IT WASN'T A SPEECH you'd expect to cause an uproar. Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, addressed the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee on January 18. Looking ahead to the midterm elections, Rove suggested that the Republicans had a number of issues that resonated well with the American people and might therefore serve as a basis for GOP success--among them the administration's handling of the war on terrorism. "We can go to the country on this issue," Rove said, "because [voters] trust the Republican party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America." The Democratic response was swift and harsh. Calling Rove's comments "nothing short of despicable," Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe said, "For Karl Rove to politicize the issue is an affront to the integrity of the entire U.S. military." House minority leader Richard Gephardt, speaking one day later at a meeting of the DNC, called Rove's statement "shameful," adding, "This is not a partisan issue." The tempest blew over in a couple of days, but it offered a preview of what may turn out to be one of the most significant questions in the 2002 campaign. Not, Which party is better at protecting American national security? But, Is national security a legitimate issue at all? By any reasonable standard, it should be. But the Democrats, as their behavior last January makes clear, will do their very best to try to keep the subject off the table this fall and to argue that any attempt to raise it is illegitimate. We need to be clear from the outset about just what the issue is that ought to be debated. The issue is not patriotism. Every member of Congress and every candidate running for that body presumably loves our country. Many have given tangible evidence of that commitment by serving in the military or by doing substantial volunteer work. But it is not enough just to say that we all want to protect the nation and leave it at that. The more important question is, How exactly will we enhance our national security? For all their agreement on a number of fundamental goals and values, Democrats and Republicans have sharply disagreed about the best ways to achieve those goals. Many Democrats spent much of the 1990s advocating positions and voting for national security policies that were ill-advised at the time--but look particularly embarrassing in the aftermath of September 11. If democracy means anything, it means that they ought to be held accountable for those decisions. Take the case of Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. From the very beginning of his first Senate campaign in 1990, Wellstone advocated large cuts in military spending--not incremental trimming here and there, but deep cuts in defense. In an op-ed written in 1990, for example, Wellstone advocated cutting "at least $200 billion in the military budget over the next five years" (this at a time when total defense spending was just over $300 billion). He also urged that we "halt work" not only on a national missile defense system, but on the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the Midgetman missile. In 1995, Wellstone voted to freeze defense spending for the next seven years. In 1999, he was one of just five Democratic senators who voted against a defense authorization bill that included a 4.8 percent military pay raise, at the time the largest military pay raise in 18 years. For his first 11 years in public life, in short, Wellstone staked out a clear philosophy of national defense. With the end of the Cold War, he insisted, America no longer needed a very large or powerful military. Rather, we needed to put "gunboat diplomacy" behind us and "move forward toward global cooperation." Wellstone should not be allowed to walk away from that long record simply because he has been singing a slightly different tune for the last eight months. The same point applies to Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who is also up for reelection this fall. One of the cornerstones of Harkin's career has been his opposition to defense spending. While running for president in 1992, Harkin called for a 50 percent reduction in the military budget. Like Wellstone, he has voted for just about every resolution to cut defense spending that has made it to the Senate floor. A good case can be made that in his past campaigns Harkin derived some net political advantage from his calls for defense cuts. The public wasn't too concerned about the nation's security in 1990 or 1996. More important, cutting the defense budget solved an otherwise difficult problem for Harkin: It allowed him to explain how he could increase spending on education and health care without increasing taxes. It will be a signal disservice to the principle of democratic accountability if Harkin is not required to defend his record just because it no longer works to his benefit. Did Wellstone's and Harkin's actions make it more difficult for America to respond effectively to the events of September 11? The answer is probably no--but only because their advice was generally ignored. The military budget was not cut by $200 billion or 50 percent; it wasn't even frozen for seven years. And the 1999 pay raise did pass. As it is, military analysts may at some point raise questions about just how well prepared the American military was to take on its new assignments in Afghanistan. But it is almost inconceivable that the fighting would have gone so smoothly if the military budget had been cut in half ten years ago--particularly if we had halted work on both the B-1 and B-2 bombers. Wellstone and Harkin are admittedly exceptional cases, but only in the extremity of their opposition to defense spending. Across a considerable range of defense and national security issues, party-line votes--with most Democrats on one side and most Republicans on the other--are actually quite common. Take the issue of U.S. intelligence activities. For all the concern that Democrats have expressed over the failure to foresee the attacks of last September, throughout the 1990s Democrats were quite willing to reduce intelligence spending. In 1998, for example, the House of Representatives considered cutting the intelligence budget by 5 percent. Republicans opposed the amendment 196-21, but Democrats supported it 98-95. In 1997, a similar amendment attracted 114 Democratic supporters. Similarly, Democrats and Republicans have long taken opposite positions on whether it is desirable to make public the total amount the United States spends on intelligence activities. Republicans insisted that this was inadvisable, since it might give adversaries a better sense of American capabilities, particularly if these were in the process of being changed. The Democrats, by contrast, argued that while keeping the total spending figure classified might have been a reasonable policy during the Cold War, it was no longer necessary. The last time this issue came up before the Senate, in 1997, Republicans voted against the motion 54-1; Democrats supported it 42-2. Or take the issue of a national missile defense system, which is starting to look a lot more appealing to many people given what we know now about Osama bin Laden's obsession with acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Even many Democrats who cultivate an image of being moderate or conservative, such as Max Cleland of Georgia, have sometimes voted against missile defense. In 1999, the Senate put together what one might have thought was the most inoffensive possible resolution on this issue, pledging to deploy an "effective" nationwide defense system "as soon as technologically possible," while also promising to continue negotiated reductions in nuclear forces. Just three senators voted against this bill. One of them was Dick Durbin of Illinois, now desperately trying to convince that state's voters that he is a proper guardian of the nation's security. To be sure, all of the votes just mentioned were cast before September 11. But if this is an explanation, it is not an excuse. We elect our public officials to exercise foresight, not just to react to crises after the fact. It is no defense of Neville Chamberlain to say that after September 1939 he did everything in his power to oppose Hitler. The problem was all the things he did prior to that time, when he manifestly failed to understand what he was dealing with. If the Democrats' recent mistakes are not that serious, they are of the same type: a simple failure to recognize that, even with the Cold War over, the world was still a dangerous place. In 2002, these issues ought to be part of the debate. Many Democrats will no doubt insist that they have ready explanations for the votes they cast throughout the 1990s. The point is simply that they should be required to provide those explanations. They should not be given a free pass on the matter. National security should not be declared out of bounds simply because Democrats--or editorial writers--think the subject is unseemly or inappropriate. William G. Mayer is an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University.