[lit-ideas] Republicans for Kerry?
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 01:18:11 EDT
Hi,
As I think of what might happen to the world if Sen Kerry is not re-elected,
I think, again, of this article. I was, I think, disappointed
tonight--though I think alot of what troubled me was having them sitting
down...I think
John Edwards' strength comes from moving around and being able to think on his
feet and Dick Cheney's from sitting down and acting like he is (still) CEO of
the company...
It's a thought, though...but so is the reverse...and will there be any
pieces left if Bush gets re-elected? The part of me which does not like
living on
this planet (can I have a wake, too?) thinks it would be rather entertaining
to see how bad Bush would let things get in Iraq. Part of me says he really
does not care -- and especially won't if he is re-elected -- but the part of
me which says that he wants to go down in History as Someone...that part
says he would care...if only selfishly.
Whoever wins is going to have an awfully horrible time of it. Of course, I
do not know how valid his arguments/comparisons are...
Concerned for the Future,
Marlena in Missouri
Wall Street Journal
CAMPAIGN 2004
Republicans for Kerry
Bush's defeat would be good for the GOP.
BY NIALL FERGUSON
Saturday, August 28, 2004 12:01 a.m.
It is doubtless not the most tactful question to ask on the eve of the
Republican convention, but might it not be better for American conservatism if
George W. Bush failed to win a second term?
Yes, I know, the official GOP line is that nothing could possibly be as bad
for the U.S. as a Kerry presidency. According to the Bush campaign, John
Kerry's record of vacillation and inconsistency in the Senate would make him a
disastrously indecisive POTUS--an IMPOTUS, as it were.
By contrast, they insist, Mr. Bush is decisiveness incarnate. And when this
president makes a decision, he sticks to it with Texan tenacity (no matter
how wrong it turns out to be).
It is a mistake, however, to conceive of each presidential contest as an
entirely discrete event, a simple, categorical choice between two individuals,
with consequences
stretching no further than four years. To be sure, there are many tendencies
in American political life that will not be fundamentally affected by the
outcome of November's election. For example, contrary to what Mr. Kerry
claimed
in his convention speech, there are profound structural causes for the
widening rift between the U.S. and its erstwhile allies on the European
Continent
that no new president could possibly counteract. And regardless of
whether Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry is in the White House next year, the U.S. will
still be stuck with the dirty work of policing post-Saddam Iraq with minimal
European assistance other than from Britain--which, by the same token, will
remain America's most reliable military ally
regardless of whether Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry is in the White House.
Nor would the election of Mr. Kerry have the slightest impact on the
ambition of al Qaeda to inflict harm on the U.S. Even if Americans elected
Michael
Moore as president, Osama bin Laden would remain implacable. In geopolitical
terms, at least, what happens on Nov. 2 will
change very little indeed. Yet in other respects--and particularly in terms
of party politics--the election's consequences could be far-reaching. It is
not too much to claim that the result could shape American political life for
a decade or more. _
Fourteen years ago, in another English-speaking country, an unpopular and in
many respects incompetent conservative leader secured re-election by the
narrowest of
margins and against the run of opinion polls. His name was John Major, and
his subsequent period in office, marred as it was by a staggering range of
economic, diplomatic and
political errors of judgment, doomed the British Conservative Party to (so
far) seven years in the political wilderness. I say "so far" because the
damage done to the Tories' reputation by the Major government of 1992-97 was
such
that there is still no sign whatsoever of its ever
returning to power.
Many Conservatives today would now agree that it would have been far better
for their party if Mr. Major had lost the election of 1992. For one thing,
the government deserved to lose. The decision to take the United Kingdom into
the European Exchange Rate Mechanism had plunged the British economy into a
severe recession, characterized by a painful housing market bust. For another,
the Labour candidate for the premiership, Neil Kinnock, had all the
hallmarks of a one-term prime minister. It was Mr. Kinnock's weakness as a
candidate that enabled Mr. Major to scrape home with a tiny majority of 21 out
of 651 seats in the Commons. Had Mr. Kinnock won, the exchange rate crisis of
September 1992 would have engulfed an inexperienced Labour government, and
the Conservatives, having replaced Mr. Major with a more credible leader,
could have looked forward to an early return to office.
Instead, the next five years were a kind of Tory dance of death, in which
the party not only tore itself apart over Europe, but also helped to tear
Bosnia apart by refusing all assistance to those resisting Serbian aggression.
Meanwhile, a spate of petty sexual and financial scandals discredited one
minister after another, making a mockery of Mr. Major's call for a return to
traditional family values ("Back to Basics"). All of this provided the perfect
seedbed for the advent of New Labour and the election by a landslide of Tony
Blair in May 1997. Well, Mr. Blair is still in Downing Street and, having
weathered the worst of the political storm over Iraq, seems likely to remain
there for some years to come.
Could something similar be about to happen in the U.S.? In my view, the Bush
administration, too, does not deserve to be re-elected. Its idéée fixe about
regime change in Iraq was not a logical response to the crisis of 9/11. Its
fiscal policy has been an orgy of irresponsibility. Given the hesitations of
independent voters in the swing states, polls
currently point to a narrow Bush defeat. Yet Mr. Kerry, like Mr. Kinnock, is
the kind who can blow an election in a single sound bite. It's still all too
easy to imagine George W. Bush, like John Major, scraping home by the
narrowest of margins (not least, of course, because Mr. Bush did just that
four
years ago).
But then what? The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term
could be more damaging to the Republicans and more beneficial to the Democrats
than a Bush defeat. If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied
upon
to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to
ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that "deficits
don't matter") and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the
constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will
serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite.
Meanwhile, the Dems will
have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured
out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes
head-to-head with the
American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out.
The obvious retort is that American politics is not British politics. No? Go
back half a century, to 1956, and recall the events that led up to the
re-election of another Republican
incumbent. Sure, Eisenhower didn't have much in common personally with
George W. Bush, except perhaps the relaxed work rate. But Ike was no slouch
when
it came to regime change. In 1953 a CIA-sponsored coup in Iran installed as
dictator Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1954 Ike enunciated the "domino
theory," following the defeat of France in Vietnam and invaded Guatemala to
install
another pro-American dictator. In 1955 he shelled
the Chinese isles of Quemoy and Matsu.
Yet Eisenhower's refusal to back the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt
following Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal, and his acquiescence in
the Soviet invasion of
Hungary, should have alerted American voters to the lack of coherence in his
strategy. Predictably, Ike's re-election was followed by a string of
foreign-policy reverses--not
least the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, Castro's takeover of
Cuba and the shooting down of Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane over the Soviet
Union. These were the setbacks that lent credibility to JFK's hawkish campaign
in 1960: And Kennedy's victory handed the rest of the decade to the Democrats.
Like Adlai Stevenson before him, Mr. Kerry has an aura of unelectability
that may yet prove fatal to his hopes. But a Stevenson win in 1956 would have
transformed the subsequent course of American political history. Conservatives
may ask themselves with good reason
whether defeat then might ultimately have averted the much bigger defeats
they suffered in the '60s. In just the same way, moderate Republicans today
may
justly wonder if a second Bush term is really in their best interests. Might
four years of Mr. Kerry not be preferable to eight years or more of really
effective Democratic leadership?
Mr. Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the
Hoover Institution at Stanford, is author of "Colossus: The Price of America's
Empire" (Penguin, 2004).
Copyright ©© 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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