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I will be heading for Pennsylvania this Saturday morning as part of the ElectionProtection effort (see http://www.electionprotectionvolunteer.org) returning late November 2nd, after which, hopefully, the national nightmare will be over.

 

A good video on what's at stake can be seen at:

 

 

Regards,

 

Jonathan

 

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“By Gradual Paces”
As the election approaches, some warnings issued by the Founders leap off the page as never before.

By Jim Sleeper
Web Exclusive: 10.26.04

If some of us anti-Bush Americans seem on the verge of a nervous breakdown in these final days, it's not necessarily because John Kerry is our heart's desire or even because George W. Bush and Co., under cover of fighting terrorism, are spending the country into crushing debt that will drive the social compact back to the 1890s. Nor are we wrought up because a Republican ticket led by two former draft dodgers (as defined by every conservative Republican since the late 1960s, when both men did their dodging), has savaged war heroes like Max Cleland, John McCain, and Kerry himself.

The republic has survived excesses like that, if barely. What really scares some of us is the foreboding that, this time, it won't outlast the swooning and the eerily disembodied cheering at those Bush revival rallies. Something has happened to enough of the American people to make some warnings by this country's own Founders leap off the page as never before.

As soon as King George III was gone, the Founders took one look at the American people and became obsessed with how a republic ends. History showed them it can happen not with a coup but a smile and a friendly swagger, as soon as the people tire of the burdens of self-government and can be jollied along into servitude -- or scared into it, when they've become soft enough to intimidate.

Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes when he wrote that history had destined Americans, "by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

And Ben Franklin sketched the odds, warning that the Constitution "can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."

How might that happen? "History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces," wrote Founder Richard Henry Lee.

The Founders were all reading Edward Gibbon's then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, degree by self-deluding degree, into an imperial tyranny. Leaders could bedazzle citizens out of their liberties by titillating and intimidating them into becoming bread-and-circus mobs that "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army … ."

Gibbon added pointedly that Augustus, the first emperor, "wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government" and that he knew that "the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom." Campaigning in an open shirt, as it were, "that artful prince … humbly solicited their suffrages for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate … . The emperors … disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power. In all the offices of life they affected to confound themselves with their subjects and maintained with them an equal intercourse of visits and entertainments."

And so Rome became what Gibbon called "an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth," not by conspiracy but thanks to a confluence of deeper currents that had enervated people's republican virtues and beliefs.

But isn't this what Bush and the Republicans say they want to save us from, with the help of God and martial valor? Isn't it big-government liberals who would coddle us into servitude and decadence? Plenty of liberal folly has reinforced that perception, but so has Americans' reluctance to admit that the tutelage of public (i.e., big private) corporations, not government, has become ever more confining, intrusive, and even degrading in employment, in entertainment, and even in the subtle skewing of public discourse (news organizations, take note) and government itself.

John Adams wasn't blaming only government when he warned that, "[w]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society."

The point was that you don't strengthen freedom by handing the people over from their elected officials to their paymasters. Honorable American conservatives -- diplomats, retired generals, even some pundits -- do want to spare us that fate. Scott McConnell just "endorsed" Kerry, whom he seems to detest, in The American Conservative, on the grounds that "[Bush's] continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations."

Two veteran diplomats, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, sounded like John Adams recently in warning that under the Bush rhetoric about terrorism, the American people are like "a frog placed in a bowl of cool water as it is slowly heated over a fire. At the point the frog realizes the danger it is in, it is already too weakened to get out. It is boiled alive. Americans today find themselves in water with the temperature rising. To date the political discourse, impregnated as it is with neoconservative formulations, has led them to acquiesce in the demands of those who are stoking the fire … ."

Walter Lippmann understood what was at risk in such acquiescence. "The kind of self-education which a self-governing people must obtain can be had only through its daily experience,” he wrote. “In other words, a democracy must have a way of life which educates the people for the democratic way of life. It is social control, not by authority from above … but by a common law which defines the reciprocal rights and duties of persons. Thus in a free society the state … administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."

When a bystander in Philadelphia asked Franklin what kind of government the delegates were creating, Franklin answered, "A republic, if you can keep it." It's not John Kerry's campaign but the late emergence of conservatives who care for the republic that is encouraging some of us to work harder for a republican spirit that will be stronger than whatever the next four years bring.

Jim Sleeper is a political-science lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches a seminar on "New Conceptions of American National Identity".

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ROBERT SCHEER

The Man Behind the Oval Office Curtain

It's Cheney's administration, and it's a shame.

