How to be the LOYAL opposition

Democrats become upset when you question their patriotism. They seem to feel that trashing the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war by claiming that he “lied us into war” is the height of patriotic conduct. They seem to believe that doing everything in their power to obstruct victory (short of personally going to Iraq and planting IEDs) only fulfills their duties as the party in opposition and somehow proves their love of country.

Of course they, with the exception of Joe Lieberman and perhaps a couple of others, are not patriotic and do not love their country. For a lesson on how to be the “loyal opposition” and being patriotic while campaigning against the sitting president and his policies we need to turn our eyes back to the Second World War when Republicans ran against FDR and the Democrats while American servicemen were doing battle with the Axis.

Fortunately Jeffrey Lord has written about this in The American Spectator:

After more than a decade of losing elections to Democrats, after three straight presidential losses to Franklin D. Roosevelt -- the man conservative Republicans loved to hate -- the scent of victory was at last in the air for the GOP.

But there was a problem, and a big one at that. The previous December 7th America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. The attack was a disaster, killing 2,471 military and civilians and destroying a considerable portion of the U.S. Navy. For the second time in just over twenty years the country was now at war. Not only were we fighting the Japanese but the Germans and the Italians too.

In the partisan camps of the Republican Party there was considerable feeling that the fault for this lay personally with FDR. Some were convinced he either knew the attack was coming and let it happen to plunge the country into the war, or that he should have known and was simply incompetent. The man, they believed, was neither very bright nor very honest. Battlefields were now erupting in strange countries literally all over the world -- in Europe, Africa, Asia. So in circumstances like this, how does a political opposition approach the upcoming election?

Savage FDR? Run on a campaign of "Roosevelt lied and people died"? Should they go out and tell the American people just how dangerously incompetent the man was, that the best thing to do was make peace with Hitler and Japan's Hirohito, then elect Republicans who would simply force FDR to bring home the boys and let the rest of the world cope with chaos? After all, a few years earlier FDR himself had turned back an ocean liner filled with 937 Jews escaping the looming Holocaust. The idea of not making Hitler, Hirohito or Mussolini any angrier than they were was certainly one approach.

The Republicans did none of the above. Instead, with the President on the political ropes at last, with a burgeoning team of attractive GOP candidates all over the country they did something else.

They rallied to FDR.

I won’t take up space to go into all the reasons why Republicans were right to think that FDR had engineered America’s entry into WWII (he was right to do so, BTW). Suffice it to say that they had well grounded suspicions. But they had the good sense to realize that when the nation has been attacked and our military is fighting and dying in the field that every consideration of how we got there becomes irrelevant and the only consideration becomes how we achieve total victory. Investigations of any misconduct leading up to the war can be safely conducted only when the American flag is flying over the enemies capital.

Let’s get back to Mr. Lord’s article and see how the Republicans rallied to President Roosevelt:

"House Republicans State War Support" blared the New York Times as the election campaign heated up on September 23, 1942. Campaigning vociferously against FDR's domestic policies, the congressional Republicans issued what the Times described as a ten-point "Loyalty Declaration." What did the GOP tell the nation? That they would give the President so many of them detested "loyal, wholehearted and patriotic support in the war." They would be as one with FDR in opposing "any attempts to negotiate peace or the consideration of any peace terms until our arms have won such a decisive victory that we, together with our
Allies, are able to dictate the peace terms."

Period.

There was no mention of an "exit strategy." Good thing too. One White House political ally, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the CIO -- half the recursor to today's AFL-CIO), coached by FDR's team, passed a resolution as the campaign opened on September 1st calling on Americans to support FDR's policy "as the country prepares itself for the final gigantic drive that will carry our Armies to Berlin in 1942." As if! Allied troops didn't make it to Berlin until 1945, a full three years later. As for FDR's "exit strategy"? The U.S. is still there right now -- sixty-one years since war's end.

House Republicans weren't the only Republicans supporting FDR in 1942. Republican candidates were adamant in falling in behind the man they practically lusted to defeat.

In New York, gubernatorial candidate Thomas E. Dewey campaigned at the Cortland County Fair in rural upstate by praising the sons and daughters of farmers for working hard to produce food supplies for the war effort. He contrasted the 4-H club with the "One H, All for Hitler or All for Hirohito" club. In Connecticut the playwright and congressional candidate Clare Boothe Luce pledged herself to "total victory," saying that the fight ahead would mean "a hard war." She did not hesitate to be graphic. The horrors that were to come would include "men maiming, mutilating and burning each other and blasting each other into eternity, with women and babes buried under bombed homes, with whole peoples starving and with American seamen going down in torpedoed ships and American fliers crashing to death in flames." Running for Governor of Connecticut Raymond Baldwin stated flatly that "[t]he President of the United States is our Commander in Chief. Because we are Americans before we are Republicans, we will back him in the conduct of the war. His success is our success and we want him to succeed." At the Republican National Committee, Chairman Joseph Martin pledged "100 percent support of the war effort." And on it went with campaigning Republicans across the country.

When the Democrat Party in the early years of the 21st Century can learn to act as nobly as the Republican Party did in the middle of the 20th, then they will have a right to hold their patriotism as beyond question.

As long as they keep acting the way they are now they will have Americans who want to actually win the war wondering if we can’t possibly bring back the internment camps.