There are only 4 days to go until the national referendum on the COMPETENCE, CREDIBILITY and CHARACTER of the _resident, the VICE _resident and the US regimestream news media that has provided them with cover for four years...80,000 people joined Bruce Springsteen and Sen. John F. Kerry )D-Mekong Delta)in Madison, WI yesterday...The Electoral Uprising is at hand...NO DEFEAT/NO SURRENDER...Here are FIVE important stories. Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. The life of the Republic itself is at stake in this election. Yes, they are trying to steal it, but they cannot steal it if enough of us vote...
Gen. Wesley Clark (D-NATO), www.johnkerry.com: “For President Bush to send Rudolph Giuliani out on television to say that the 'actual responsibility' for the failure to secure explosives lies with the troops is insulting and cowardly.
“The President approved the mission and the priorities. Civilian leaders tell military leaders what to do. The military follows those orders and gets the job done. This was a failure of civilian leadership, first in not telling the troops to secure explosives and other dangerous materials, and second for not providing sufficient troops and sufficient equipment for troops to do the job.
Don Hazen, www.alternet.org: In Nevada, the focus of voting is Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, and is the area where most of the state's inhabitants reside. It is possible for a candidate to win Nevada just by carrying a large majority in Clark County while losing in every other county. That scenario almost worked for Gore in 2000, when the only county he won was Clark, and lost by a small margin.
It could work this time around. According to the Ralston Report as of Tuesday, 183,252 Clark County voters had already gone to the polls – a record 24,042 on Tuesday alone. Add 34,744 absentee ballots delivered to election offices, and the total is 217,996. That means about a quarter of southern Nevada's registered voters have already cast ballots – that adds up to a lead for Kerry's of 7,042 for the early vote, and a slim lead in absentee ballots of 143. Kerry's total lead in Clark County is 7,185, adding up to a three percent advantage over Bush so far. Since most analysts see more Republicans voting early than Dems, the early lead for Kerry is seen as a good omen for the Kerry camp.
PHILIP SHENON, NY Times: The principal advocacy group for families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks blamed President Bush and a group of House Republicans on Wednesday for the failure of Congress to approve a bill to enact the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission and overhaul the nation's intelligence agencies.
In a statement clearly meant to influence voters in next week's election, the group did not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, but said Mr. Bush had "allowed members of his own party to derail the legislative process."
The statement, which also singled out Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and five other House Republicans for blame, said, "The president never took time from his campaign to come to Washington himself to see this through," adding: "Election Day is imminent. Now it's our turn."
Mary Jacoby, www.salon.com: NAACP head Julian Bond says the GOP is going all out to suppress the black vote. Can his "Election Protection" offensive stop them?
Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has devoted his life to civil rights and voting rights issues... Salon spoke to Bond on Wednesday by telephone about Republican attempts to suppress the black vote in next Tuesday's election, including the placing of 3,600 election "challengers" at the polls in Ohio. The Republican secretary of state in Ohio, a crucial swing state with 20 electoral votes, asserts the challengers are needed to prevent voting fraud. But Bond countered that if fraud is really the issue, why are the GOP challengers focusing on cities like Cleveland, which have large Democratic-leaning African-American and Hispanic populations?
Nearly 40 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, dirty tricks and intimidation tactics against black voters are alive and well, Bond said. In Louisiana in 2002, he said, fliers were passed out in African-American neighborhoods advertising the wrong date for a U.S. Senate runoff election. In the 2003 mayoral election in Philadelphia, he added, men wielding clipboards and official-looking law enforcement insignia paroled African-American neighborhoods asking voters for identification.
The NAACP and the People for the American Way Foundation have issued a report titled "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today." Your organization will also be staffing an Election Day war room with a toll-free telephone number for voters to report irregularities or intimidation at the polls. Obviously, you think the risk of minority voters being denied their rights is serious.
"I do. I think it's going to be a major factor in either delaying, knowing or deciding who won. In Ohio for example, Republicans have targeted 35,000 voters [for election challenges], most of them registered in cities with large minority populations. And they do this based either on the racist assumption that minorities are inveterate cheaters or because they know that these are voters who are likely to vote against them. Either way, it's a dirty tactic, and only can be thought to slow up, gum up, mess up the whole process. And this is something they [Republicans] have consistently done in every election since the middle to late 1960s -- underhanded, tricky, illegal and immoral tactics."
