The Great Mystery
The great mystery of current day politics in America is why so many otherwise smart, balanced, principled Republicans continue to implicate themselves and the honor of their party in the humiliating catastrophe that is George W. Bush. Three years on from Bush’s glorious photo-op in the rubble of the World Trade Center, only the most uninformed, disingenuous, or credulous people stubbornly cling to the tissue of lies that surround nearly every aspect of this Administration, from Iraq to tax policy to the myth that all this nonsense is making America any stronger or more secure. In the last week, we’ve seen first-hand evidence of the psychotic break from reality that characterizes the two men at the top of this shit-pile: a stream of cold, calculating lies delivered with great authority and assurance by Dick Cheney, and the spectacle of Bush, whining and stammering, challenged to fill 90 second responses with substantive discussions of his own Administration’s policies in the face of calm and deliberative questioning.
Not only are we hearing shifty, self-serving excuses from the President of the United States that we wouldn’t accept from a six year-old child, but we are also confronted with one of the poorest records of accomplishment of any Administration since Calvin Coolidge. Look at the signal achievements of Bush and the Republican Congress: No Child Left Behind, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the PATRIOT act, Medicare Reform, Homeland Security. Each one of these laws fails in basic and predictable ways in achieving its public purpose. Indeed, judged as policy, each represents the very least-effective and most expensive way of improving our schools, our economy, our domestic safety, and our health care system, while including all kinds of indefensible giveaways of public money and people’s rights to private interests. Like every other aspect of this fantasyland Presidency, the legislative record substitutes photo-ops and spin for effective action, while betraying every basic principle of good governance embraced by responsible Liberals and Conservatives alike in pursuit of opportunistic short-term gain. The results – a sluggish economy, rising income disparities, out of control health care inflation, and a burgeoning police state run by Keystone Cops – speak for themselves. Is this really a legacy that Republicans are eager to embrace?
What’s becoming impossible to deny is that the failures of the Bush administration on both foreign and domestic policy are not accidents, are not the result of a world in which “everything has changed.” Instead, this sorry record can most charitably be ascribed to wild incompetence and indifference – the predictable result of turning the government over to people whose proudly-stated philosophy views the activities of government with skepticism and disdain. At worst, they represent the cynical mendacity of utterly unprincipled, power-hungry opportunists, guided by an ideology alien to American democratic values.
As the lies crumble and reality intrudes into Bush’s baroque cathedral of disinformation, he forces his supporters into a difficult choice: join him in his psychotic break from the world brought into being by his own blunders and misjudgments, or fall grudgingly into line out of misplaced loyalty and/or fear of a worse alternative. There’s little to be said or done with people in the first group. Enough information exists on which to base an informed judgment of Bush’s record, and those who ignore it or discount it do so out of willful denial or simple inability to grasp facts and reason. But for the second group, there must come a point where you need to look at the long-term future of the Republican party versus the knee-jerk reaction to close ranks around an obviously flawed, inadequate and deluded leader.
Republicans were faced with this choice in 1974. They did the right thing for the country by supporting the impeachment of Nixon, and were returned to power after only four years with a new mandate of trust. Imagine if today’s party were in charge back then, and had stuck it out with a paranoid criminal in the White House out of partisan loyalty, even as mountains of evidence surfaced to discredit him in the eyes of the public and the world. Do you imagine there would even be a Republican party today, assuming Nixon didn’t declare Martial Law and throw all his opponents in prison?
As we come down the home stretch of this campaign, Republicans should look to Bush and soberly assess where he stands on the issues that define the Party:
- Fiscal responsibility
- Limited power of government over citizens
- Federalism
- Realistic foreign policy in the tradition of Dulles, Kissinger, Baker and Bush senior
- “Good government” and limitations of abuse of power by legislators and the executive branch
- Aggrandizement of American influence in the world
- Free trade
In each of these cases, the Republican muses, “yes, but Kerry would be worse.” But would he? Given the financial situation we’re in right now and the high likelihood of a Republican Congress, even most Democrats have no illusions that Kerry will be able to accomplish any ambitious spending policies, even if he were inclined to do so. Since Clinton, Democrats have embraced fiscal responsibility as a driver of economic growth. Kerry would be a fool to reject that legacy and turn the clock back to tax-and-spend, even if he may have flirted with those policies in the past. On individual liberty and States’ rights, is it possible to imagine any Democrat doing more damage than John Ashcroft, who has routinely de-prioritized anti-terrorism and effective anti-crime work to pursue his private agendas, suing states over laws that expand personal freedom and prosecuting American citizens for using marijuana to reduce their suffering from disease?
In foreign policy, imagine a second-term Bush Administration without the steadying influence of Colin Powell, with the lunatics who have dragged America’s reputation and our ability to project effective power through the mud now in charge of the asylum. On trade and economics, Kerry has been straight-up with his position on outsourcing, but will be under intense pressure from centrist Democrats to stay the course on free trade. Bush, who talks a good game, has in practice been all over the map on this. He’s for free trade until he isn’t, until some constituency or other persuades him to throw up a few tariffs, maybe start a trade war. Is that kind of unpredictable, opportunistic policy good for markets?
Finally, with Kerry, you get a thoughtful person of moderate views, able and interested in grasping the details of a complex and confusing world. Partisans paint him as extreme in his liberalism – a false characterization which would be impractical as a mode of governing in today’s world even if it were true. Bush also likes to claim Kerry is inconsistent. That’s another way of saying he doesn’t let his past biases interfere with his ability to embrace a good idea. That’s not inconsistency – it’s sanity, and it’s something Democrats and especially Republicans could use a little more of these days.
9:57:10 AM 
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