2010: The Democrats' Napolitano problem

At least some Obamaphiles are still complaining that Napolitano is getting a bum rap, and they almost have a point. No one person deserves the blame for the unmitigated disaster that is U.S. air-travel security, which has done wonders for manufacturers of tiny plastic bottles of toothpaste and little else in the years since 9/11. Like almost everything else that comes out of the federal government, the effort to improve air-travel security became a free-for-all for rent-seeking scoundrels looking to cash in on the fears and anxieties of the American public. The truth is that after the system inevitably fails, we turn to our Homeland Security officials for a show of ritual self-abasement. That’s where Napolitano went wrong. Rather than apologize profusely and insist that she’d get to the bottom of a broken system, she gave it a “Heckuvajob”-like endorsement with her now-infamous “the system worked” spiel. Now that she’s shrewdly and speedily reversed himself—it turns out that her words were “taken out of context,” which is how George W. Bush felt on more than one occasion—my guess is that Napolitano will survive.

The real and lasting damage, however, is not to Janet Napolitano’s tenure in the Obama cabinet. Rather, it is to Democrats running in 2010. One of the quirky things about the post-9/11 political landscape is the way national security issues subtly changed the electoral map. In 2004, when George W. Bush was supposedly the candidate of hard right evangelicals, he did far better than expected in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, where a decent number of middle-class suburbanites—including many Jewish and secular voters—decided that only trigger-happy Republicans intended to take the fight to the terrorists. Now, as Chris Dodd struggles to hold on to his Senate seat, you have Republican Rob Simmons, a CIA veteran, tearing into him for, in his words, sponsoring “an amendment that cut aviation security funding for explosive detective systems that may have prevented Abdulmutallab from ever boarding the plane and putting so many American lives at risk.” Ouch. Whether Simmons’s tough accusations are fair or not—I think they are—they’ll make a powerful 30-second spot. For those who cry foul, try to imagine a world in which the Rahm Emanuel of 2006 refused to use this massive foul-up against Republican incumbents as a matter of principle.