Double Jeopardy

Don't weep for Fernando Ferrer. He was the author of his own crushing defeat. In 2001, smarting over his defeat by Mark Green in the runoff for the Democratic mayoral nomination, Ferrer joined Al Sharpton in submarining the Green campaign with allegations of racial slurs. In a matter of days, they morphed Green, the longtime liberal, into an accused racist. That left the comparatively underfunded Green fighting a losing two-front war against Ferrer and Sharpton on one side and Michael Bloomberg's billions on the other.What was buried in the two-front assault on Green was the chance to reform New York's antediluvian Democratic Party. "There's a new way to run and govern, " Green told primary voters, "that ideally will produce someone who's tough and smart, and can be persuasive in boardrooms and civic meetings, with beat cops and high school seniors." A Green victory would have begun the modernization of New York's Democratic Party, which had lost its old clubhouse roots without finding a new rationale for its existence other than as an adjunct to the city's public sector unions. But Green went down to narrow defeat in 2001, and Ferrer went down in flames this year. The loss is the Democratic Party's--but also the city's. This year, the feckless Ferrer was such a flawed opponent that, once again, Bloomberg was subject to little or no critical evaluation. The press, unable to take Ferrer's retro campaign seriously, shied away from scrutinizing Bloomberg's first-term policies. And so, for the second time in four years, New York has elected a mediocre mayor. And, for the second time in four years, Fernando Ferrer is to blame. Should liberals be foreign policy idealists? Suddenly, the question is everywhere. In his new book, Power and the Idealists, tnr Contributing Editor Paul Berman argues that today's interventionists are the true heirs of the radical spirit of 1960s liberalism. In The Washington Post last month, Richard Cohen urged Democrats not to abandon idealism, writing that "a cold refusal to recognize the role that morality can play" in foreign policy should not characterize U.S. foreign policy. And, in the latest issue of The American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld argue for a modest liberal idealism--one that recognizes the Iraq war as a mistake but preserves a place for moral considerations in foreign affairs. It is good to see liberal writers resisting the trend toward realism--a denial of America's moral responsibility in world affairs--by reaffirming the primacy of idealism in the Democratic worldview. But one topic has been curiously absent from this discussion: Darfur. A reexamination of liberal foreign policy cannot consist merely of a discussion about what U.S. foreign policy has done; it must also include a consideration of what has to be done-- in Iraq, yes, but also elsewhere in the world. And anyone who calls himself a liberal ought to agree that something must be done about Darfur. In fact, Darfur is a crystal-clear test of liberals' commitment to foreign policy idealism. Compared with Iraq, it is a relatively uncomplicated test. A genocide is taking place, hundreds of thousands have died or have been displaced, and there is reason to believe that the slaughter will not end until Western troops forcibly stop it--or until the genocide's targets are all dead.

By Fred Siegel; Richard Just