Robert Scheer

October 26, 2004

Can this nation survive four more years of Dick Cheney running the show? Probably, but it is a risk that few thoughtful Americans, conservatives included, should want to take.

Whatever one thinks of George W. Bush — do you see a smile or a smirk? — it is now patently obvious that the most powerful vice president in U.S. history is in charge of the White House. Cheney's ultra-secretive, anti-democratic and crony-capitalist instincts have defined this administration.

Perhaps we should have expected all this from a man who, as head of the Bush vice presidential search team, selected himself. It was a forewarning of the Machiavellian arrogance that has made him the leading individual in an administration that has consistently believed that self-serving ends — such as helping Enron at the expense of California's energy needs or boosting Halliburton's profits at the expense of American troops — justify lying, secrecy and preemptive war.

In the hours after the 9/11 massacres, some Americans may have been reassured to have the older Cheney around at a time when the "real" president was confusedly sitting in a classroom listening to a story about a pet goat. However, in hindsight, this was clearly misguided faith in a man who presents himself as a stern father figure but is just an irresponsible ideologue whose disrespect and disregard for the U.S. Constitution are manifest in all his actions.

It was the vice president who served as the power behind a tiny group of fringe right-wing lawyers that secretly created a system of unaccountable White House-controlled military tribunals. Despite indelibly staining America's reputation as a leader in democratic principles and endangering the lives of American prisoners of war in current and future conflicts, these proceedings have proved totally useless in the war on terror, with zero terror convictions to date.

Never mind: After the tribunals decree was signed by Bush, Cheney was off leading a new misguided crusade, deploying a slew of manipulated and misrepresented intelligence factoids, clever innuendoes and outright lies to fool Congress and the public into supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As the Washington Post's Bob Woodward reports in "Plan of Action," his insider account of the Bush White House, Secretary of State Colin Powell "detected a kind of fever in Cheney…. Cheney was beyond hellbent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed."

And through the reports of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and 9/11 commission, and an exhaustive compilation released last week by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) of the Senate Armed Services Committee, it is now possible to read in excruciating detail about Cheney's role in convincing a majority of Americans that — strong evidence to the contrary — Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was moving toward the production of nuclear bombs and was an ally of Al Qaeda.

As recently as June and contrary to the 9/11 commission's final report, to give but one of many examples, Cheney was still insisting that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta had a meeting in Prague with a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence agent before the 9/11 attacks. This is an unconscionable and obviously knowing use of the Big Lie technique, given that the CIA and FBI repudiated that baseless yet titillating claim in 2002.

Lately, as the war has become an unmitigated disaster for the United States and Iraq, Cheney and the president have been on the defensive against charges by numerous terrorism experts — and presidential candidate John F. Kerry — that the invasion of Iraq was a dangerous distraction from the fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Undaunted, Cheney tells us the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has been blamed for many anti-American attacks in Iraq, originally entered Iraq with Hussein's permission; thus Cheney tries to post facto justify the invasion as a legitimate pillar of the war on terror. But it's just another lie, with the CIA stating the opposite: The fundamentalist Zarqawi first sneaked into Hussein's secular and nationalist dictatorship using a false identity.

That Cheney clearly has a huge personal interest in the war makes all of this that much more sickening.

The latest report in a never-ending stream of conflict-of- interest revelations about this administration appears in the current issue of Time magazine. It detailed how the Pentagon favored Halliburton — which Cheney headed from 1995 until 2000 — with long-term, no-bid contracts. No problem. In Cheney's world, messianic ambition and personal greed can happily co-exist.

Next Tuesday, voters should retire this malevolent force.

 

 

 

John Kerry for President

[from the November 8, 2004 issue]

The presidential campaign debates are over, and the time for decision has come. The Nation endorses Senator John Kerry to be the next President of the United States.

Any stocktaking must begin, of course, by comparing the records of Kerry and George W. Bush. Yet the upshot of such a detailed comparison, though entirely favoring Kerry, is not our principal reason for supporting him. To make clear why, despite strong disagreements with Kerry, we not only recommend a vote for him but do so with fervor, we must step back from the candidates and their positions and set forth an independent view of what we believe are the stakes in this election.

The most important is the consequence it will have in what has emerged as a crisis of American democracy. The crisis began on December 12, 2000, when Bush was chosen to be President by the Supreme Court. The gift of a true electoral mandate now to this previously unelected President would give fresh legitimacy and momentum to all his disastrous policies. And that new momentum could in turn place our constitutional system itself at risk.

