George Bush did a number on this country, there’s no question. But he didn’t manage to pass one bit of his stated domestic agenda. Namely, he couldn’t dismantle Social Security, and he couldn’t pass his immigration reform bill. Why is that?

Especially in the case of immigration reform, it was because Bush had no political capital to spend.

Immediately after September 11th, Bush’s approval rating was flirting with 90%. Now, it’s lower than Nixon, hovering near 25%. So, what happened?

Well, lots of things happened, but one big thing that happened was the war in Iraq.

Obama has some huge domestic goals. He wants to spend at least $1 trillion to get our economy back in shape. He wants to pass a health care plan that’s been in the works since the Great Depression. He wants to get our energy economy off fossil fuels. He wants to drastically reform our education system.

I’m not sure how he can do any of it if he’s stuck in an unpopular foreign war.

Right now, support for the war in Afghanistan is hovering around 50%. I’m pretty certain that support is soft, too. Americans haven’t really had to think about whether the continued war in Afghanistan is making America safer or worth its cost in blood and treasure since 2001. If they are forced to think about it again, I think many people will revise their opinions.

A popular President with a huge domestic agenda in an unpopular war has a clear historical parallel beyond Bush. As any Nixonland reader will recognize, this looks a lot like the position LBJ found himself in. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained the situation and the consequences well back in 1967:

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

As Nixonland relates, after LBJ was elected he proclaimed that “these are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” And then he declined to seek re-election because of his unpopularity. LBJ’s downfall wasn’t all about Vietnam, but it played a large role. (ZP Heller is seeing the connections to Vietnam, too.)

We should not allow the war in Afghanistan to destroy Obama’s presidency.

What happens here in America is more important to me than what happens in Afghanistan. As Jon Rainwater points out, our presence in Afghanistan may actually be increasing the terrorist threat, not reducing it. Escalation will not only make us less safe, but it will turn the tide of public opinion against Obama and force him to use political capital to defend his foreign policy. And that’s less political capital that he will have to make change here at home.

It’s guns or butter, not both. Even though Afghanistan may have once been a “just war” and “the right thing to do,” at this point, we’re facing a choice. I’m not willing to sacrifice economic recovery, health care, education, or energy for Afghanistan.

This post is part of Get Afghanistan Right. Join us!

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