WHAT do Howard Dean, Vermont’s former governor, and Osama bin Laden have in common?

Hatred of America’s success.

One of the few things more painful to watch than a kiddie talent show is the desperate effort of the Democratic Party’s White House hopefuls to gain any traction against President Bush.

They’re spinning their wheels in the political mud. While the president flies off to thank the cheering crew of an aircraft carrier for a military triumph.

That carrier visit really irked the Dems. No matter that most of their presidential wannabes make Mike Dukakis look like Teddy Roosevelt. And no matter that Bill Clinton cynically used our military as a political backdrop at every opportunity, despite the fact that the men and women in uniform despised him.

According to the woe-is-us crowd, President Bush wasted taxpayer dollars by visiting our sailors at sea.

It doesn’t matter that not one sailor complained and that the carrier crew was thrilled by the visit. Or that visits to the troops by other presidents have been far more elaborate, expensive and less considerate of those in uniform. What really bothered the Dems was that the president looked like a successful wartime leader in his flight suit.

To our disloyal opposition, that was worse than his actual status as a successful wartime leader. They can ignore the facts, but they won’t forgive a photo op.

One poor lefty columnist even complained, in outrage, that the president’s visit meant taxpayers would have to pay all those sailors overtime.

Sorry, babe. The men and women of our armed forces don’t draw overtime. America’s military ain’t a union shop. The absurdity of the claim shows just how out of touch the lefties are with the realities of uniformed service.

The carrier issue will pass. But two far more important themes continue to come up: 1) the charge that, somehow, President Bush has neglected the War on Terror; 2) the accusation that the rebuilding of Iraq is a catastrophic failure.

As to the notion that Bush has somehow botched the terror war, it’s simply absurd. Forget for a moment that the first (and only) thing a President Al Gore would have done after 9/11 would have been to form a committee of academics to discuss America’s guilt. Focus on the situation right now: Since 9/11, there has not been a single major terrorist attack on American soil. Period.

In what sense is that a failure?

Certainly, after we ripped apart al Qaeda, toppled the Taliban, pursued terrorists literally to the ends of the earth, killed ’em or slapped ’em in the slammer, seized their assets and destroyed the outlaw regime in Iraq, the terrorists yearned to hit back. But our actions have been so powerful and effective that they have been unable to do so.

Doesn’t sound like a failure to me.

Beyond the dishonesty and whining, the fundamental problem with their insistence that everything the Bush administration has done against terrorism has been ineffective is that all the Dems do is criticize: Where are the Democratic Party’s alternatives?

Not generalities, my Democratic friends. Where are your detailed plans to better protect America and its citizens?

There are none. Just as the Democratic Party has failed to articulate any new foreign (or domestic) policy ideas for the 21st century. In the Democratic world-view, America is bad, our armed forces are baby-killers, the terrorists have a point and we might as well just surrender. “Hell no, we won’t go” is not an adequate foreign policy.

Even domestically, the Dems are caught in a time warp, convinced it’s still 1936 and Tom Joad is struggling to trample the grapes of wrath. Hey, old Tom’s grandkids are out in California making cabernet sauvignon.

The other charge, that our post-war efforts in Iraq are a disaster, will be with us right through the next election. I promise every reader that we’ll be deathly sick of hearing it, no matter what actually happens in Iraq. The truth is that the Dems are rooting for reconstruction to fail (just as the Democratic Party stood against reconstruction in the South after our Civil War).

Iraq isn’t going to be an easy after-school project. It will cost us a great deal of time and money – as well as additional lives. But the world is better off now than it was a month ago. Anyone who argues otherwise is either a liar, a fool or a Democratic presidential hopeful.

As with the War on Terror, those who are so anxious to launch premature attacks on our engagement in Iraq need to spell out exactly what they’d do differently: If you really believe the sky is falling, tell us how to hold it up – or get out of the way.

It would be all too easy to gloat about the Democratic Party’s moral vanishing act. But the truth is that Republicans should be alarmed at the left’s unprecedented disarray.

We need a vigorous, intellectually honest opposition.

We accept that monopolies are bad for markets. In the Middle East, we see how fatal religious monopolies can be. But monopolies are bad for political systems, too. The utter lack of new ideas in the Democratic Party means that the Republican Party goes unchallenged as it pioneers new foreign and military policies.

Certainly, Republicans have been right almost as consistently as the Democrats have been wrong on foreign-policy issues. But a competition of serious ideas would force those on the right to sharpen their logic and arguments to a still-finer point. Americans get the best results when the ideas of both parties are honestly and rigorously challenged.

The Democratic Party needs to hold a huge, happy funeral for its dead ideas. Then it needs to give birth to inspiring new ones. That would be the greatest favor the Dems could do for themselves, for Republicans, and for America.

But insisting that every American success is really a failure serves no one’s interests. President Bush has soared in the polls because he’s a man of action and because his actions have been intuitively correct. His opponents, trapped in a culture of rejection as reality-defying as that of the terrorists, have become nothing more than political suicide bombers.

Fortunately, they tend to detonate among themselves.

Ralph Peters is a frequent Post contributor and the author of “Beyond Terror: Strategy is a Changing World.”