This magazine's disagreements with Kerry are deep and touch on fundamental matters. We believed that the invasion of Iraq was "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" (as he now describes it) before the war was ever launched; he has come to that conclusion only recently, having voted to authorize the war. We believe the United States should withdraw from Iraq; he wants to "win" the war there. We think the military budget should be cut; he plans to increase it, adding 40,000 troops. (For what, exactly? to fight another wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time?) We reject pre-emptive war; he embraces it. We oppose the wall that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is building on Palestinian lands; he supports it. We believe in the elimination of all nuclear weapons; he wants only to stop their spread. He calls for significant expansion of healthcare; we call for a single-payer system that would cover everyone. He opposes gay marriage; we back it. If he wins the election, The Nation will pursue each of these differences vigorously.

But while we have sharp differences with Kerry, we believe he has the qualities required for the presidency. He is more than "anybody but Bush." His instincts are decent. He is a man of high intelligence, deep knowledge and great resolve. At times in his life--notably, when he opposed the Vietnam War--he has shown exemplary courage. He respects the law. He believes in cooperation with other countries and has the inclination and ability to bring America out of its current isolation and back into the family of nations. As a senator, he demonstrated concern for social welfare and has backed this up with enlightened policy proposals. He has supported civil rights and labor rights and opposed racism. He has supported the rights of women, including the right to an abortion. He has been an advocate of nuclear arms control and opposed the almost incomprehensibly provocative nuclear policies of the Bush Administration. He would rescind the most unfair of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. He would be a friend of the environment and return the United States to the negotiations on global warming.

The Bush Record

As for Bush, where to begin the list of his mistakes, delusions, deceptions, follies, tragedies and crimes? Where to end it?

He failed to respond to repeated clear warnings of an Al Qaeda attack ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.," the CIA told him) and displayed startling incompetence when the attack came. Then he tried to cover up both failures by opposing the formation of the September 11 Commission, obstructing the committee's work once it was formed and denying key findings once they were disclosed. (To this day, Vice President Cheney asserts a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.)

In the name of fighting terror, Bush waged a war in Iraq that had nothing to do with terrorism and was as unjustified when it was begun as, after the loss of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, it is unwinnable now. He has inaugurated an immoral and unsustainable policy of global hegemony based on military force, estranged most of the country's principal friends around the world and dismayed the world at large--which has begun, indirectly but pervasively, to resist US domination. He mocked the United Nations as "irrelevant" and defied the Security Council. Today our forces are overstretched in pursuit of delusional goals.

Bush's policies have turned away from the country's tradition of seeking disarmament exclusively by diplomatic means and adopted force as the mainstay of its nonproliferation efforts, violently pursuing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, and overlooking them in Pakistan and North Korea, where they existed. All the while, his Administration further provoked and disturbed the world by pursuing the development of new, "usable" varieties of nuclear weapons, to be employed for new purposes against new targets, mostly in the Third World. He has systematically cast aside or weakened environmental initiatives, domestic and international. He withdrew from negotiations to address global warming, which except for nuclear war is the gravest danger facing the world; sponsored a Clear Skies Act that fouled the air; gutted regulations limiting strip-mining; and sold off public lands to oil, gas, timber and mining companies; rejected fuel conservation measures; tried to suppress or repudiate the science on which knowledge of environmental hazards is based.

And while thus conspiring to discredit these and other scientific findings, he has pandered to a "base" of religious fanatics, many of whom are looking forward to a day of "rapture" when Jesus returns to earth and kills everyone but them. His attitude to the factual world in general is one of hostility and rejection. He has made fraud and fantasy foundations of his Administration. His own belief in something--that Iraq was a threat to the United States, for example--appears to be evidence enough for him that it is true. One of his advisers has mocked his critics by stating that they live in a "reality-based community," explaining, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Bush has by almost every measure worsened the US economy and set it on a path to likely disaster. He has taken hundreds of billions of dollars from the poor and people of ordinary income and given it to the rich through tax cuts (if you dare to point this out, you are accused of waging "class warfare") while driving the country into unprecedented federal debt and trade deficits, delivering the nation's finances to the decisions of foreign creditors. He has increased our dependence on foreign energy sources. His approach to the economy and our resources is the same as to the environment--this putative believer in a "responsibility society" strip-mines the future to gratify the present.

Bush has broken his oath to uphold the laws of the United States. He asserted and made use of an array of "inherent" powers nowhere mentioned in the Constitution: to lock up and place in solitary confinement American citizens and others, with no access to courts or even legal representation; to withhold information from the public and Congressional committees; to detain hundreds of people outside domestic and international law in the legal no man's land of Guantánamo; and to permit the torture of prisoners.

