. America's military and its arsenal are—by a very wide margin—the most elaborate and the largest in the known universe. Military spending is the largest single factor driving America's massive debt mountain—again the largest in the known universe. For those who read this column who have not traveled or lived outside America, in foreign lands the emphasis on the military-industrial complex is approximately one per cent as intense as in the United States.

Jeremy Rosner has been a business partner of Stanley Greenberg for several years, and his client list is fascinating. On their corporate website, Mr. Rosner lists as his clients: Joe Lieberman; Tony Blair; a host of neoconservative candidates and parties in Eastern Europe and Latin America; The Israel Project and the notorious arms manufacturer, Monsanto.

What Democrats must not do now—is to not listen to this sort of misguided and miscalculated “analysis” any longer, from any source—including the desperately unconvincing Mr. Rosner, who has customarily charged his lengthening list of clients substantial sums of money for his peculiar and oblique counsel.

Just glancing over Mr. Rosner’s latest post-election pronouncements, it would appear that he and Mr. Greenberg have far too much influence with the American media and within the right wing of the Democratic Party.

Immediately following the triumphant midterm elections, Mr. Greenberg swiftly adopted pretzel logic to join together with another of his plethora of business partners, James Carville, in calling for the immediate sacking of Governor Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Greenberg’s abrupt recommendation seemed to be a rather odd position for these two wealthy political consultants to take at the time—and it still does. Both Mr. Carville and Mr. Greenberg lambasted Governor Dean for having won the midterm election, but—from all appearances—they do not know how or why the election was, in fact, won by the Democrats.

Apparently, Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Carville still do not understand the revolution in political strategy that has unfolded right under their very noses—and knocked them and their now-discredited techniques of dilapidated polling and its product of pseudo-centrism into the dustbin of strategic history. In a whirlwind of a career in national politics, Governor Dean has revolutionized the strategy of the Democratic Party. By using the internet and running to the strength of the party in its vibrant grassroots—and in reinvigorating the body politic of the party across the entire fifty states—Governor Dean masterminded the resurgence of a political party that had become afflicted with a cluster of geriatric symptoms: depression; lassitude; memory loss; energy drop; lack of concentration; inability to focus; myopia; cataracts and a sometimes blinding and habitual disorientation punctuated by nonsensical and conflicting pronouncements.

America does not need a huge, mechanistic military bristling with the most costly and intricate high-tech weaponry in the history of creation. Such a national security policy is decidedly counterproductive, as we are seeing from eyewitness accounts every day in Iraq.

Neither does America need its massively expensive global barracks of 745 military bases scattered across the surface of the earth and embedded into 130 sovereign nations.

Nor does America need its vast global gulag of secret prisons where prisoners are rendered and subjected to torture and increasingly Orwellian models of mind and thought control.

America does need a humanitarian military capable of refusing the imperialist designs of corrupt politicians like George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.

According to a recent interview with Gore Vidal, Americans are now witnessing the collapse of the command authority of the Bush White House over the US military, which has long resented the massive mismanagement emanating from Donald Rumsfeld's office in the Pentagon.

What America must not do now is countenance any further right-wing agendas masquerading as “progressive”—agendas like the counterintuitive nonsense expounded by the likes of Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Rosner, Mr. Quinlan and Mr. Carville.

• How Democrats Won the Third National Security Election and What We Must Do Now
• The Next Challenge: Locking in Democratic Gains on National Security
• DLC | New Dem Dispatch | November 10, 2006 What's Next for Democrats?
• Jeremy Rosner: Biography
• Americans Believe U.S. International Strategy Has Backfired / Majorities See World More Fearful of U.S. Military Force, Making Governments More Likely to Pursue WMD - Public Opposes Setting Goal of Regime Change in Problem Countries