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Monday, May 31, 2004
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WHEREIN skippy MAKES A PRESIDENTIAL ENDORSEMENT
Firstly, to my American readers, happy Memorial Day.
Given current world events, it seems appropriate that I pick Memorial Day to butt into a foreign election and tell otherwise smart people who I think they should cast their ballot for in five months. As I write this, American forces are on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither engagement seems to have a clear end in sight. Anybody who knows anything about geopolitics will tell you that you can't introduce troops into a place where civil governance has collapsed and then withdraw them, consequence-free a year later. That serves only to make a bad problem incalcualbly worse.
There's more than enough blame to go around on this point. Six years before 9/11, President Clinton introduced ground troops into Bosnia, promising that they would be home in time for his second inauguration. They remain there to this day. Then a force commitment was made in Kosovo, which was also supposed to be a short-term engagement. The explanation Clinton gave at the time was that U.S forces would be a stopgap for NATO and U.N peacekeeping forces and their introduction would allow for the U.S to withdraw.
Notice how well that worked?
Unfortunately, the failure of this policy hasn't warned both President Bush and Senator Kerry off of it. Both feel that they can get either U.N or NATO forces to lighten the load in Iraq. This is incredibly unlikely. Firstly, the people who were most strongly against the war, the French, Russians and Chinese, all have a veto on the U.N security council and the French and the Germans can effectively veto any NATO operation. The U.S and British are there, and for the foreseeable future, will be there alone. There's an outside chance that a Muslim force, consisting of the Egyptians, Pakistanis and a few others might be mustered up, but that's a long shot.
There's also a good chance that the government of British Prime Minister Blair can be toppled from within in the next six months. One can safely assume that any subsequent Labor Prime Minister will pull British forces out of Iraq, just as the new Spanish government has.
Iraq is but one of the issues that have made this years' presidential election the most important of my lifetime. It may be the most important since 1940. Both World War II and the Cold War were set pieces with mutually understood strategies and comprehensive alliances. The War on Terror is neither. Our (meaning the Western World's, whether we like it or not, we're all in this together) are completely unafraid of fighting by tactics that the Nazis, Japanese and Soviet's wouldn't. They are proud of such tactics and, indeed, believe them to be the path to eternal paradise.
These are serious, desperate times. Strong, hard-headed leadership is required more now than at any time since 1945. Such leadership is not on the ballot. Instead what is offered is President Bush, Senator Kerry and Ralph Nader.
This blog is officially endorsing Raph Nader for president of the United States.
I've never agreed with anything that Ralph Nader has ever said. This being the case, one could reasonably wonder why I should endorse his candidacy. Firstly, it sends a powerful message to the major parties. That message would be, "quit gerrymandering your primary structure in such a way that guarantees that you nominate candidates who's only real gift is fundraising. There are serious people in both parties, any of whom would be better equipped to face the world than anyone currently on the ballot.
In 2000, the Republican field included Senators John McCain, Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch, all of whom are gifted civil servants with an impressive knowledge of the world and a breadth of experience that then-Governor Bush could not hope to match. But Bush was better on television and a masterful fundraiser.
The same was true in the Democratic primary. Former Senator Bill Bradley was probably more serious and, in my estimation, would have been a better general election candidate than Al Gore. Gore could not win his home state of Tennessee, but one could bet that Bradley would have won his home state of New Jersey.
Being a good technical politician is no guarantee that one will be a good president. President George H.W Bush was a horrible politician but a far superior president - at least in foreign policy - than anyone currently running. The same could be said of President Gerald R. Ford.
I'm sure there are several questions that will arise out my support of Nader. I will try to anticipate and answer as many as I can.
1. Ralph Nader can't win, can he?
That's true. He can't. Not only will he not get on the ballot in all 50 states, he won't be allowed to participate in the debates either. Without being in the debates, it will be virtually impossible for him to gain the traction, political and financial, that he needs to get anywhere close to winning. I don't expect Nader to get 5% of the vote. This is why I don't mind endorsing someone I've never agreed with on anything.
It is almost statistically impossible for Nader to win.
2. Why not endorse John Kerry then?
Senator Kerry is, if anything, even more dangerous than a re-elected President Bush. No one, including the Senator himself, appears to know what, if anything, he believes. Many commentators have pointed out that world opinion has turned against the United States. I would argue that it has turned against the president personally. However, should Kerry be elected and switched his positions - especially as they pertain to foreign policy - as he has done throughout his Senate career and even during his campaign, the world may conclude that it is a failure of American democracy itself as opposed to the failure of any single leader. These are serious issues of war and peace, not an omnibus spending bill for a dam in Massachusetts. Kerry's brand of issue flipping could do more harm than good internationally. A global war has far more serious consequences than the Iowa cauceses where you can say virtually anything.
