Blogs > Cliopatria > I'm Back! (And Feeling Combative)

Sep 14, 2004

I'm Back! (And Feeling Combative)




Howdy, y’all. I’m back from England, back in Texas, back to your regularly scheduled semester, already in progress. It was an exhausting, expensive and exhilarating trip that once again reminded me of why I love to travel abroad. I am pretty good at immersion, which is odd given that many of my more prominent traits would seem to lend themselves to being an ugly American. But I really am not. When in Rome, and all that, I manage to dive in pretty well.

My wanderlust temporarily sated, thoughts return to the election in which both much and little has transpired. President Bush seems in somewhat more command than most would have predicted for him, and it is difficult to figure to what this ought to be attributed. I am at a bit of a loss to see how Bush is even still in the game. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have always thought that we ought to reward success and punish failure. By that simple, though I’d argue not simplistic, matrix, Bush should be in trouble. I’d like to know of just one unmitigated success of this administration. Just one. The war, whatever one’s beliefs about our engaging in it and how, has clearly been disastrously managed in so many ways. I still think we can and must win, but from the outset it was poorly planned and conceived, and the administration’s arrogance in the face of even the most obviously true criticisms ought to give anyone pause as to whether or not this administration is the one to carry out whatever is left, which seems like a lot more than we ought to have been expected to buy when we were assured “Mission Accomplished.”

If the war in Iraq has been, shall we say, a disappointment, what of the larger and clunkily named “War on Terror”? Well, it seems to me that the administration cannot possibly have it both ways. It cannot laud its record on this war and then proclaim that electing someone else would be dangerous – if we are that vulnerable that a democratic transition that we prepare for every four years could lead to an attack on our soil, someone has decidedly not done an acceptable job, never mind a good one. This to me is the most remarkable thing about Cheney’s noxious assertions about electing Kerry. So, Mr. Vice President, let me get this straight. We should elect you because if we don’t the likelihood of a terrorist attack increases. This increase has happened under your watch. After the worst terrorist attack in US history happened on your watch. And Kerry is the dangerous one? I do not blame this administration in particular for 9-11. But when they politicize that event and engage in patent demagoguery on the issue of terror, then it seems that certain questions should be asked. This administration’s record on terrorism is apparently contingent upon their continued maintenance of power. What a perplexing assessment of success.

All of this, and keep in mind that the administration is running primarily on its foreign policy record. No wonder. Look at its domestic policies. I admire the chutzpah in some ways. This is an administration that has lost a net total of more than one million jobs, but thinks it deserves credit for gaining a million jobs because at one point it had seen the loss of two million jobs. Try this rationale when you are overdrawn on your checking account next time, folks.

And what of the budget itself? Someone explain to me how we can afford the tax cuts (which the president credits for the state of our economy; welcome to the other side of the looking glass, ladies and gentlemen), military expenditures, and social spending that the administration advocates all at the same time. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It seems to me that taxing and spending is a whole lot better than its alternative – spending and not taxing. So much for fiscal responsibility. Which is why it is especially noisome to see how brazenly the administration and some not so intellectually deft people have pilloried Kerry for the $87 billion that he at first supported and then did not. For those of you who actually care about facts and such, this is not at all complicated: Kerry supported the $87 billion when the bill proposed to pay for it by rolling back some of the tax cuts. He opposed it when the Republicans refused to allow those rollbacks to happen. One can criticize Kerry for this decision, but it is not a flip-flop. Indeed it is intellectually consistent. It surely shows more intellectual integrity than the arguments of those who lazily assert that John Kerry flip-flopped on this issue. He did not.

I could go on. I will not. The problem for Kerry, then, is not that George Bush’s administration has been a resounding success. It is that John Kerry’s campaign thus far has been a failure. This American Prospectarticle by Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe makes one of the more compelling cases for Kerry’s leadership that I have read. Why can’t the democrats make this case? It is partially because they got caught up in the Vietnam tit-for-tat. Some have blamed Kerry for making Vietnam too large a part of his campaign (those who have claimed it is the sole basis for his campaign are either liars or demagogues or not so sharp, a differentiation I simply do not find cost-effective to make) and yet that seems a rather odd criticism to make about a candidate who served in war given that the GOP has tended to portray their war heroes front and center. Or is 1996 all that far removed from our memory banks? But when the Swift Boat veterans for “Truth” came out with their smear campaign, riddled with lies, obfuscations and calumnies, Kerry had to respond. The discussion became about Vietnam, then, not because Kerry made it such a large portion of his campaign, but because the GOP decided to smear Kerry’s biography. Not the sign of a party especially confident in their own party’s record. Then again, why should they be?