New Yorker Editorial: 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.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://blog.johnkerry.com/blog/archives/003705.html
General Clark on Giuliani Comments:
"Insulting and Cowardly"
General Wesley Clark issued the following statement today about Rudolph Giuliani's comments about the responsibility of U.S. troops for the missing explosives in Iraq:
“For President Bush to send Rudolph Giuliani out on television to say that the 'actual responsibility' for the failure to secure explosives lies with the troops is insulting and cowardly.
“The President approved the mission and the priorities. Civilian leaders tell military leaders what to do. The military follows those orders and gets the job done. This was a failure of civilian leadership, first in not telling the troops to secure explosives and other dangerous materials, and second for not providing sufficient troops and sufficient equipment for troops to do the job.
“President Bush sent our troops to war without sufficient body armor, without a sound plan and without sufficient forces to accomplish the mission. Our troops are performing a difficult mission with skill, bravery and determination. They deserve a commander in chief who supports them and understands that the buck stops in the Oval Office, not one who gets weak knees and shifts blame for his mistakes.”
Posted by DickBell on October 28, 2004 at 04:33 PM
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20321/
The Silver State for Kerry?
By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2004.
Early voting is underway in Nevada, and Kerry is ahead by 7,000 votes. But there's a lot more at play in the Silver State. Story Tools
More stories by Don Hazen
It is election crunch time as the end game shifts into high gear, and the presidential race is too close to call in a number of states – that is, if one trusts the polls.
And as election day closes in, there is a separate question: with the predicted chaos and glitches, will we know who has won on election night, or will we have an ongoing donnybrook long after Nov. 2?
A very close race is certainly the case in Nevada, where the tension is already rising as early vote totals are being tallied. While current polls, particularly the Zogby tracking poll, have Bush winning Nevada by a few points, the early voting returns, already in record numbers, suggest something else.
At this point virtually every state faces some potential for confusion over voting procedures, mechanical glitches or law suits and Nevada is no exception. Interestingly, Nevada is the only state that has paper trails attached to its electronic machines, but that also could breed confusion because voters cannot take the paper with them, like a receipt, since as the theory goes, having proof of how you voted might facilitate vote buying.
In Nevada, the focus of voting is Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, and is the area where most of the state's inhabitants reside. It is possible for a candidate to win Nevada just by carrying a large majority in Clark County while losing in every other county. That scenario almost worked for Gore in 2000, when the only county he won was Clark, and lost by a small margin.
It could work this time around. According to the Ralston Report as of Tuesday, 183,252 Clark County voters had already gone to the polls – a record 24,042 on Tuesday alone. Add 34,744 absentee ballots delivered to election offices, and the total is 217,996. That means about a quarter of southern Nevada's registered voters have already cast ballots – that adds up to a lead for Kerry's of 7,042 for the early vote, and a slim lead in absentee ballots of 143. Kerry's total lead in Clark County is 7,185, adding up to a three percent advantage over Bush so far. Since most analysts see more Republicans voting early than Dems, the early lead for Kerry is seen as a good omen for the Kerry camp.
Behind the vote totals there is a much larger Nevada story. For many, Las Vegas is off the hook. It's the coolest, most-hyped destination in the continental United States. Suddenly more people are traveling to Las Vegas and spending more money there than most thought possible.
Much of the credit for its striking economic boom is the hotel and gambling industry's sexification of Las Vegas. A lot of the new Vegas is a far cry from the family fare and amusement rides of old. These days, the city is aimed at liberating the libido. And the high roller owners of Vegas are raking it in. A record $32.8 billion was spent in Vegas in 2003. And apparently the effort to stimulate the collective horniness knows no bounds, as many new high-priced, sex-themed attractions are in the works, and $6.2 billion in new construction is underway.