Anyone who takes a look at the Kerry campaign's foreign policy team sees several familiar faces. This is beause the Kerry foreign policy shop has been taken over by the Clinton government in exile. Sandy Berger or Richard Holbrooke would likely be Secretary of State in a Kerry administration. Bringing the Clinton team back into government could send the message that foreign policy will revert back to what it was in 1990's. While I doubt that a Kerry administration would pretend al-Qaeda doesn't exist like the Clinton administration did (Richard Clarke's book notwithstanding, bin Laden could have been captured or killed on at least three different occassions between 1995 and 2000 and Clinton failed to follow through. His one attack on al-Qaeda in August 1998 -"the blowjob bombing"- was notable for its timing. Clinton never mentioned the words "Osama bin Laden" or "al-Qaeda" in public before August 20, 1998 and he never mentioned them in public again for the duration of his presidency.), the implication of a return to the policies that allowed al-Qaeda to flourish in the first place could send a very dangerous message to very unstable places.
Secondly, there's the question of what, if anything, Kerry could achieve if elected. For the first time in my memory, the Democrats aren't even pretending that they can win Congress back. As a matter of fact, there are seven open senate seats in the South this year. It is not unreasonable to expect that the Republicans will win five of them. There are also close races in Colorado and Illinois. I suspect that in November the Republicans will have 56 or 57 seats. This is almost enough to shut down a filibuster, and, with the support of conservative Democrats (should any be left), enough to over ride a veto.
A Kerry presidency would be held hostage by his own lack of political principles and a hostile Republican congress. I'm not someone who usually decries divided government, but if Kerry campaigns on a foreign policy platform that he doesn't have the political will or the congressional votes to pass, it could do unknown damage to American prestige in the world. This is NOT just another election, where platforms don't matter.
3. Isn't a vote for a Nader a vote for Bush?
In a roundabout way, yes it is. Nader likes to point out that 8 million Democrats voted for Bush rather than himself or Gore last time, but that is beside the point. Those votes were spread out across several states. In Florida alone, Nader received 97,000 votes that otherwise would have gone to Gore. Bush won the presidency by 537. By this tally, one could argue that Nader gave Bush the keys to the White House. That Gore helped by running a horrible campaign is also beside the point.
Voting for Nader is, in fact, voting for Bush without actually pulling the lever marked "Bush" on it. But it is also a vote of no confidence. That the president is the most appealing person in this race is not an endorsement in and of itself. That he is better suited to the office than Kerry is not an affirmation of his personal qualities.
4. So why shouldn't I just vote for Bush then?
While I feel that the president will be re-elected, I feel that Congress should be far more assertive than it has been in restraining some of his policies. Most rational people know that massive tax cuts in a time of global war is a recipe for disaster. If the president is handed a large victory in a two man race, Congress will fold in any confrontation with him.
In this, history is instructive. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president by a plurality of the vote (43%) in a race with a strong third party candidate, Ross Perot who received 19% of the vote. Clinton took this to be a mandate for large policy initiatives and proceeded accordingly. Clinton was frustrated by Congress which at the time had overwhelming Democratic majorities. There is one number, and one number alone, that a Member of Congress pays close attention to. That is the difference in the popular vote between the member and the president in that congressional district. If the president runs ahead of the member in the district, the president calls the shots. The opposite also applies.
Nader has argued that the president's conservative base is furious with him and might be expected to vote for him. They might also just stay home. That several wings of the party are infuriated with the president is undeniable. The Neo-cons are upset about Bush's immigration reform, steel tariffs and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Fiscal conservatives are enraged over the tax cut after 9/11 and the continuance of huge entitlement spending as the deficit grows ever larger. And the "Rockefeller wing" (as currently lead by Secretary of State Powell and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - the most popular Republicans in the country, with approval ratings of 75 and 67% repectively, compared to Bush's 42%) are furious over all of the above and the administration's transparently political play on same sex-marriage.
It is entirely likely that this president will be re-elected without being particularly popular. If enough of his base stays home, and Nader gets a significant percentage of the vote (say, 8-15%), the president will be re-elected yet still run behind most congressional incumbents. A president who gets elected with 40-45% of the vote generally does not have coat tails. If this holds true in enough congressional districts, Congress might actually grow some balls and impede some of the president's more nonsensical proposals.
Do I think this will happen? Nope. As things now stand, I give this election to Bush, 49%, Kerry, 48% and Nader 3%
I wish there a way that I could come out and openly endorse the president. While I believe that he does mean well, if left unchecked, several of his policies could be disastrous. However, if freed from the hard right political base and carefully overseen by a responsible Congress that has nothing to fear from him politically, he can still be a successful president. So long as the Democrats put all of their eggs in Kerry's basket, even if he won he would fail in office. And this not this time for another failed presidency.
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