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Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq War, which effectively neutralized the issue politically by making it harder to criticize (John Kerry’s unfortunate argument that “I voted for it before I voted against it” exemplified the contortions the issue generated). Moreover, there was still a sense within progressive circles that national security could not be a “winning” issue politically. Inside the Kerry campaign, there were constant discussions about how soon they could drop the topic of foreign policy and switch to domestic issues that they believed would win the election.
    One lesson Democrats drew was that to be politically successful in a time of war, they needed to look “strong” and “tough,” and so Kerry made his military service in Vietnam a central part of hiscandidacy. Yet that experience proved his undoing, as the successful efforts by the Bush campaign to undermine the credibility of Kerry’s war record became a large part of his failure as a candidate. Instead, the one person who emerged from the 2004 campaign as a star was then a little known Senate candidate from Illinois, who famously delivered the keynote address at the Democratic Convention in Boston, arguing that “war must be an option sometimes, but it should never be the first option.”
    The painful 2004 loss established the foundation for Democrats’ rebirth on national security, as progressives were determined to regain their footing on these issues. Most of this happened behind the scenes, under the helpful camouflage of the Bush administration’s foreign policy which was self-destructing by the day. Democrats had studied the efforts of conservatives in the 1970s and 80s to build an infrastructure of expertise and policy advocacy that could help build consensus around their efforts, and in the four years after the 2004, progressive national security experts and leaders met and plotted their way out of the wilderness.
    They formed study groups and established new organizations to help carry this message forward and create a new generation of leaders, such as the Truman National Security Project, which was established in the days after the 2004 presidential campaign to help build a young generation of Democratic national security leaders, purposely harkening back to the strong Democratic foreign policy hands like those who had served under Presidents Truman and Kennedy, and think tanks like the Center for American Progress and the Center for a New American Security. 11
    A key part of these efforts was to strengthen the ties of Democrats with the military. Despite the eight years of a Clinton presidency and a largely successful civil-military relationship that had developed over those years, Democrats were still tarnished with the sense that there was an inherent divide between them and themilitary. Part of this was cultural—with roots in the Vietnam era—but it also stemmed from the ambivalence many Democrats still had about the use of force, and that view was newly visible.
    O UTSIDE W ASHINGTON ’ S FOREIGN policy elite, there was a larger struggle going on within the Democratic Party, a ferment created by a new class of activists and donors. There were many who discerned from the 2004 election the opposite of what Washington national security experts and politicians had concluded. They believed that the problem for Democrats was that they were too much like Republicans, and that rather than try to remake themselves, Democrats needed to return to a purer form of liberalism. They asserted that by supporting the Iraq War—and by not advocating for defunding the effort and for the immediate withdrawal of American troops—Democrats themselves were culpable in the failures of the Bush years.
    This battle was principally about Iraq, but it had actually started years before. The convulsions within liberalism began in the late 1990s, illustrated by the rise of the