Praise the message, blame the messenger.

• Author: Tomasky, Michael
• Position: Middle East Democracy: Who gets the credit? What are the lessons?

I didn't react to President Bush's second inaugural address with quite the same degree of hair-stiffening alarm that many liberals did. I grasped, obviously, the moments of dark irony: his line about "the unfinished work of American freedom"; and the promise that "all who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors," when there's still, it seems to me, quite a lot of ignoring going on when it suits us.

But at the same time, I was a bit chagrined whenever I heard liberal commentators or Democratic politicians slip casually from denouncing the hypocrisies embedded in the text to disparaging the goals laid out in the speech. Wait: Opposing tyranny? Expressing faith in the idea of freedom as man's best destiny? Offering encouragement to democratic dissidents? I thought our side was supposed to be for all those things. True, those lofty words invite certain questions (actually, a ferocious debate) about the policies the United States should put into place to achieve those aims. Liberals can and obviously will disagree about when, where, and how the United States should act against dictators and on behalf of struggling people. And progressives are right to point out when the administration doesn't live up to those words, or when its idea of living up to them is mainly to make a lot of things go Boom!

Much of the discussion in progressive circles so far has been misplaced: I'm less concerned with the precise question of how much credit Bush deserves for the encouraging events unfolding in the Middle East than I am with how liberalism can reclaim the rhetoric of freedom and democratization for itself. And when I say "liberalism" in that context, I mean, really, the Democratic Party, because liberal intellectuals can yap about democracy until doomsday, but it won't matter until elected Democrats take up the topic with conviction.

The record there is dispiriting to say the least. I was disgusted with the Democrats, in the months after September 11, when they had nothing to say about what the attack meant for how the United States had to engage with the world. I asked a handful of senators and representatives and their aides why they hadn't been more aggressive in laying out a public response and vision, and they always gave me variations on two answers: "Well, that's not our job; the president makes foreign policy"; or, "We have to wait until we have a candidate." Those...