He has governed through fear and intimidation. His party will not tolerate dissent either in its own ranks, from which it purges any moderate voice, or in the country at large, where his Administration insinuates that his opponents are in league with America's enemies. At his rallies, composed of carefully vetted supporters, people who oppose him have been thrown out and even arrested.

A Dangerous Mandate

A matchup of the records of the two candidates only begins to measure the stakes in this year's election. These come fully into view only in the larger context of a deeper crisis that has overtaken the American system of government. To begin with, the irregular procedure of the last election lends a special importance to this one. In 2000 candidate Bush, who lost the popular contest by half a million votes and was put into the presidency by a Supreme Court decision, failed to receive a popular mandate. However, he embarked on a radical, right-wing course anyway, compounding the insult to democracy. Yet it is so far only the government that has asserted global imperial ambition, waged aggressive war on false pretexts, condoned torture, strengthened corporate influence over politics, turned its back on the natural environment and spurned global public opinion. If Bush is now elected, then a national majority--a far weightier thing--will stand behind these things. The consequences would be profound. A crippled presidency would begin to walk on two legs. At home, public affirmation would turn the record of the first term, now having been inspected and approved by the people, into the starting point for an accelerated movement in the same general direction. Bush has already put through a new round of federal budget-wrecking corporate tax cuts, called for new repressive legislation in a Patriot II act and clearly announced his desire to "democratize" not just Iraq but the entire Middle East. Abroad, such a vote would deepen and confirm the United States' separation from the rest of the world, enclosing it in an eccentric and dangerous mini-climate of ignorance and lies.

On the other hand, if Bush is defeated, his entire presidency will acquire the aspect of an aberration, a mistake that has been corrected, and the American people will be able to say: We never accepted Bushism. We rejected the brutality, the propaganda, the misbegotten wars, the imperial arrogance. And we never, ever chose George W. Bush to be President of the United States.

What Is at Stake

But even these stakes are not the largest on the table in November. The largest and most important is the protection of American democracy. It is always difficult while enjoying the comforts and privileges of taken-for-granted liberties to imagine that they could be lost; but the elements of Bush's misrule have plainly converged to form this threat. It is the wars of aggression designed to expand imperial sway abroad that produce the fear that fuels his campaign. It is the transfer of money from the poor or average majority to the rich few and corporations that cultivates the allegiance of the corporate chieftains who swell Bush's campaign coffers while at the same time helping to bring the news media, now owned mostly by large companies, to heel. It is the media that amplify his Administration's war propaganda while failing to expose the deceptions put forward as justification for war and puffing up the bubble of illusion whose creation is perhaps the Administration's top priority. And it is government secrecy and Justice Department repression and a right-wing judiciary that chills the dissent that tries to puncture the bubble of illusion. The upshot is a concentration of power in the Republican Party that has no parallel in American history, including the Gilded Age and the Nixon era.

It is not only all three branches of government that have fallen largely into the same hands; it is the corporations, the military (which tends to vote Republican) and, increasingly, the communications industry, which are either propaganda arms of the party, as in the case of Fox News and other outlets of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, or else simply bow to the pressure of Administration threats and popular anxiety.

Even before Bush's selection by Supreme Court fiat in 2000, a dangerous pattern had asserted itself at the top levels of American institutional life. The Republican Party embarked on a process of using legitimately won power to acquire more power illegitimately. In the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex, the Republican majority in Congress abused its power in the legislative branch to try to strike down the leader of the rival executive branch. The attempt failed. In the election of 2000, the party in effect abused the judicial power to seize the presidency for itself, and this time the attempt succeeded. The deed was in fact a culmination of a long, deliberate (if not conspiratorial) campaign of politicization of the judiciary, pushed by right-wing legislators as well as such groups as the Federalist Society. In a series of reapportionment battles, notably the one waged by House majority leader Tom DeLay in Texas, the party used legislative power to entrench itself in that same legislature. Meanwhile, a web of think tanks and other institutions, supposedly independent but actually de facto instruments of the Republican Party, was created. They cooperated in vetting political loyalists for government posts and in flooding the news media with apologists for the party and its policies. Under DeLay's leadership, the Congressional Republicans, leaving no stone unturned, have sought to take over even the lobbying establishment of Washington by threatening firms that hire former Democrats to work for them.

