But I say we can still do smart policy which makes a difference at the margins:
1) all the liberal programs of education and job training. As well as simply creating more jobs, and somehow this part is not emphasized near enough.
2) better investigation and conviction when crimes are committed, and
3) We can run prisons better and avoid brutalization. In particular, neither men nor women need to be raped.
That is, a mix of liberal and conservative approaches. And to a considerable extent, good policy is actually good politics?
Perhaps you should have led with this, but I think you have a tendency to be overly Socratic.
Here's the problem I see with it--it is pretty complex and nuanced. In order to have populist resonance, it is necessary to get a bit confrontational--because a lot of crime is actually the fish rotting from the head down.
Take the immigration controversy. It has long been the case that a major reason we have lots of undocumented residents is that the law is written and then selectively enforced by politicians largely beholden to the well off as donors to campaigns, and patrons in general. A substantial number of the propertied are proprietors of shady fly by night operations that rely on underpaid, overexploited workers and they have tended to shift the practice and text of immigration law to in practice let in lots of people who have difficult or no legal pathway to citizenship, but are desired as workers below the radar, in practice exempt from the minimum wages and safety/worker interest regulations these bosses seek to evade to their greater profit. Thus their influence prevents police and courts from effectively stopping the immigration of the undocumented, and "protects" these desperate people from its consistent effect, as long as they show up to work in their sweatshops and don't make waves about the dangerous conditions they work in.
So, progressive "tough on crime" might turn to the "malefactors of great wealth" as Teddy Roosevelt, the progressive (in the top down preemption of genuine populist democracy sense of that early 20th century movement) put it. If we put some of these sweatshop operators behind bars, confiscated their ill-gotten gains, the illegal shops might go out of business, the protection of immigrants without cover of law in their cynical interests might dry up--and then, it would be my hope that a humane and reasonable amnesty of these largely honest and beneficial new Americans would make them citizens and close the gaps in American labor law. For the general welfare it is a win win.
But not for the "welfare" of a big sector of the most powerful, influential people! We can stipulate (I am not sure with how much generosity and how much resulting inaccuracy!) that the really great powers that be among the wealthy are not these fly by night types--though if we make analogies to other infamous forms of corruption, such as the entanglement of northern business interest in slavery prior to the Civil War, it doesn't look good for the Great and Good--slavery provided capital for a whole lot of US development across the board actually. Harriet Beecher Stowe was careful to point this out by the way in
Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had a lot of good muckraking journalism in it. So I think it is being generous to the point of cartoonish to pretend that zero tolerance toward sweatshops from a point of view of labor solidarity including the workers in these shops and aimed at those who actually profit from hypocrisy would not be a blow to the moneyed classes as a whole; even supposing only a minority have direct complicit knowledge of such abuses, the indirect blow to portfolios across the board would be heavy I actually think.
Now relax the pious assumption that the Great and Good are by and large Good, and suppose that anything that inconveniences them, they will react to by opposing effectively. Perhaps it is not necessary for most of them to face squarely the idea "we actually need the sweatshops for our own gain and are willing to lie and cheat to maintain them." It is perhaps enough for them to give money and endorsement and patronage to politicians who more or less launder the agenda by talking about "tough on crime." Here I generalize away from the specific matter of persons here in the USA without the benefit of legal standing, and point out that across the board, it is easier for a society so stratified by wealth and privilege as ours is to shift the blame for trouble down onto the poorer masses, who lack strong advocacy save as supplicants in the organs of power. Oh sure, on paper they can go vote for politicians who will champion them, and being numerous, ought to be able to win some.
But look at the fine print of our "democracy." A lot of people will affirm that elected representatives do not actually represent people as such, but rather the communities people live in. We don't have positive representation, where a person's vote, if aggregated with enough other persons, results in a representative for them being elected; representatives run in binary winner take all district contests isolated from all other districts, and the premise (which seems plainly undemocratic on the face of it to me) is that someone speaks for the entire district when they win it.
One way or another, the great movers and shakers will have first claim on this representative's priorities, as they are in a position to effectively veto anyone being elected who doesn't first meet with their collective approval.
Now if we had positive representation, if it were possible for each group of citizens who scraped together across a state or nation amount to a quota of the state or Congressional representation to get their champion elected to these bodies, I think then the long term outcome would be as you say "good policy is good politics."
But with the binary, first past the post, winner take all system we accept as normal, it is quite often the case that terrible policy is good politics, to win those kinds of races. Scaremongering and scapegoating is an easy recourse, because elections can be won mainly by negative means, by smearing the Other Guy and seeing which one can take more hits--and dish more out.
Cheap lies are, well, cheap. The OTL "War on Crime" was in fact founded in lots of mendacious misdirection and deeply reactionary in its effects, as the cheap demagoguery of its proponents would lead one to expect. Malefactors of great wealth have many bastions of defense to deflect cheap easy shots, people looking for quick, shoot from the hip 'solutions' to problems they are not interested in diving deep into and unsorting (the representatives of a democratic republic ought to be doing that, as their job) can easily be told to blame people they don't like and fear anyway and that seeing them frustrated and treated harshly is in fact the progress they are looking for.
For the Democrats of the 1960s to have taken up a "war on crime" banner then to preempt people like Nixon would have been a declaration of war on someone. Would the Democrats of say 1962 have been prepared, or at all likely, to open fire on the bastions of wealth? I think to ask the question is to answer it. Of course not. It would therefore necessarily be a war on the Usual Suspects, on the people American society always threw under the bus first.
