JOHN LEO'S BLOG

Last week at the real Davos, Clinton demoted the terrorism threat from No.2 to No.3, behind economic inequality around the world as well as global warming. Most informed people think that climate change is very ominous and that poverty is of course a serious problem. But Clinton does not seem to think the possibility of New York or Washington disappearing in a nuclear blast is a very big deal.

Michael Crowley of the New Republic, reporting on the New York talkathon last September, wrote that "Clinton cast the war on terrorism as a blip on the radar of history."

Many Democrats seem to think this way. Fretting about racial profiling at airports and the turning over of library records of suspected terrorists is a much bigger deal than doing all we can do to avoid an apocalypse on American soil. I was distressed to see Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, more or less join the pack of those taking terrorism less seriously than politically aware adults should.

Beinart is an excellent journalist, unafraid of escaping Democratic orthodoxy. But his column in the current (February 6) New Republic discusses terrorism essentially as something inflated by White House strategists for partisan purposes. It's certainly easy to believe that some Republicans, peering into the steady stream of terrorist threats, are more inclined to single one out for public discussion just before an election and less inclined to do so during a nonelection year like 2005.

"How courageously the press does its job could help determine whether the White House strategy succeeds yet again," Beinart wrote. Isn't this basic head-in-the-sand Democratic boilerplate? A little over a year ago, Beinart wrote one of the best articles of 2004, "An Argument for a New Liberalism, a Fighting Faith." In it, he said John Kerry's nomination "was a compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to define itself for the post-September 11 world."