The persistent theme of these policies and actions, domestic and international, is to acquire power--to seize it, to increase it and to keep it for good. A systemic crisis--a threat to the Constitution of the United States--has taken shape. At the end of this road is an implied vision of a different system: a world run by the United States and a United States run permanently by the Republican Party, which is to say imperial rule abroad, one-party rule at home. Somewhere along that road lies a point of no return. It is in the nature of warnings in general that you cannot know whether the danger in question will come, or be averted by timely action, or perhaps never present itself at all. But it's also in the nature of warnings that one must act on them before it is too late, and this is especially true in the case of threats to democracy. That is why the danger to democracy takes primacy over other perils that are in themselves greater, including nuclear war and irreversible damage to the ecosphere through global warming. (It is notable that none of these three perils has been more than glancingly mentioned in the election debates that have just ended.)

No one can know when or how the decisive test of democracy might arrive. It could come quickly, perhaps in a crackdown following another terrorist attack on American soil, this time conceivably on a far greater scale than September 11, or it could come slowly, in a protraction of the process, already well under way, of gradual strangulation of independent institutions, amounting to a coup in slow-motion--a hardening of an informal monopoly of power into a formal monopoly--leaving the institutions of democracy technically intact but corrupted and hollowed out from within, helpless to resist a central authority that has drawn all real power into its own hands.

Although the precise steps by which a systemic breakdown might occur are obscure, most of the main elements of the danger seem to be contained in microcosm in one episode--the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere in the United States' nascent global gulag archipelago. The story begins with a secret memo from Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel to the President and most frequently mentioned name for a Bush appointment to the Supreme Court, recommending that he issue a "finding" that neither international law, in the form of the Geneva Conventions, nor US law, in the shape of the War Crimes Act (18 US Code, Section 2441) was applicable to abuses of prisoners in Afghanistan. The "war on terror," he said, was a "new paradigm," rendering provisions of the Geneva Conventions "quaint." As for US law, a presidential determination would help tormentors brought to justice by creating "a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." Even before the crimes were committed, the White House was planning how to beat the rap. In one short memo, a new vision of law came into view. In this vision, the executive was freed from legal accountability as well as Congressional oversight, while at the same time the individual person was stripped of his fundamental human rights. It was law--if "law" is the right word for it at all--cut to imperial specifications.

A blizzard of other memos justifying the abuse of prisoners followed from lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and soon Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had authorized several new varieties of torment for the prisoners at Guantánamo. Not long after that, the superintendent of Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, traveled to Iraq to teach the command there the new interrogation arts. To the surprise of the Administration, the war was not going well, and the military command was hungry for intelligence from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. A memo had gone out from a captain in intelligence stating, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees. Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."

They were. In the recently published report "AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade" by Maj. Gen. George Fay, cited in The New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, we read:

In October 2003, DETAINEE-07, reported alleged multiple incidents of physical abuse while in Abu Ghraib. DETAINEE-07 was an MI hold and considered of potentially high value. He was interrogated on 8, 21 and 29 October; 4 and 23 November and 5 December. DETAINEE-07's claims of physical abuse (hitting) started on his first day of arrival. He was left naked in his cell for extended periods, cuffed in his cell in stressful positions ("High cuffed"), left with a bag over his head for extended periods, and denied bedding or blankets. DETAINEE-07 described being made to "bark like a dog, being forced to crawl on his stomach while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being struck causing unconsciousness."

The overthrow of law by legal-sounding phrases penned in secret; the laws of the Republic falling before the demands of empire; nullification of any check or balance on the President; suspension of fundamental human rights; a tangle of contradictory bureaucratic memos; blind imperial ambition leading to catastrophic war; mayhem and failure in that war unfolding behind a shimmering screen of high-sounding phrases extolling the spread of democracy; panicked resort to criminal emergency measures; torture and other outrages against human dignity hidden behind a battery of euphemisms ("sleep adjustment," "setting the conditions" for interrogation); the pre-organized rejection of any accountability, including that imposed by the articles of the US criminal code: Are these not the main features we might expect to see writ large if a full-scale collapse of the Constitution of the United States were to come?

Safeguarding Democracy

And that brings us back to the election and our endorsement of John Kerry. The most important reason to vote for John Kerry in November is to safeguard democracy in America.

Kerry's election would not necessarily save, and Bush's election would not necessarily destroy, democratic government in the United States. Even as President, even "in power," Kerry might well find himself "in opposition." In that case, he would need all the help from ordinary people he could get, and there's good reason to believe it would be forthcoming. The impeachment of Clinton failed, but it demonstrated the strength of the assault on legitimate government that can be waged not by the presidency but upon the presidency--and that was in peacetime. Clinton, after all, began his two terms in office with all three branches of government in Democratic hands but ended with all three in Republican hands. (His presidency was perhaps the most brilliant political retreat in American history, but it was a retreat.) Moreover, Kerry has given his right-wing opponents powerful ammunition. By pledging to win a war in Iraq that is unwinnable, he may have put his foot in a trap that would snap shut once he was in office, leaving him open to the charge of failure. What would the party that impeached Clinton for sex and lies do to a President who presided over the "loss" of Iraq in the midst of the "war on terror"?

