September 3, 2004
I'll confess that I avoided watching the Republican convention. I'm not proud of that, because ideally, I'd be able to listen to the other side without letting myself get highjacked emotionally. I don't hate Mr. Bush -- see my earlier piece on that subject. However, I happen to be one of those who believe very strongly that he shouldn't be re-elected, and when the attempts to persuade me otherwise consist mainly of character assassination, I don't find the conversation uplifting.
Of course, it's hardly as though the left has avoided character assassination. The Democratic Convention tried hard to leave vitriol out of the mix, but if a Republican saw that as a rare moment of pseudo-sunshine, I'm not really sure I could disagree.
Having gotten that off my chest, I'd like to make a different case: none of the three major candidates (if Ralph Nader counts as major) are anything to get excited about. It's been pointed out that many Democrats aren't so much voting for John Kerry as against George Bush. Republicans seem to be genuinely enthusiastic about their man, but it seems to me that if they thought more clearly, a good many of them would be casting their own votes with clothespins on their noses too. And as for Ralph Nader, only someone who thinks both major parties stink beyond salvation ought to be voting for him.
Let's start with Mr. Nader. He claims that he wants to see George Bush defeated. He hasn't made any such claim about John Kerry and far as I know, there's no reason to think he puts Kerry and Bush in the same category. He can't possibly believe that he will be elected himself, but he's got to know that he's much more likely to pull votes away from Kerry than from Bush. He has to know that if he draws even a small number of votes away from Kerry in a swing state like Florida, he could throw the election to Bush. If that happens, he will have done absolutely nothing for the cause of the progressive politics he claims to be promoting. In the short term, he will have helped elect George Bush. In the longer term, he will have alienated an awful lot of people who would otherwise be sympathetic to him. It's hard to see his candidacy as anything other than righteous self-deception cloaked in vanity.
Then there's John Kerry, the man I'll be voting for -- or more accurately, the man who will serve as my way of voting against George Bush. I'm disgusted by the Swift Boat attacks, but I don't think that John Kerry's Viet Nam service is particularly relevant to whether he should be president. For one thing, my guess is that there isn't much correlation between how people behave in the heat of battle and whether they'll make wise policy choices when they have the luxury of doing it without bullets flying. Of course, I don't hold Kerry's service against him. My complaint is somewhere in the neighborhood of the flip-flop thing.
That needs some qualification. The fact that a senator votes one way on one version of a bill and another way on another version doesn't have to have anything to do with flip-flopping. If one version is clean and the other is filled with bad add-ons, that could be reason enough to vote differently. Looking at a Senate voting record without context may not tell us very much. And in fact it's worse. As the Washington Post points out, there's some real distortion in the Republican depiction of Kerry's record. That said, what bothers me about Kerry is that he seems disingenuous.
Exhibit A: in his acceptance speech, Kerry got a lot of applause for this line: "And as President, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to." Let's parse that. The implication is that we didn't have to go to Iraq, but George Bush took us there anyway. I happen to think that's right. Does Kerry? Hard to say. When he was asked if he would have voted to give the President the authority to go to war if he'd known there were no weapons of mass destruction, here's what he said: "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a President to have."
Maybe that doesn't mean he thinks we were right to go to war. Maybe it's just a comment about the tools the president ought to have. But had we known that Iraq didn't have WMD, it's hard to see why the President should have been given authority to go to war.
Of course, Kerry may have had something more subtle in mind. William Saletan made an attempt to sort out Kerry's statements on the war. I'm all for nuance; philosophy is that kind of business. But it's possible to be subtle and still be reasonably straightforward. Kerry seems addicted to fudging the story -- to trying to be either everything to everyone or, maybe closer to the truth, not quite anyone to anyone.
And then there was the President's recent admission that we can't exactly win the war on terror. He was right. There will always be terrorists. We can try to contain them, try to make terrorism less attractive, try to pull the rug out from under the conditions that breed terrorism, but we'll never get rid of it. In fact, that's one reason why the phrase "war on terrorism" is so troublesome. The administration uses it in a way that goes far beyond such metaphors as "the war on drugs" or "the war on poverty." They make it part of the claim that Bush is a wartime president in the literal sense. But while terrorism is violence and often calls for a violent response, it's different from war in a lot of important ways, not least because there's nothing realistic that would clearly count as victory. John Kerry attacked the president for what seemed to me a moment of insight. (Granted it was an insight he decided to retract few days later.) Does Kerry really believe that we can literally win the war on terrorism? I hope not.
Finally we come to the President. I'm willing to grant that there was a case to be made for going to war with Iraq -- especially when it seemed so likely that there really were weapons of mass destruction. But the president and his party want you to think that going to war with Iraq was a crucial part of the war on terrorism. That, in the words of Colonel Potter, is horsehockey. Dark hints by various administration apparatchiks notwithstanding, there's no good reason to think that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, no good reason to think that he had any meaningful ties to al Qaida, and most important of all, not the slightest, tiniest reason to think that our foray into Iraq has made us one iota safer from terrorists than we were before. Saddam is gone; good riddance. But even though Saddam was a brutal, murderous thug, he wasn't a terrorist and the difference matters. Terrorists are stateless agents whose main way of operating is to attack the civilian populations of the countries they despise. They are shadowy, hard to find and don't have any one coherent set of motives. That's the nature of the enemy in the particular struggle we call the war on terrorism. Invading Iraq doesn't count as part of that struggle, and the oft-repeated claim that our presence in Iraq has created even more terrorists is all too plausible. The administration's -- and the President's -- attempt to confuse the issue is dishonest. When combined with the host of misrepresentation that went along with the lead-up (not least the allusions to mushroom clouds) "dishonest" is way too mild.
As I see it, we don't have any candidates who really ought to be president. It's a case of choosing the least bad of a very imperfect lot. In my case, even if I weren't so mad at the president for the way he handled the war (and I've only touched on one piece of that), I would still vote against him because of his domestic policies. That, of course, is a whole 'nother debate and I agree that there's room to disagree. What seems clear to me in any case is that no matter who wins, it won't be because he deserved to.