Spinning the Bush Doctrine

Read this article and you'll discover that the only experts who support this view -- that Palin's confusion was to be expected because there are so many versions of the Bush Doctrine -- are people who presently or in the past worked for the Bush Administration and/or McCain-Palin. Charles Krauthammer has a column making a similar argument to this story -- odd coincidence -- suggesting this is the new spin to show that Gibson is a liberal elitist who sandbagged Palin, and that he was wrong on top of it. But Gibson is the same man who twice defended GOP positions on tax breaks while moderating Democratic debates, who believed that your typical college professor, firefighter, or cop would be affected by increasing taxes on incomes over $200,000 (I wish), and who tag-teamed Obama in that last Obama-Clinton debate with questions about Rev. Wright and assorted other gotchas.

As for the claim that there are many Bush Doctrines, well, not in the literature on the Bush Administration's conduct of the war on terror. There you'll find pretty consistent usage of the term to refer to the two significant breaks made by Bush from previous doctrine: (1) rejecting deterrence and containment; and (2) arguing for a right to anticipatory wars of defense -- that is, preventative war in which we don't need evidence of an imminent attack, but only a belief that someone will attack us at some point in the future. The emphasis on democratization, that began to be emphasized shortly before the invasion of Iraq, is something that goes back at least as far as Wilson (as Krauthammer notes). Claiming it the Bush Doctrine would be sort of like renaming the Monroe Doctrine the Kennedy Doctrine (since JFK also articulated a view like Monroe's).

While the Obama-Biden campaign needs to worry about the way that McCain-Palin successfully spin media coverage (and about the fact that Palin continues to be the focus rather than McCain, since their convention sought to focus voters' attention on McCain's flip-flops and on how his policies ran against popular sentiment), I think that there's also reason for anyone who believes we face serious foreign policy challenges to be concerned that the "reality-based" community remains on the defensive even several years after public disaffection with Bush and his administration became widespread. Ronald Reagan once famously misspoke, saying "Facts are stupid things." Apparently, his slip was prescient.