If Bush is elected, the role of popular activism in support of the democratic system would be even more important. Roughly half the country dissents from Bushism. The antiwar movement, and now the campaign itself, have generated widespread and intense opposition. Activism has blossomed. New progressive organizations have been founded and will outlast the election. Events are also unlikely to favor the Administration. Already, its war policy and its fiscal policies are widely recognized as disasters. Opposition is bound to be strong and can save the Republic. And let us recall that when President Nixon threatened the constitutional system thirty years ago, he was driven from office in disgrace by popular fury. For all its importance, the election is only one episode in a longer popular struggle, whether Bush or Kerry is President. Either way, The Nation will devote itself to the fight.

Yet it remains true that of all the things Americans can now do to support democracy, the election of John Kerry is the most important. A Kerry presidency would seriously disrupt the concentration of power at the heart of the present danger. He might still try to "win" the Iraq war but would be less likely to wage future wars. His appointments to the Supreme Court would stop the Court's slide into unchecked, one-sided partisanship. His control of the bully pulpit would be a powerful counterforce to the right-wing propaganda that now all but drowns out other voices in the news media. His control of the agencies of the executive branch would halt, or at least retard, their merger with corporate America. More important, the simple structural fact that the Democrats are the other party would create a counterbalance to the right-wing power that predominates elsewhere in the system. The Democrats, including Kerry, have been disappointing champions of their namesake, democracy, yet the culture of their party is still an improvement over that of the Republicans. The Democrats are reluctant imperialists; the Republicans are imperialists by avocation. The Democratic Party generally wants to defend civil liberties and does so when it dares; the Republicans, with honorable exceptions, apparently would sweep them aside. The Democrats prefer social justice, however weakly they fight for it; the Republicans would give every dollar they can find to the rich. The Democrats are inclined to limit corporate power; the Republicans are corporate power.

What can be lost, slowly or abruptly, as the crisis unfolds, is everything that was lost by Detainee 07. What can be saved--let us rescue the beautiful word from the cesspool through which the Bush Administration has dragged it--is freedom.

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Why I'm voting for John Kerry

Published October 24, 2004

At the age of 50, I get few chances to try something entirely new. Come Nov. 2, I plan to take one of those rare opportunities. I'm going to vote for a Democrat for president.

I've never done it before, and I hope I never have to do it again. But President Bush has made an irresistible case against his own re-election. His first term has been one of the most dismal and costly failures of any presidency. His second promises to be even worse.

I know there are people for whom voting Democratic comes easily. Not me. Contemplating the prospect, I feel how I did a few years ago when I took up downhill skiing: not sure I would like it, and apprehensive of the risks involved. I cast my first presidential ballot in 1972 for Richard Nixon, and since then I have alternated between voting Republican and voting Libertarian.

John Kerry is not an inspiring candidate. He's a believer in expensive government solutions, a defender of abortion rights and a supporter of the congressional resolution that gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq. I'm a small-government, pro-life libertarian who thought the war was a terrible idea from the start.

But I can't vote Republican this year--and the stakes demand using any available instrument to remove Bush. Kerry is not the ideal instrument, just as a rubber raft is not the optimal vessel on the open sea. But when the ship is sinking, you can't be choosy.

One of the most heartening positions Bush took in 2000 was to reject using the U.S. military for nation-building. I hoped he would reverse President Bill Clinton's habit of risking American lives on missions that didn't enhance American security. Instead, Bush has embraced that approach in spades, taking possession of a country that posed no appreciable threat to us.

Now we are mired in a war that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers has said there is "no way to militarily win." For that, we can thank Bush.

As for the broader terrorist threat, we can also thank him for shortchanging the program to dismantle Russian nuclear weapons--which may someday wind up with Al Qaeda. More of those potentially "loose nukes" were destroyed in the two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks than in the two years after.

The war in Iraq is one reason government has expanded over the last four years. But only one reason. At his worst, Kerry would be hard-pressed to fatten the bureaucracy as much as Bush has done. Under Bush, domestic discretionary outlays have risen far faster than under Clinton.

The incumbent would have us believe that by cutting taxes, we can get more government for less. In fact, if you cut taxes while increasing outlays, you're not cutting taxes, just postponing them. We'll be paying for Bush's deficits for a long time.

Anyone who is sincerely pro-life may be inclined to vote for Bush on that issue alone. But when it comes to abortion, Bush has provided mostly words, and not many of them. His policy against embryonic stem-cell research deals only with federal funding--and doesn't prevent privately funded laboratories from destroying human embryos for scientific research.

