http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041101ta_talk_editors
COMMENT
THE CHOICE
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?" "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.
— The Editors
1st Endorsement by New Yorker Ever
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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041101ta_talk_editors
COMMENT
THE CHOICE
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?" "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.
— The Editors
COMMENT
THE CHOICE
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?" "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.
— The Editors
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1st Endorsement by New Yorker Ever – blockdog on October 27th, 2004-
Re: 1st Endorsement by New Yorker Ever – dale on October 27th, 2004-
Re: 1st Endorsement by New Yorker Ever – Rogertick on October 27th, 2004
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Re: 1st Endorsement by New Yorker Ever – Smorley on October 27th, 2004
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