Maybe Peter Beinart and I will need to chat about this next week. He thinks the Democrats came out winners on Vietnam. An excerpt:

Actually, they have. Despite today’s conventional wisdom, Democrats didn’t suffer in the 1970s for opposing Vietnam. And they’re even less likely to pay a political price for trying to end the war in Iraq. In 1973 the Senate voted to suspend funding for American military operations in Vietnam; the next year, Congress voted to cut off aid to the embattled government in Saigon. Some of today’s commentators argue that those votes devastated the Democratic Party in the mid-1970s. But if so, the Democrats had a strange way of showing it. They won the 1974 midterm elections in a landslide. Two years later, Jimmy Carter grabbed the White House. To be sure, Watergate played a major role in those victories. But if the party’s efforts to end the war weren’t the primary reason for its success, they certainly didn’t hurt.

Me: One of several problems here is that even if you agree to his argument that Vietnam didn’t hurt the Democrats in the 1970s (I think there’s a debate to be had and — hey! — we just may have it). It certainly hurt the Democrats in the 1980s. Reagan’s popularity stemmed in large part from his ability to defeat the Vietnam syndrome. Clinton would never have been elected in 1992 with his Vietnam record if the Cold War hadn’t been over, and even then it was a tough haul. The war on terror won’t be over any time soon, so they can’t rely on a political peace dividend the way Clinton did in 1992. And the Democrats seem to be working overtime to make their foreign policy stance as indecipherable as possible. Peter sees nuance. It’s not clear to me average Americans will.

Oh, and then there’s the actual problem wih the substance of what the Democrats did then — and now. But that’s an argument for another time.