So here we find ourselves, caught up in what is becoming an increasingly ugly situation that further buries the issues. If the most recent documents about President Bush are found to be forgeries, there needs to be an accounting, though no one has yet linked the Kerry campaign to the documents in any way. Of course the debate over these documents manages to sweep under the rug a range of newly revealed information about Bush’s service that might ordinarily make some of his supporters blush, but it seems that at least some conservatives have lost the capacity for corpuscles to do whatever it is that they do to make us reveal our shame on our faces. Then again, perhaps they just have no shame.

The problem, then, is twofold. On the one hand, Kerry is not making his case. On the other, the media and the GOP are doing a pretty good job of making sure that the issues that dominate are the ones that have little to do with who will be a better president or leader, whose record is stronger (or weaker), and who most should be president. There is enough blame to go around. It is too bad that none of it will amount to anything when the votes are cast.



comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:


Steven Heise - 9/20/2004

Tee-hee.


Derek Charles Catsam - 9/15/2004

Chris --
Goodness -- that is the most sobering thing I've seen yet -- that my fantasy football team might be an enjoyable escape from election year reality. Given my team's performance this past weekend, that is just depressing.
dc


chris l pettit - 9/15/2004

probably my only chance to gloat all year...but look who is at the top of the standings!! At the expense of Tom, of course, so it does not feel as good as the whipping I am going to put on your team DC...

That being said...i got killed in my other league, thanks to leaving Curtis Martin on my bench in favor of David Carr. As Sports Guy says, the lesson, as always, is that I am an idiot. I am sure that I will prove that in many more ways this season...

Speaking of columns like that...you ever read Klayman's Katastrophe's at mlb.com fantasy baseball? Funny column and it makes you feel better about your own fantasy gaffes...

CP
www.wicper.org


Jonathan Dresner - 9/15/2004

Thanks for the Oliphant reference. Kerry's good relations with John McCain make the VP discussion much more meaningful, and McCain's willingness to shill at the Republican convention that much harder to understand.

But it was nice to read something that had a little depth to it....


Derek Charles Catsam - 9/14/2004

Lee --
I'll give them this: The GOP is far well organized on attack dog tactics than the democrats, to be sure. i just have no idea why the GOP thinks they are better poised to protect us when they have demonstrably not done especially well at doing so. It's weird that the administration sees their handling of terrorism as a selling point. It is shocking that the media and the American people are telling them.
dc


Richard Lee Altman - 9/14/2004


Glad to see you're back, Derek. It seems that you've caught the Democratic malady of the moment, "Kerry-might-be-Dukakis-itis". Never fear, the debates are not yet here.

Meanwhile, "fear" seems to be the key theme of the Bush campaign. Cheney's recent verbal ejaculation was quite dramatic, but I think Zell Miller may have been more effective with his "only Bush can defend my family" evocation of the bad old Southern democrats of olde.

Karl Rove knew what he was doing when he made Miller the keynote speaker. For those mythical swing-voting security Moms that Rove covets, there is nothing more effective than a Democratic grandfather-figure screeching that John Kerry will "leave America defended by spit balls."

No, the speech did not make Miller a popular figure, outside the legions of Ditto-heads. But it planted doubt in the minds of many people who are too lazy to do their homework. Such folks simply assume that a Democratic senator, speaking on national television about his colleague John Kerry, must be telling the truth. Mission accomplished. If Bush wins, Miller can retire to his crypt feeling that his precious bloodline is safe.

Of course this quote has been overused, but Hermann Goering could not have said it better: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Witness Zell/Cheney/Swiftvets/Bush 2004.


Richard Lee Altman - 9/14/2004


Glad to see you're back, Derek. It seems that you've caught the Democratic malady of the moment, "Kerry-might-be-Dukakis-itis". Never fear, the debates are not yet here.

Meanwhile, "fear" seems to be the key theme of the Bush campaign. Cheney's recent verbal ejaculation was quite dramatic, but I think Zell Miller may have been more effective with his "only Bush can defend my family" evocation of the bad old Southern democrats of olde.

Karl Rove knew what he was doing when he made Miller the keynote speaker. For those mythical swing-voting security Moms that Rove covets, there is nothing more effective than a Democratic grandfather-figure screeching that John Kerry will "leave America defended by spit balls."

No, the speech did not make Miller a popular figure, outside the legions of Ditto-heads. But it planted doubt in the minds of many people who are too lazy to do their homework. Such folks simply assume that a Democratic senator, speaking on national television about his colleague John Kerry, must be telling the truth. Mission accomplished. If Bush wins, Miller can retire to his crypt feeling that his precious bloodline is safe.

Of course this quote has been overused, but Hermann Goering could not have said it better: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Witness Zell/Cheney/Swiftvets/Bush 2004.