The right-to-life movement's support of Bush rests mainly on the hope that he will appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe vs. Wade. But a reversal of that decision is unlikely no matter whom he picks--and I doubt Bush really wants it overturned, lest Republicans pay a political price.

The only realistic way to combat abortion is to work ceaselessly over time to change attitudes about it. Bush, in his cowardly refusal to exercise leadership on the issue, has done nothing to change attitudes.

Respect for life, however, goes beyond abortion. The other big issue for "seamless garment" pro-lifers like me, who reject the taking of human life except in self-defense, is the death penalty. There, Bush is proudly in favor of killing people to show that killing people is wrong.

Kerry, it's true, is worse than Bush on some issues. But he can probably pass a test that Bush has failed, namely, avoiding catastrophe.

His presidency would also restore something valuable: divided government. Unlike Bush, Kerry would face a Congress dominated by the opposition party. As Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz puts it, "Republicans wouldn't give Kerry every bad thing he wants, and they do give Bush every bad thing he wants."

Bad things have been the hallmark of the Bush presidency, from either a conservative or a liberal perspective. On Nov. 2, we can let him expand the grave damage he has done to the national interest--or we can hold him accountable. I'll vote for John Kerry without high hopes or enthusiasm, but vote for him I will.

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E-mail: schapman@tribune.com
Steve Chapman