As the intense, claustrophobic struggle for the presidency slogs on, what Las Vegas' "irrational exuberance" means politically is still up in the air. Ultimately, will the financial success of liberating Vegas from its inhibitions be a plus for the more tolerant Democrats in a country where the Republicans often stand for sexual abstinence and repression? Or will a state where ironically straight-laced Mormons exercise enormous power stay in the Republican column, as it did in 2000 when Bush scored a three-point victory over Gore with 21,500 votes? Steve Rosenthal, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and now the CEO of the well-funded America Coming Together still thinks Nevada's five electoral votes will go for the Democrats this year. "We feel that Nevada is a good bet for a 'take away state,'" he said. And with number crunchers having various scenarios for a tie in the Electoral College, Nevada's five electoral votes are very, very important – especially if Kerry holds all the states that Gore won in 2000.
A Boom Town with Party Bosses
Nevada, overwhelmingly dominated by Las Vegas, is a tough state to figure; anomalies abound. Despite widespread poverty throughout the Southwest, the Las Vegas region is arguably the most vibrant in the country at this moment. It is hands down the fastest-growing city in the U.S. with more construction underway than any other city. One direct result of the growth is low unemployment with some workers in the fast food industry making over $9 an hour, almost twice the country's minimum wage.
Nevada has a lot of economic contradictions. It is a "right-to-work" state (meaning that workers can opt out of joining unions), but it also has a strong union presence. The 50,000-strong Culinary Workers Union, part of the national Hotel and Restaurant Workers (HERE) are legendary, both in their service to members and their grassroots clout in local politics in Las Vegas and across the state.
At the same time, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), under the new leadership of Executive Director Jane McAlevey, is beginning to flex its political muscle in Vegas, particularly after Local 1107 won a big victory on behalf of nurses and other hospital workers in recent contract negotiations and showed grassroots power in recent political primaries. Meanwhile, the national SEIU, which by some accounts is investing more than $60 million in the effort to defeat Bush, has prioritized Nevada meaning that some of the hundreds of SEIU members who have volunteered to go to work in swing states (while still being paid by the union – SEIU calls them "heroes") are in Nevada.
In Las Vegas, the corporate casinos and developers rule, and their cash buys everything, and that includes the politicians. It's something the local Republicans and Democrats have in common. With so much money in play, payoffs seem to be prevalent in Nevada. Currently no less than six current and former elected officials are under investigation or indictment, including officials of both parties.
The parties in Nevada have more in common than corruption. Both senators – Democrat Minority Whip Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign – are Mormons. Reid exercises lots of influence – his son Rory Reid ran for and now serves on the Clark County Commission, and no wonder. Most agree that the Commission is the most powerful body in the state, overseeing the Nevada strip, which is in the unincorporated portion of the city, while colorful mayor Oscar B. Goodman, a strong proponent of selling the sexier side of Las Vegas, rules a very small fiefdom north of the strip. The Clark County manager, Thom Reilly, and the head of the Clark County airport, Randall W. Walker are two of the other key power brokers in the state.
A Mountainful of Politics
A final point of affinity between the Republicans and Democrats in Nevada is that both are against the disposal of all the nation's nuclear waste in Yucca mountain. The public is against it as well; a recent poll had 54% of Nevadans against Yucca, with 39% supporting it if the state received "federal benefits" for storing it. Yucca figures to be the biggest local issue for Nevadans in the presidential race, and Bush and Kerry are divided on it. Bush has generally supported bringing all the nuclear waste to Yucca, while John Kerry has voted six times in the Senate against bills relating to the Yucca plan. The Kerry campaign sees this as a big wedge issue for the Nevada voters. Katie Selenski, director of the New Voters Project's Nevada office says "issues like the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain are motivating young people to reach out to their friends and neighbors to vote in record numbers."
Kerry made a pledge in May of this year that, "there's going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain" if he were elected. Kerry reaffirmed his pledge on Aug. 10 at an evening rally before more than 12,000 people at the Thomas & Mack center in Vegas, and according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Kerry said that the Bush administration "has pursued a relentless, purposeful policy to push the science no matter what the science says."
