John Kerry for President
New York Times Editorial October 17, 2004
Senator John Kerry goes
toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to
George W. Bush than
loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr.
Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've
seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not
just a modest improvement on the incumbent.
We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking -
something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute
debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions
change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and
then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from
the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with
a strong moral core.
•
There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous
tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the
presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would
acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he
turned the government over to the radical right.
Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history
of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one
ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to
implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government
Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the
government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give
minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas
or the offspring of alumni.
When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on
generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the
wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social
Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs
the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic
program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing
enough money to meet them.
If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and
Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment.
Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental
Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three
years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important
environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory
safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to
wilderness protection.
•
The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001.
With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled
opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his
imagination.
He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.
The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was
gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to
change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush
did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education
initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority
than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo
unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.
Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous
international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in
place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the
administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with
secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.
American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or
family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the
Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh"
conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right
to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for
skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal
treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.
Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of
people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely
low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do
something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one
major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and
patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that
the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the
same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful
photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation
that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave
that way.
•
Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to
zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to
Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working
relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam
Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of
evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from
Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the
purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear
centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly
debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members
of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the
president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their
misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war
that followed.
The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense
of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have
attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to
an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue
states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the
best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear
weapons themselves.
•
We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term,
particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of
cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous
Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation
technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon
Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate
to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.
Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican
lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like
increased farm aid.
If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the
fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that
increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the
dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.
The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American
right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the
efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child
Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of
Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to
distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing
enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so
strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to
respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.
•
Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness -
sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are
relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove
unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the
concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to
provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.
Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas
about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a
longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John
McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led
investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to
permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that
America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community
of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.
We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the
lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and
again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again
he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the
nation will do better.
Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his
positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that
refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All
citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have
done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on
those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.
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