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The truth is that the things democrats stand for are not "cool" in many peoples' minds. Talk, negotiations, the climate, social services are always trumped by "they hit us, now we're going to get 'em" attitude. The average citizen doesn't have the time or willingness to think about things in the long term. They vote on gut instinct and that's why the GOP focuses on the terrorism issue. Nothing stirs up the gut like fear...never mind that global warming is going to kill many more and affect our way of life to a much greater extent than terrorists can ever dream of doing. Kicking ass is cool, saving an ice cap is not.
I'm an army officer, served in Iraq, and we discussed politics over there a lot. Whenever someone blamed Clinton for the mess of too few troops to fight the war because of his down sizing, I tell them that Rumsfeld must agree with Clinton since he's fought congress every time they tried to increase the size of the military. Not even the staunchest Bush supporter had a comeback for that one.
The BS arguement that always comes up is that it's the media's and public's fault that we're not going to have the stomach to win the war. Well if you're planning and executing policy at the strategic level, say while serving as POTUS, you might want to realize that policy does not execute in a vacuum. You do not have an unlimited amount of time to get it right. If things go bad, you have to plan for public opinion going south and what you're going to do about it. The GOP never thought of what to do if Iraq would take more than a few years. You can bitch about public opinion all you want, but you're not going to magically change it, you have to manage it and plan what your successor will have dumped in his lap after the next election.
Yes the guys at the VFW are waking up, but they're still not going to go out and hug a tree, that's just not cool.