A Soft Strategy for the Left
The closeness of the races in the Southwest has garnered the attention of national groups like America Coming Together and the New Voters Project. It is unclear how much impact the outside groups will have on Nevada. One possible critique is that the groups trying to deliver Nevada for the Democrats are putting too many of their resources in Clark County.
At first glance, that strategy would seem to make sense. In the 2000 presidential elections, southern Nevada – where 80 percent of the state's electorate resides – accounted for 63 percent of the votes cast in the presidential race. Al Gore carried only Clark County (Las Vegas), while Bush won 16 of the 17 counties in the southern part of the state, and Bush won the state. It is clear that a campaign that focuses only on Democratic base turnout in Clark County is not enough to carry the whole state. America Coming Together claims to have a statewide focus in Nevada, but perhaps too many resources are being used in Las Vegas.
America Coming Together (ACT), operating full blast in a number of swing states, was late-forming in Nevada. One insider's sense of ACT in Nevada is that it has been slow to get rolling and has not been making much of an impact. Some suggest that the ACT Nevada leadership is from out of state and lacks roots or experience in the desert.
Ty Weinert, political director of SEIU local 1107 in Las Vegas, says that despite there being 20 organizations ranging from 527's (these are organizations permitted to conduct political activity – running ads, registering voters, etc. – but aren't allowed to coordinate their work with specific candidates) labor organizations (Culinary/UNITE HERE and SEIU at the forefront), and other non-partisan groups active in the state, "a less Clark County-centric strategy is needed for those who would like to see Kerry/Edwards win Nevada," which Bush won by a mere 21,500 votes out 600,000.
Cooking Up Politics, Latino Style
A big factor in Nevada politics is the role of the Culinary Workers Union, which has membership that is roughly 45% Latino. Part of the union's success is in creating the Immigrant Worker's Citizen Project – aimed at assisting members with naturalization, and registering them as new voters. Another group, Voices for Working Families, has aimed to register 15,000 new Hispanic voters, according to Las Vegas City Life. Also New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's non-partisan Hispanic-focused Moving America Forward (MAF) has registered more than 9,000 Hispanic voters in Clark County since June. Twenty-two percent of Clark County is Latino, according to the 2000 census.
The Las Vegas Culinary union success story is the tale of how John Wilhelm, sent to Las Vegas years ago to prove his mettle, helped to produce one of the biggest union organizing success stories in recent years which eventually led to his taking over as head of the national Hotel and Restaurant Workers.
The ambitious Wilhelm, who is often discussed as a possible successor to AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, recently engineered the groundbreaking merger of HERE with UNITE, the textile workers' union. Wilhelm will be co-president with Bruce Raynor, the head of UNITE. The shorthand explanation of the merger is that UNITE, by dint of savvy investments many years ago, is a wealthy union with a rapidly shrinking worker base. In contrast, HERE has a huge gambling and restaurant industry to pursue across the country, but lacks the resources to do it – as some would say, "a match made in heaven." Suddenly there were big stakes for for HERE, particularly in Atlantic City where some of the casinos have been struck by HERE workers, and key leaders have been scattered around the country. Nevertheless, it has been very important for HERE to refocus its attention on Nevada, and make sure its vaunted political operation at Culinary Workers is in high gear this last week if Kerry is to win the state.
So there you have it: Las Vegas is a wild mix of sex, gambling, enormous growth, Mormons, political corruption, nuclear waste, and grassroots voter registration in the barrios by a powerful local union. What does all of this add up to? Check in with the Las Vegas oddsmakers. Chances are, the prospects are even money.
Don Hazen is the Executive Editor of AlterNet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/politics/28panel.html?oref=login
9/11 Families Group Rebukes Bush for Impasse on Overhaul
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: October 28, 2004
ASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - The principal advocacy group for families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks blamed President Bush and a group of House Republicans on Wednesday for the failure of Congress to approve a bill to enact the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission and overhaul the nation's intelligence agencies.
In a statement clearly meant to influence voters in next week's election, the group did not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, but said Mr. Bush had "allowed members of his own party to derail the legislative process."
The statement, which also singled out Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and five other House Republicans for blame, said, "The president never took time from his campaign to come to Washington himself to see this through," adding: "Election Day is imminent. Now it's our turn."
