that President Bush is helping the Democratic party by selling the public on an idealistic foreign policy with which Democrats will, in the long run, be more comfortable than Republicans. “It’s not a given that Democrats will be able to rise above their partisan dislike of Mr. Bush’s war, and their broader suspicion of United States power, in order to embrace democratization. But by 2008 the job of consolidating democracy will probably be primarily nonmilitary in nature. It will involve financing and training indigenous political activists, helping to build highways, schools and hospitals, and nurturing democratic institutions like a free press and labor unions. Which is to say, all the things Republicans roll their eyes at and Democrats have long embraced.”

Now let’s assume that the top foreign-policy issue of 2008 will be training activists abroad, etc.; that Democrats will be more enthusiastic about this agenda than Republicans; and that the public will support this agenda. Even if all these conditions were met, how much would the Democrats really be helped? If that’s what the foreign-policy debate looks like in 2008, then foreign policy isn’t going to be much of an issue in the elections that year.

Now that would certainly be better for the Democratic party than if foreign policy were a big issue that hurt it, as in 2004. But the party’s increased fortunes would owe entirely to the fact that the foreign policy issue had gotten less politically salient. It would not be because Bush had sold the public on Democratic ideas.