How do you suppose such a dynamic would work out? Would it necessarily be the case that the party that opened fire in this demagogic game would automatically inherit the mantle of Law and Order, and the other be forced into the position of hand-wringing, dithering wishy-washy "but it is complicated!" camp stampeded over the political cliff?
No, you are talking about a nuanced, careful, judicious Good Policy. Fine, but isn't it plain the other guys could easily make political hay of that, seizing on every due process bit of meticulousness now insisted actually be honored consistently instead of only in practice being a privilege of those who could afford the best lawyers as "war on the common man, soft on criminals, pandering to the worst while fouling decent Americans?" For this is exactly what did happen. In order to have good policy, it was necessary to tone down the cowboy posturing, stop shooting from the hip, and buckle down to serious careful deliberation of cases--which was represented shamelessly as coddling criminals, no doubt at Communist orders. In order to protect themselves from such charges, Democrats would have had to prove themselves just as inured against cries against blatant injustice as any Republican, have had to shrug off plain cases of abuse of authority and double standards and so on as just the way power works in America. The whole stance of being careful and judicious would have to be thrown out.
Possibly the USA becomes a nation of cowboys--in fact it seems plain to me that relative to any sane pretense to law and order that is not a mere exercise of the power of property, we have largely always been so and have remained so, and the whole Nixonian era War on Crime, Nixon's Enemies List, his appeals to the Silent Majority, his quite mendacious approach to drug policy, all of it was an assault on what little baby steps toward a more balanced rule of law that were taken in the '60s.
The whole "inspiring" narrative is, much like your opening metaphor of the Missile Gap (and Bomber Gap) based on lies and misdirection, and it is unclear how much of it is cynical conscious mendacity and how much is Orwellian self-deception.
Let's look at that metaphor a moment by the way. This is what happened: based on long knowledge that each military service will vie for as much of the public treasury and policy priority as it can get, in the post-WWII era the CIA was founded in large part to give the President a supposedly unbiased, not service-chauvinistic, objective assessment of the actual world situation the President faced. But when the best practices of the CIA estimated Soviet warfighting capability in a certain limited range, that tended to undermine the high priority the various services had for generous Federal funding of service levels and weapons procurement programs, which a lot of other ax-grinding interests outside the Air Force and Navy shared, as contractors and work forces and the like. So, in defiance of the concept that the Central Intelligence Agency after all existed to provide the definitive assessment of the facts on the ground, the USAF employed its own methodologies, which in later sober hindsight all clearly distorted the picture, consistently skewing in one direction--to (falsely) purport to discredit the CIA assessment as dangerously optimistic and paint a much more luridly grim picture of Mighty Ivan just bursting with no doubt slave produced arsenals of all sorts of high tech wizardry all aimed at Destroying the American Way of Life, which only massive new funding of the Air Force could parry. I suppose the Navy was playing much the same game, I am not sure why the Air Force has the spotlight largely to itself in this.
But the Bomber Gap, and the Missile Gap, were both, to put it charitably, errors. If we can be the least bit frank, it seems plain they were culpable errors. Now if instead the generals (and I suppose admirals) had said, well, sure, we agree the CIA is probably right, our missile programs are farther along, we have large numbers of bombers carrying large megatonnages of bombs that probably can mostly penetrate Soviet airspace and drop them on target while their best weapons probably cannot generally get through to CONUS; we agree we are in fact ahead, but we just want to appeal to the US taxpayer--you've never had it so good, you can afford to pay a little more, we want our lead to be as great as possible just in case maybe we might be overlooking something those sneaky Reds have hidden, and just in case they start surging ahead sometime in the future, and quite frankly it is overkill but we say better safe than sorry, cause it is our job to defend the USA--that would have not been mendacious. But would it have been effective at getting the delirious splurge of weapons system buildups that in fact covered the USA in pork grease in the '50s and '60s? Probably some fraction of it, but not the orgy of "defense" spending that was the norm in those decades.
One of the outcomes of the Air Force being willing to, to put it bluntly, lie to get the funding they wanted, was to cast a cloak of spurious plausibility over just about any kooky notion anyone had of Soviet superpowers. Entire generations of crazed reactionaries went about believing the Reds had deep factories, entire cities worth, of hand-picked Communist fanatics, that they were building weapons systems people like Khrushchev could only dream of--it is all very Clancyesque because of course people like Tom Clancy grew up in this fantastic hothouse.
Now in much the same way, the cheap and simplistic scapegoating narratives of the "War on Crime" paint a lurid but false picture of the general nature of humanity and of American society in particular, and people grow up steeped in this nonsense, and make life decisions and vote, based on bull.
Whichever party took that ball and ran with it--and I can point to plenty of Democrats who did so--can in fact win elections because a lot of people either believe the bull uncritically, or are worried that their lying eyes are fooling them into it being false when in fact so many people believing this stuff probably suggests there is hidden truth to it. Given that elections are a zero sum game and negative campaigning is effective, policy makers are at a great arms length remove from reality, and are under pressure to deliver practical results not to the masses as a whole but to the great movers and shakers who broker their campaigns.
War on Crime is inherently and necessarily a reactionary slogan with reactionary results, and being founded on lies, it sows a bitter harvest of ongoing damage. It is not possible for someone to cynically play this card to do good with it.