Duck Season

Viking Pundit links to this Hill piece which reports that in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina only 1-2% of likely Democratic primary voters consider Homeland Defense or Terrorism as the concern which worries them the most.

Firing up the WayBack Machine yields us this Michael Totten post from last Sunday where the numbers are spun differently. "Liberals and Democrats are not pacifists" Michael claims. To support his claim Michael links to a blog which focuses on a different set of numbers from the same polling our friend Eric linked to. (Also see the WaPo.)

In these same states a majority of likely Democratic voters said "they prefer a presidential nominee who supported military action against Iraq but criticized President Bush for failing to assemble international support over a candidate who opposed military action from the beginning..."

So what's going on here? Is Eric spinning things to disavow any legitimacy in Democratic politics, or is Michael spinning to preserve the manliness of liberal dissent? Have we reached a Doonesbury moment? (Damn you Eric for blogging about Doonesbury before I had the chance. Why don't you take a day off every now and then, eh?)

My gut feeling: Primary voters are trying to have their cake and eat it too, and though I can't prove it, I suspect that they're not alone. The polling results cited above aren't the result of the spotlight being shone on some partisan liberal whack-jobs, I think they reflect a very real and well founded concern for the progress of the development work being done in Iraq. If more people understood what we were doing in Iraq, what our billions of dollars are providing for the Iraqi people, and what we expect of Iraq once our job there is finished, then perhaps these people would understand the connection between the rebuilding of Iraq and the war on terror.

Nation building is an entirely new experience for this country, and although eery connections to the late 1940s Europe might cause some to be even less receptive to liberal complaints, on a whole these numbers might suggest to the President that the people of the United States deserve to know more about the reconstruction of Iraq than "it's going on as we speak, and just as soon as it's done we'll let you know."