[Mb-civic] Reality Check

[Michael Butler]

Reality Check
The president¹s biggest problem isn¹t John Kerry. It¹s the world around him.

 By  Harold Meyerson
 Web Exclusive: 10.09.04

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 Now we know that the president disagrees with the Dred Scott decision and
is not likely to reappoint its author, Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864)
to the United States Supreme Court.

 This comes as a relief. After all, several of George W. Bush¹s favorite
justices have been elevating the doctrine of states¹ rights over those of
the individual and the federal government during the past decade. If his
term runs long enough, Clarence Thomas can reasonably be expected one day to
declare that under a proper originalist reading of the Constitution, he
should be enslaved. Bush¹s break with Taney in Friday night¹s debate, then,
is good news for abolitionists.

 It¹s on more contemporary topics that Bush¹s answers Friday night were
troubling. In numerous answers, Bush either failed to respond to John
Kerry¹s indictment of his presidency or turned his attention to his own
alleged resolve and Kerry¹s alleged inconsistencies and creeping Europhilia.
³In order to be popular in the halls of Europe,² Bush noted disdainfully,
³you sign a treaty.² That may be what girlie-man John Kerry wants, but not
Bush, the American homie through thick and thin.

 If you¹re pandering to the xenophobe vote, Kerry is the perfect opponent --
too cosmopolitan for his own damned good, as his blurted-out ³global test²
reference from the first debate makes clear. Kerry was compelled to reassert
his obvious belief in national sovereignty last night, just as he was
compelled to take a no-new-tax pledge straight into the camera for Americans
earning less than $200,000 a year. (It would have been bad form, I suppose,
for Kerry to point out that the only president in recent memory to have
broken such a pledge was Pappy Bush. But it would have been great Oedipal
theater to have seen Junior, in his reply, struggling with his impulse to
diss his old man.)

 The president¹s real trouble is less with Kerry than with reality. In the
week between the first and second debates, a CIA-appointed investigator
concluded that Iraq had dismantled its WMD programs in 1991, Paul Bremer
revealed that he had complained to the White House about the shortage of
troops in Iraq, The New York Times reported that the administration
knowingly covered up the misgivings of our intelligence establishment during
the run-up to the war, the job creation figures were underwhelming, and Tom
DeLay was reprimanded three times by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee.
Kerry took Bush to task on Iraq and job loss, and on the domestic issues
that first came into play during this debate: the president¹s preferring the
drug industry over American patients, the lack of funding for Bush¹s own
Leave No Child Behind program.

 The attack by Bush and Cheney on Kerry¹s allegedly ³big government² health
care plan is a mark of the nervousness that has come over the president and
his consultants. Kerry unveiled his plan, with all its particulars, fully 18
months ago in a speech in Des Moines. During those 18 months, neither health
care experts nor the media -- nor all but a handful of Republicans, nor
anyone in the president¹s campaign, until just recently -- have
characterized the plan as "big government,² for the simple reason that its
not. Its major component is to have the government assume the costs now
borne by employers for catastrophic illness that cost more than $50,000. It
also extends the coverage of children and the poor under existing programs.
Only in the past several weeks has the Bush campaign suddenly realized that
this is a ³big government² program. You wonder, if Bush had a big lead,
whether they¹d even bother to mention the plan at all.

 Kerry had several lines of attack on domestic issues he did not embark upon
Friday, though he could be saving them for the final debate on Wednesday.
The fact that by independent estimates, Kerry¹s health care proposal would
cover about 27 million currently uninsured Americans, and Bush¹s would cover
no more than 6 million, has yet to be mentioned. The fact that Bush¹s
proposed new spending comes to $3 trillion -- nearly a trillion more than
Kerry¹s -- has yet to be raised. The connection between Bush¹s giveaway to
the big pharmaceutical companies and those companies¹ support for the
president¹s and other Republicans¹ campaigns has not yet been discussed.

 Kerry was in command for the first hundred minutes of Friday¹s debate, then
seemed too unsure and defensive as the discussion turned to stem cell
research and abortion. (What¹s wrong with Bill Clinton¹s old line -- that
abortions should be ³safe, legal and rare³?) By then, Bush had stopped
shouting out his answers and was actually talking in a normal register. Both
candidates said much that appealed to their respective bases, but Kerry¹s
handling of Iraq and health care seemed better calculated to win voters who
are still making up their minds.

 We await polling to know whether the debate did anything to stop or slow
the shift of momentum to Kerry. But I¹d be surprised if it did.

 Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.

 Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.  Preferred Citation:
Harold Meyerson,  "Reality Check",  The American Prospect Online, Oct 9,
2004.  This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for
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