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October 25, 2004
	COMMENT THE CHOICE by The Editors Issue of 2004-11-01 Posted 2004-10-25 This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to make Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state, George W. Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gore’s national margin; irregularities, and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and the state’s electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush’s brother, who was the governor, and one of Bush’s state campaign co-chairs, who was the Florida secretary of state. Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them—by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat—the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism. A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his election—in the composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to Bob Woodward in “Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this way: “From the very day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election—full speed ahead.” The new President’s main order of business was to push through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening environmental protection and cutting off funds for international family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in English, not Arabic) as “the base,” which is to say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President’s enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, cost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that, the President’s political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but inexorable decline. Then came the blackest Tuesday of all. September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of solidarity, global and national—solidarity with and solidarity within the United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second opportunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Senate by portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound differences in outlook between the two candidates and their parties? The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence. In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year’s federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion. Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go away on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ultimate results look less scary. If Congress extends the expiration deadlines—a near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans retain control of Congress—then, according to the C.B.O., the cumulative deficit between 2005 and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5 trillion. What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq’s collapse in April, 2000. It’s true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn’t make them wise policy. “Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans,” Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false—a lie, actually—though at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars. These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. This Administration’s most unshakable commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains, and permanently abolish the estate tax—all of which will widen the widening gap between the richest and the rest. Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as “new source review,” which requires power-plant operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation’s largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from power plants. The E.P.A.’s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry. “I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind. The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development. By stripping away restrictions on the use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule changes, the Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger than Indiana and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration. During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits government investigators to obtain—without a subpoena or a search warrant based on probable cause—a court order entitling them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling. Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have continued, but eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many people were and are being held. In any event, not one of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way that foreign nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than five hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions, after hearings that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by Ashcroft, were held in secret. Since it is official policy not to deport terrorism suspects, it is unclear what legitimate anti-terror purpose these secret hearings serve. President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that’s the right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees; Senate Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s. (Those ten, by the way, got exactly what they deserved. Some of them—such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted years of her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that practice racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr Report—rank among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.) Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court’s worst decisions of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best—salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects, striking down Texas’s anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally retarded—were reached by one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from reversal.) All but one of the sitting justices are senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap since the last appointment—ten years—is the longest since 1821. Bush has said more than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their images. The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President’s hostility to science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to “the base,” is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration’s energy policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year. Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the “war on terror”—more precisely, the struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon. Bush’s immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus. His decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal base of operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the near-unanimous support of the American people and of America’s allies. Troops from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain are serving alongside Americans in Afghanistan to this day. The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month’s Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left undone, despite fervent promises at the outset that the chaos that was allowed to develop after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in the nineteen-eighties would not be repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in eastern and southern regions. Bin Laden’s organization continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans as well as Pakistanis on both sides of their common border. Warlords control much of Afghanistan outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the territorial writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium production has increased fortyfold. The White House’s real priorities were elsewhere from the start. According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a Situation Room crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld suggested launching retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and others pointed out to him that Al Qaeda—the presumed culprit—was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there were better targets in Iraq. The bottom line, as Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said, was that the Bush-Cheney team had been planning to carry out regime change in Baghdad well before September 11th—one way or another, come what may. At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying that without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is probably true, and Saddam’s record of colossal cruelty--of murder, oppression, and regional aggression--was such that even those who doubted the war’s wisdom acknowledged his fall as an occasion for satisfaction. But the removal of Saddam has not been the war’s only consequence; and, as we now know, his power, however fearsome to the millions directly under its sway, was far less of a threat to the United States and the rest of the world than it pretended—and, more important, was made out—to be. As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain, Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments and warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than the chants of millions of marchers. The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four assumptions: first, that Saddam’s regime was on the verge of acquiring nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with Al Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and others) might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within Iraq the regime’s fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and rapid and peaceful democratization; and, fourth, that a similar democratic transformation would be precipitated elsewhere in the region, accompanied by a new eagerness among Arab governments and publics to make peace between Israel and a presumptive Palestinian state. The first two of these assumptions have been shown to be entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind them do someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was a help rather than a hindrance. In Bush’s rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with precision bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended exactly three weeks later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That military operation was indeed a success. But the cakewalk led over a cliff, to a succession of heedless and disastrous mistakes that leave one wondering, at the very least, how the Pentagon’s civilian leadership remains intact and the President’s sense of infallibility undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders as General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government buildings, hospitals, museums, and—most inexcusable of all—arms depots. (“Stuff happens,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained, though no stuff happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but ignored the State Department’s postwar plans, compiled by its Future of Iraq project, which warned not only of looting but also of the potential for insurgencies and the folly of relying on exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi; the project’s head, Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The White House counsel’s disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as “quaint” opened the way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic of the Administration’s management style, no one in a policymaking position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may cleave to his arguments about a grand coalition (“What’s he say to Tony Blair?” Â“He forgot Poland!”), the coalition he assembled was anything but grand, and it has been steadily melting away in Iraq’s cauldron of violence. By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost of this war will be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by Lawrence Lindsey, who headed the President’s Council of Economic Advisers until, like numerous other bearers of unpalatable news, he was cashiered) and rising. And there are other, more serious costs that were unforeseen by the dominant factions in the Administration (although there were plenty of people who did foresee them). The United States has become mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war that has taken more lives since the mission was declared to be accomplished than before. American military deaths have mounted to more than a thousand, a number that underplays the real level of suffering: among the eight thousand wounded are many who have been left seriously maimed. The toll of Iraqi dead and wounded is of an order of magnitude greater than the American. Al Qaeda, previously an insignificant presence in Iraq, is an important one now. Before this war, we had persuaded ourselves and the world that our military might was effectively infinite. Now it is overstretched, a reality obvious to all. And, if the exposure of American weakness encourages our enemies, surely the blame lies with those who created the reality, not with those who, like Senator Kerry, acknowledge it as a necessary step toward changing it. When the Administration’s geopolitical, national-interest, and anti-terrorism justifications for the Iraq war collapsed, it groped for an argument from altruism: postwar chaos, violence, unemployment, and brownouts notwithstanding, the war has purchased freedoms for the people of Iraq which they could not have had without Saddam’s fall. That is true. But a sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale—and, as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been likewise undermined. Foreign-policy idealism has taken many forms—Wilson’s aborted world federalism, Carter’s human-rights jawboning, and Reagan’s flirtation with total nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed intervention in Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other examples. The neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration, post-9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic purpose in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its autocracies and dictatorships. Yet this Administration’s adventure in Iraq is so gravely flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in the future, faced with yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be expected to retreat, a victim of its own Iraq Syndrome. The damage visited upon America, and upon America’s standing in the world, by the Bush Administration’s reckless mishandling of the public trust will not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see the damage arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery. Pollsters like to ask voters which candidate they’d most like to have a beer with, and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask which candidate is better suited to the governance of our nation. Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has demonstrated steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical courage he showed in combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage when he raised his voice against the war, a choice that has carried political costs from his first run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a campaign of character assassination from a local newspaper that could not forgive his antiwar stand, right through this year’s Swift Boat ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering operation that favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his investigation forced him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he rejected the cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his own party with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for Washington’s normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-nineties, was the signal accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol Hill, and it is emblematic of his fairness of mind and independence of spirit. Kerry has made mistakes (most notably, in hindsight at least, his initial opposition to the Gulf War in 1990), but—in contrast to the President, who touts his imperviousness to changing realities as a virtue—he has learned from them. Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry’s mettle has been tested under fire—the fire of real bullets and the political fire that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected—and he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

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