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Daniel Henninger: A Quiet Majority Replaces Vietnam's "Silent Majority."

[Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page]

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is an aphorism of uncertain truth everyone seems to have etched into their minds. Who can forget? From the sound of the "antiwar" tom-toms thumping across the land, forgetting the past is the one thing America doesn't have to worry about. We routinely open the sepulchers of memory, and just now it is the "ghost of Vietnam" that is strolling among us.

Gary Hart, a former Democratic senator from Colorado who ran for president twice and worked on the McGovern campaign, published an op-ed in the Washington Post this week in which he exhorted someone in his party to actively oppose Mr. Bush on the war--to "jump on the hot stove" of Iraq, notwithstanding the Democrats' searing experience with Vietnam.

Chuck Hagel, a senator from Nebraska and current presidential marathoner, is beating his singular path to the nomination by explicitly saying that as in Vietnam, we are "bogged down" in Iraq and "need to be out." Also on the yellow brick road to the presidency, Democratic senator Russ Feingold has called for withdrawal from Iraq by Dec 31, 2006

Maybe Santayana was misquoted. Maybe what he meant to say is those who remember history are condemned to repeat it. And repeat it, and repeat it. ...

Any politician aspiring to the presidency who gets the call wrong on the Iraq war may find himself in the ditch George McGovern dug for his party in 1972--with 37.5% of the vote. Perhaps the reason Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden aren't jumping in front of Cindy's parade is that as a matter of species survival they're required to keep an ear to the ground. And you know what, the times really have changed since Vietnam.
Richard Nixon, amid a similar low ebb of popularity with Vietnam, gave a famous speech in 1969. This was the year after the Tet offensive, which caused Walter Cronkite's famous Hagel-like throwing in of the towel. In that speech Nixon described a "great silent majority" in America. The idea, of course, was that the daily media attention commanded by the antiwar movement was missing a class of Americans who sat home seething at the behavior of the protesters.

Today, because of the Internet, no one has to seethe in silence, as wired activists in both parties proved in 2004's high-tech election, and now. But it may be that the current infatuation with anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment is again missing a political current flowing beneath the surface of the news, just as the media missed the silent majority 40 years ago and the values voters in the 2004 election.

I would call this faction the Quiet Majority. These people are organized and they are pro-active. But they pass beneath our politics unnoticed because they're about something deeper than TV face-time. There is a large number of groups that have organized in the past three years solely to support the American troops in Iraq. ...

Read entire article at WSJ