[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: John Kerry for President

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John Kerry for President

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. 

An endorsement of Senator Charles Schumer for re-election
to the Senate appears today in the City, Long Island and
Westchester weekly sections. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/opinion/17sun1.html?ex=1099030391&ei=1&en=3612affa9148afa4


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