Does the Democratic Party Need a Defeat in 2008?

In repeating a theme that has been sounded before both by himself and by the likes of Zell Miller, Sen. Lieberman takes the Democratic Party to task for abandoning its core foreign policy vision:

How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

He then takes Obama to task for his unwise statement that he would meet with various and sundry America-hating despots without precondition.

Many of us on the Right have heard this lament before, both from conservative Democrats and from Republicans who want politics to stop at the water’s edge.  The contemporary Democratic Party has lost its way, lost its soul, and simply cannot be taken seriously in vital matters of security and foreign policy.

I would have thought the stinging defeat in 2004 would have made the Democrats reconsider their shrill blame-America-first stance on foreign policy that has served them and the country so ill since the 1960′s.  But instead, the Democrats have become even more shrill, even less serious, and even more dangerously naive and self-hating.

Let’s take for granted that I believe defeating the Democrats in 2008 is in the vital national interest.

Is defeat in 2008 in the interest of the Democratic Party as well?  Would the nadir that a defeat by the Secular Messiah be the final straw that would force a self-examination from within?  Or would the Democrats become even more bitter, even more angry, and even more radical than they are today?  (The mind wonders at how much room there might be to go, pressed absolutely against the radical left as the Dems are today.)

If a defeat makes the grownups and the rank & file amongst Democrats begin to question their incredibly naive and destructive foreign policy positions, and reject once and for all the Vietnam contingent from within their midst, then I think that would be an incredibly positive development for them.  They might continue to be as liberal, as leftist, and as wrongheaded (in my view, of course) on matters domestic, while still joining with the Republicans in insisting on defending America, making moral judgments about the world, and defending freedom and our way of life without apology.  I and millions of other Americans might finally be able to decide that this or that candidate’s views on social security and same sex marriage are more in line with my own without worrying that he would immediately surrender the country to the Islamists and bring back the Bad Old Carterite Days.

-TS