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Efforts by House and Senate negotiators to work out a compromise bill appeared close to collapse on Wednesday, with lawmakers at a stalemate over the powers of a proposed national intelligence director \and other issues.
Asked about the group's criticism of the president, a White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, suggested that Mr. Bush did not deserve the families' blame, and that he had been active in encouraging Congress to agree on a final bill.
"He has urged the House and Senate to come together and resolve their differences," she said. "The administration has been actively engaged in this. We've been up on the Hill. We've been taking part in the conferees' process."
The Kerry campaign instantly seized on the families' statement to attack President Bush. Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said it showed that "George Bush has squandered this golden opportunity to achieve meaningful and lasting intelligence reform."
John Feehery, a spokesman for the speaker, said the families' criticism of Mr. Hastert was "unfair because the speaker and his staff have been negotiating day and night to get a bill that will make the country safer."
No advocacy group claims to speak for all relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. But the leaders of the Family Steering Committee - in particular, four New Jersey widows who became known as "the Jersey girls" - were instrumental in pressuring Congress and the White House to create the Sept. 11 commission in late 2002, and in insisting that the commission be aggressive in demanding documents and testimony from the Bush administration.
Their statement, the most pointedly political one ever issued by the committee, said the group's members were "angry and saddened that the opportunity for significant reform of our country's intelligence structure has been squandered." Nikki Stern, leader of another large victims' family group, Families of September 11, said that her group's nonprofit status barred her from urging voters to support or oppose individual political candidates.
"But we do say that those people who are responsible for not helping push through legislation that supports the 9/11 commission will be held accountable on Nov. 2," she said. "We're encouraging everyone to vote."
Congressional negotiators have been meeting for a week to try to reconcile House and Senate bills intended to enact major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, most importantly its call for the creation of the job of a national intelligence director to coordinate the work of the government's 15 spy agencies, including the C.I.A. Congressional leaders had asked that a final bill be ready in time for it to be signed into law by President Bush before the election on Tuesday.
But lawmakers say the talks have been at a virtual standstill this week, with House Republicans refusing to accept the wording of the bipartisan Senate bill, which would grant broader budget and personnel authority to a national intelligence director than would the House bill.
House Republicans say they have been willing to make concessions about the intelligence director's authority, but that they cannot make concessions that would hamper the work of intelligence agencies within the Pentagon, like the National Security Agency.
Their position has been endorsed by senior officials at the Pentagon, which has proved awkward for the White House to explain in recent days since President Bush has offered his public support to the Senate provisions, which have also been endorsed by the Sept. 11 commission. The House Republicans have also insisted on the inclusion in a final bill of several law-enforcement and immigration provisions from the House bill that have been strongly criticized by civil liberties groups and were never addressed by the commission.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102904W.shtml
"It Will Be Worse Than in 2000"
By Mary Jacoby
Salon.com
Thursday 28 October 2004
NAACP head Julian Bond says the GOP is going all out to suppress the black vote. Can his "Election Protection" offensive stop them?
Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has devoted his life to civil rights and voting rights issues. After a group of black college students refused to leave a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, Bond -- then a student at Atlanta's Morehouse College -- helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Famous for its "Freedom Rides" challenging segregation, SNCC also worked to register black voters in rural areas of the deep South in the early 1960s, with Bond serving as the organization's communications director.
Elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, the 25-year-old Bond was denied his seat by legislators angry about his opposition to the Vietnam War; he was seated after three elections and a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Chairman of the NAACP since 1998, Bond is now a distinguished professor at American University in Washington and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He narrated the prize-winning documentaries "A Time for Justice" and "Eyes on the Prize."
Salon spoke to Bond on Wednesday by telephone about Republican attempts to suppress the black vote in next Tuesday's election, including the placing of 3,600 election "challengers" at the polls in Ohio. The Republican secretary of state in Ohio, a crucial swing state with 20 electoral votes, asserts the challengers are needed to prevent voting fraud. But Bond countered that if fraud is really the issue, why are the GOP challengers focusing on cities like Cleveland, which have large Democratic-leaning African-American and Hispanic populations?
