Let’s get this straight. After losing a presidential election in good part because Senator Kerry argued that American foreign policy had to pass a “global test,” the Democrats now want to derail the nomination of Secretary Bolton to be the next American ambassador to the United Nations because he once lost his temper with a State Department bureaucrat. The Democrats’ beef seems to be that the secretary, three years ago, spoke intemperately to an analyst who tried to eviscerate the language with which Mr. Bolton characterized the danger of a Cuban biological weapons program. Well lah-dee-dah. Earth to Senator Biden, what America needs at the United Nations is precisely someone who’s capable of dressing down a recalcitrant bureaucrat or two – or two thousand.

The fact is that the Senate hearings on the nomination of Mr. Bolton to the United Nations have been a classic case of what is wrong with the Democratic Party. Here we are in the midst of a war with Islamist terror, in the midst of a historical scandal over the oil-for-food program, in the midst of a crisis of credibility at the United Nations over the behavior of its peacekeeping forces, in the midst of a reform in the management and fundamental structures of the world body, and in the midst of a debate over whether the United Nations ought even to stay in New York. What do the Democrats do but fall to quibbling over the nominee who once dressed down a bureaucrat.

We could be wrong, but we believe that what the American people want at the United Nations is an envoy who is made of the sternest stuff. And we believe they want the minority party to raise fundamental questions. If the Bush administration is supporting the United Nations and even its embattled secretary-general, why isn’t it the Democrats who are agitating for reform – or arguing that the proposed reforms fail to go far enough? Why don’t they pick up the initiative that Secretary Albright once toyed with of starting a body of democratic nations?

The Democrats’ effort against Mr. Bolton functioned as a public relations boost for Communist Cuba. The issue that got Mr. Bolton annoyed with that bureaucrat, after all, had to do with concern over Fidel Castro’s biological weapons program. We don’t profess any expertise in respect of what Mr. Castro might or might not be cooking up in the way of weapons. But we do seem to recall that the one Democrat they are making heroic movies about of late was the one – we speak of President Kennedy – who, during a famous 13 days, threw down the gauntlet over a Cuban weapons program. Wouldn’t you think that this is the tradition the Democrats today would want to revive as they try to rebuild their party in the wake of 2004’s debacle?