Al Franken's appearance this Tuesday night may have been the highlight of my fall term so far. I woke up at 8 the week before to wait in line for an hour to get tickets. I ordered his new book online, hoping to read the entire thing before the speech. I could barely sit still in class on Tuesday, nearly giddy with excitement. But the speech was not quite what I had anticipated. He was just as intelligent, clever and committed to his cause as his books led me to believe. But I didn't go home feeling as energized, excited, or as hopeful as I thought I would. For while Franken exemplifies the best the Democratic Party and the progressive movement have to offer, he also displays their greatest shortcoming.
I wasn't able to complete Franken's "The Truth (with Jokes)" before Tuesday night, and ended up happy I hadn't. He spent the majority of the evening reciting different examples from the book of Bush and his administration's lies and deceptions, mostly concerning Iraq and the lead-up to war. Many of the jokes were straight out of the book, too (although his impression of the President admitting all his mistakes was both new and hilarious). But by the end of Franken's speech, after all these examples of what was wrong with the case to go to war and was is wrong in Iraq now, I was left with the question "So what do we do now? How do we fix Bush's mistakes in Iraq?" I wanted to ask this to Franken himself, but sadly I waited too long calming my nerves before going up and waiting in line for the mike, and by the time I was next to ask, the young lady near the stage signaled to me that they were all out of time. Oh well. Since almost everything else Franken had said is in the book, the answer to my question might be there as well.
In fact, I did find an answer near the end of "The Truth." Sort of. After 60 or so pages of criticisms of the current administration's conduct concerning Iraq, the best solution he offers is "I don't know what to do in Iraq." He discusses some of the different proposals he's heard: stay, leave, bring in more troops, try negotiating with the insurgents. But he defends his indecisiveness by saying that "as much as I and others have agonized over this, it doesn't matter. The Bush administration does not care what you or I think."
But it does matter. Not because I believe the Bush administration cares at all, but because all this work to identify and expose the scope of the problem is meaningless if they don't provide solutions. The White House, even with everything it's done wrong so far, has something the left doesn't: a goal for Iraq. Even if that goal, as Franken suggests in "The Truth," is only to get the administration and their cronies rich through lies, deception, and war profiteering, it is still more than the Democrats are offering.
One student on Tuesday asked Franken if in his campaign for a Senate seat in '08, which he alludes to in the epilogue of "The Truth," he is just riding his current wave of popularity of if he has any positions on the major issues. Franken responded by saying that if he had read the epilogue, he would have found what Franken's positions are. And they are in the epilogue. Not one of them concern Iraq. Not one. How is he, or any of the other Democratic candidates in '06 and '08, going to win back the House and the Senate? On domestic issues alone?
Simply put, the Democrats need some stance on Iraq policy. Obviously they can't run on a "stay the course" platform, and a "cut-and-run" solution would only throw an already unstable region into chaos. But an "I don't know" stance is even worse. It seems to me that any time a Democrat is asked "What should we do in Iraq?" the only answer they give is "We shouldn't have gone in the first place." Maybe I'm crazy, but that doesn't seem to me like an answer at all. Unless, of course, Democrats plan on creating a time machine and running a sort of "Leaders of Yesterday" campaign. Maybe Democrats have been focused so much on the deception and lies of the past and the present, they've forgotten to look towards the future.
I hate to have to criticize the Democrats this way, because I really want them to succeed. I'm a registered Democrat myself, and I would love to see my party lead this country in a new and brighter direction. But we can't lead the country if we don't have a direction in which to lead. It doesn't have to be a perfect strategy, but the country needs to know that the Democrats have some plan to lead us out of the quagmire the Republican leadership has gotten us into. Maybe I'm wrong about all this. Maybe the Democrats do have a plan for Iraq, but just haven't been vocal enough for people like me, people who aren't political junkies, people who prefer "The Daily Show" to "Meet the Press," to hear the message. Or maybe they've been so focused on criticizing the right because they seek only to win elections rather than advance policy. I hope not. It's possible that Bush has screwed up so badly that there actually is no good solution to Iraq, but I doubt it. Whatever the case, though, I do agree that the Bush administration has failed us, and we need to move in a new direction. They say that "knowing the problem is half the solution." I think now it's time for Democrats to move on to the other half.