Nearly 40 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, dirty tricks and intimidation tactics against black voters are alive and well, Bond said. In Louisiana in 2002, he said, fliers were passed out in African-American neighborhoods advertising the wrong date for a U.S. Senate runoff election. In the 2003 mayoral election in Philadelphia, he added, men wielding clipboards and official-looking law enforcement insignia paroled African-American neighborhoods asking voters for identification.
The NAACP and the People for the American Way Foundation have issued a report titled "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today." Your organization will also be staffing an Election Day war room with a toll-free telephone number for voters to report irregularities or intimidation at the polls. Obviously, you think the risk of minority voters being denied their rights is serious.
I do. I think it's going to be a major factor in either delaying, knowing or deciding who won. In Ohio for example, Republicans have targeted 35,000 voters [for election challenges], most of them registered in cities with large minority populations. And they do this based either on the racist assumption that minorities are inveterate cheaters or because they know that these are voters who are likely to vote against them. Either way, it's a dirty tactic, and only can be thought to slow up, gum up, mess up the whole process. And this is something they [Republicans] have consistently done in every election since the middle to late 1960s -- underhanded, tricky, illegal and immoral tactics.
Are you saying that the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 has not been particularly effective in ensuring the enfranchisement of minorities?
Curiously, the Voting Rights Act shifted the partisan direction of these tactics. Before the Voting Rights Act was passed, this [black-voter suppression] was the exclusive province of Democrats. But the Voting Rights Act made two things happen. First, Democrats who were resistant to equality migrated in large numbers to the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party, which had been hostile to black voters, became welcoming. When LBJ signed the law, he said to an aide, "We're giving the South to the Republican Party for a generation." The parties traded places.
Do you expect the tactics to be any heavier-handed this year than in the past?
Oh, yeah. I think it will be worse than in 2000. For one thing, in 2000 you did not have the law-enforcement apparatus of the government engaged on one side of the contest, as you do now. Attorney General [John] Ashcroft has instituted this so-called ballot integrity program. Yes, despite appeals to him to issue statements saying we're interested in protecting the voters' right to cast their votes, he's focused entirely on suspicions and allegations of fraud. I don't think anyone thinks that fraud is a widespread problem in the American electoral system. Instead, he's instructed his attorneys general across the United States to be on the alert for fraud, rather than be on the alert for people who are likely to stymie voters and keep them from casting their votes. The two parties are much more aware, taking a lesson from 2000, that every vote counts, and the Democrats take the lesson to mean we need to get all our people to the polls, while the Republicans take the lesson to mean we have to keep as many people as we can away.
Have you ever heard of thousands of people being employed to challenge voters before, as is happening in Ohio?
I don't know how old this practice is, but it's a fairly standard option in most jurisdictions that one voter is able to challenge the legitimacy of another. But it has never been a widespread practice until this year, and that's what makes it so significant. Typically, in small local races where most voters know each other, the right to challenge means that if I see John Smith coming, and I know that John doesn't live in this precinct, I'm going to challenge him. In the South before the Voting Rights Act, it was typically done by white Democrats against blacks. Now, things are reversed, and this Ohio thing is just unprecedented. Just the sheer number -- never before in American political history have 35,000 voters been challenged at one time.
What can the NAACP do about it?
Unfortunately, all you can do in the absence of any intervening authority is to say these are harassment tactics and will not be tolerated. All you can do is have your own people at the polls. In Ohio, you have a partisan secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, whose hopes for achieving the governorship next year rest on his ability to win this election for George W. Bush. He's done everything he can to make the process of casting votes difficult, and he's tolerating this massive challenge, which at best will gum things up.
And you can't really counter these tactics?
You can give instructions to the poll managers to say these things won't be tolerated. You can try to educate them about the standards under which challenges are conducted. But as I understand it, Blackwell hasn't set any standards or issued any warnings. You hope that the poll managers will do it, but they're likely to be overwhelmed by the enormous numbers of people. This is an invitation to chaos.
As far as the hard-won right to vote is concerned -- and to have that vote count -- what's at stake for African-Americans in this election?
