Brown’s National Security Victory

Posted By Jamie Glazov On January 25, 2010 @ 12:27 am In FrontPage | 3 Comments



Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a columnist for National Review. His book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad [1] (Encounter Books, 200, has just been released in paperback with a new preface. Check out a description [2] from Encounter Books.



FP: Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts and how it was the issue of national-security that put Brown over Coakley.

Can you talk a bit about that? The people seemed to have cared about terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants, yes?


McCarthy: Jamie, great to be here as always. And you’re right. The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting. While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places. Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives. Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism. It evidently made a huge difference to voters.


FP: What do you think of how Bush was treated on this whole issue?


McCarthy: As many of us predicted during the Bush years when the president was being hammered by the Left and the press, history is treating him much more kindly on the national security front. His movement of the country to a war-footing rather than treating international terrorism as a criminal justice matter was common sense, but common sense cuts against the Washington grain so it took a strong president to do it. Now, on issue after issue, he is being vindicated—he and Vice President Cheney, who has become the country’s leading voice on national security, after spending years being vilified.

FP: What role did McCain play?

McCarthy: Sen. McCain is, as ever, a mixed bag. He’s recently been very good on the need to treat the enemy as an enemy, not as a defendant. So that was helpful to Brown. But it can’t be forgotten that McCain was the force behind the libel of Bush as a torture monger and the consequent ruination of our interrogation policy. And it was the “McCain Amendmentâ€