I'm Back! (And Feeling Combative)
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.