If one person is denied the right to vote, that's a tragedy. If one is turned away for a phony reason, that's a little chink in our democracy. When it happens to thousands, and when their votes are disallowed, as happened in Florida in 2000, then citizens' confidence in the process is weakened.
The result will always be open to challenge and dispute. As you know, there are many, many people, myself among them, who are convinced that President Bush has been an illegitimate president for four years. He didn't win the popular vote; he won the Florida vote by 527 votes, when thousands of black votes were cast aside. If the president doesn't have legitimacy, it makes the process of governing less legitimate.
And yet some polls suggest that Bush is not doing so badly among black voters, at least compared with the single digits he pulled in the 2000 election.
It's because after years of trying to suppress and nullify black voters, they've [Republicans] now tried to slice away a wedge of black voters. And in 11 states, [they] have these so-called marriage amendments on the ballot [to prevent gay marriage] and have begun an aggressive campaign to solicit the support of conservative black clergy. And in some respects, they've succeeded. Now, the NAACP opposed the federal amendments, which failed, and opposed these state-level amendments. And Kweisi Mfume, the president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, and I as the chairman, have written letters to ministers in these 11 states, telling them of our opposition and saying that these state-level amendments are simply devices to split the progressive coalition.
Why don't you ever hear about intimidation tactics being used in predominantly white precincts?
You never hear about it because if you're walking down the street and you see a black face and a white face, you can make an informed guess that that black face is going to vote for the Democrats, and so minorities are the targets of people who want to suppress Democratic votes. That's true -- you never hear about this occurring in white precincts. And it's evidence of the partisan and pernicious nature of these practices.
Tell me about the "Election Protection" project that the NAACP has set up with People for the American Way. You've got a toll-free hot-line number for people to call on Election Day to report irregularities and intimidation tactics?
Yes, but I hope we don't just get overwhelmed. Ideally, if you see a practice you think is questionable, you call and somebody nearby you will be dispatched to take care of it. We also have this cadre of lawyers who will be on the ready in places where, based on past experience, we expect trouble, chiefly in Florida. It's basically a dispatch system to ensure that every complaint is attended to.
Do you do this every election year?
Yes. We've done it in the last two presidential elections, but it really didn't seem to be something needed much until 2000. In 2000, we were just flooded with all kinds of calls all over the country.
So you do or do not think you have the resources to counter any Republican tactics?
I'm sure [the Republicans' efforts] are going to be successful. The only question is to what degree will they be successful. With the resources available, the only way this can be countered is by overwhelming the polls with a record turnout of voters.
We've focused on intimidation of African-American voters. But this is an issue that is important beyond the minority community, isn't it?
Yes. We're talking about things that are beyond the pale of normal politics. It's normal politics for candidates to run negative ads in the hope that they suppress their opponent's votes. But we're talking about things that border on the illegal, or which are illegal. And it ought to be an issue for everyone. How can you wake up the next morning and say Joe Blow has been elected when you know that Joe's election has been tainted by suppressed votes, nullified votes and voters frightened away? How can that election have any credibility? The issue is confidence in the democratic system.
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Jump to TO Features for Friday October 29, 2004
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/041101ta_talk_editors
COMMENT
THE CHOICE
by The Editors
Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25
This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to make Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state, George W. Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gore’s national margin; irregularities, and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and the state’s electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush’s brother, who was the governor, and one of Bush’s state campaign co-chairs, who was the Florida secretary of state.
Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them—by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat—the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.
A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his election—in the composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to Bob Woodward in “Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this way: “From the very day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election—full speed ahead.”
The new President’s main order of business was to push through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening environmental protection and cutting off funds for international family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in English, not Arabic) as “the base,” which is to say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President’s enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, cost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that, the President’s political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but inexorable decline. Then came the blackest Tuesday of all.
September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of solidarity, global and national—solidarity with and solidarity within the United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second opportunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Senate by portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound differences in outlook between the two candidates and their parties?
The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence.
In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year’s federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion.
Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go away on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ultimate results look less scary. If Congress extends the expiration deadlines—a near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans retain control of Congress—then, according to the C.B.O., the cumulative deficit between 2005 and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5 trillion.
What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq’s collapse in April, 2000. It’s true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn’t make them wise policy. “Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans,” Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false—a lie, actually—though at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars.
These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. This Administration’s most unshakable commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains, and permanently abolish the estate tax—all of which will widen the widening gap between the richest and the rest.
Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as “new source review,” which requires power-plant operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation’s largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from power plants. The E.P.A.’s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry.
“I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind. The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development. By stripping away restrictions on the use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule changes, the Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger than Indiana and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration.
During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits government investigators to obtain—without a subpoena or a search warrant based on probable cause—a court order entitling them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling.
Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have continued, but eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many people were and are being held. In any event, not one of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way that foreign nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than five hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions, after hearings that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by Ashcroft, were held in secret. Since it is official policy not to deport terrorism suspects, it is unclear what legitimate anti-terror purpose these secret hearings serve.
President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that’s the right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees; Senate Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s. (Those ten, by the way, got exactly what they deserved. Some of them—such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted years of her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that practice racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr Report—rank among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.)
Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court’s worst decisions of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best—salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects, striking down Texas’s anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally retarded—were reached by one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from reversal.) All but one of the sitting justices are senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap since the last appointment—ten years—is the longest since 1821. Bush has said more than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their images.
The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President’s hostility to science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to “the base,” is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration’s energy policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.
Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the “war on terror”—more precisely, the struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.
Bush’s immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus. His decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal base of operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the near-unanimous support of the American people and of America’s allies. Troops from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain are serving alongside Americans in Afghanistan to this day.
The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month’s Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left undone, despite fervent promises at the outset that the chaos that was allowed to develop after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in the nineteen-eighties would not be repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in eastern and southern regions. Bin Laden’s organization continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans as well as Pakistanis on both sides of their common border. Warlords control much of Afghanistan outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the territorial writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium production has increased fortyfold.
The White House’s real priorities were elsewhere from the start. According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a Situation Room crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld suggested launching retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and others pointed out to him that Al Qaeda—the presumed culprit—was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there were better targets in Iraq. The bottom line, as Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said, was that the Bush-Cheney team had been planning to carry out regime change in Baghdad well before September 11th—one way or another, come what may.
At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying that without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is probably true, and Saddam’s record of colossal cruelty--of murder, oppression, and regional aggression--was such that even those who doubted the war’s wisdom acknowledged his fall as an occasion for satisfaction. But the removal of Saddam has not been the war’s only consequence; and, as we now know, his power, however fearsome to the millions directly under its sway, was far less of a threat to the United States and the rest of the world than it pretended—and, more important, was made out—to be.
As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain, Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments and warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than the chants of millions of marchers.
The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four assumptions: first, that Saddam’s regime was on the verge of acquiring nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with Al Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and others) might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within Iraq the regime’s fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and rapid and peaceful democratization; and, fourth, that a similar democratic transformation would be precipitated elsewhere in the region, accompanied by a new eagerness among Arab governments and publics to make peace between Israel and a presumptive Palestinian state. The first two of these assumptions have been shown to be entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind them do someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was a help rather than a hindrance.
In Bush’s rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with precision bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended exactly three weeks later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That military operation was indeed a success. But the cakewalk led over a cliff, to a succession of heedless and disastrous mistakes that leave one wondering, at the very least, how the Pentagon’s civilian leadership remains intact and the President’s sense of infallibility undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders as General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government buildings, hospitals, museums, and—most inexcusable of all—arms depots. (“Stuff happens,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained, though no stuff happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but ignored the State Department’s postwar plans, compiled by its Future of Iraq project, which warned not only of looting but also of the potential for insurgencies and the folly of relying on exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi; the project’s head, Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The White House counsel’s disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as “quaint” opened the way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic of the Administration’s management style, no one in a policymaking position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may cleave to his arguments about a grand coalition (“What’s he say to Tony Blair?” “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.
Posted by richard at October 29, 2004 08:31 AM