PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

DANIEL HENNINGER -- "Kerry Reopens Vietnam's Wounds." Quotable:

Why didn't John Kerry .. find some gracious way to make peace with the John O'Neills of the world? .. This is an election, not a Shakespearean tragedy. How come John Kerry never worked out, before the final leg of his long odyssey, a let-bygones statement, admitting the hyperbole (at the least) of his accusations of atrocity before Congress in 1971, honoring the service of colleagues who never felt obliged to apologize for Vietnam, but reserving his right to oppose that troubled war?

The reason for not doing so lies in something often asserted but little respected in our politics now -- principle. Alongside support for the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, opposition to Vietnam forms the moral bedrock of the modern Democratic Party. John Kerry .. is obliged to stand by his 1971 testimony as a matter of principle. Abandon that, and the party abandons him. Now this principle has drawn the Democrats into a game of high-stakes political poker over the Swift-boat story. Early on, it was merely John Kerry's presidential dream that the Swiftees threatened. We've moved way beyond that. Now the whole stack of moral capital the party banked from the Vietnam period has been pushed to the center of the table.

[Leftists] for years have argued that the ideas, policies and beliefs of their opposition were, whatever else, morally wanting. The basis for this claim was their domestic achievements inside government during the 1960s and--the twin pillar--their opposition in the streets to the Vietnam war. Both live on, and are used today, as the triumph of simple public morality over the soulless details of public policy. No challenge is ever permitted to either claim. Tax policy, for instance, is now argued almost wholly in terms of moral fairness. Judicial nominees are opposed as threats to some presumed moral consensus on rights and justice. If John Kerry loses this election over Vietnam, and he just may, one of the pillars that has propped up the Democratic church for more than 30 years will crack ..

.. the Democratic primaries have delivered to us a candidate who embodies nearly all the [Vietnam] period's social and political division. Choosing to place Vietnam at the center of his candidacy, Mr. Kerry -- an odd man from an odd time -- has loosed the dogs of politics and war again. Surprise, the old dogs of Vietnam still bark and bite. No one's playing the old morality card this time. They are simply telling the Vietnam veterans to shut up. Shouting them into silence worked back then, but we live in different times ..

Compare PrestoPundit from August 11. The locus classicus on the logic of the leftist moral trump card against classic liberals (i.e. "conservatives") is Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, perhaps the most significant book published in the past ten years. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack