[Mb-civic] Kerry's roads not taken - Thomas Oliphant - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Kerry's roads not taken

By Thomas Oliphant  |  September 22, 2005

WASHINGTON
SUPPOSE WE had a president, with barely seven months in office, pushing 
Congress to confront the energy crisis and stop the insane importing of 
oil from the Middle East.

That was the road not taken before Katrina, remember?

Suppose we had a president who had challenged the lobbyist-run Congress 
long before Katrina produced gargantuan costs that cannot be paid 
honestly: His veto would block the extension of those juicy tax cuts for 
wealthy investors that expire in a few years in order to force a 
reestablishment of the best Social Security reform of all -- fiscal sanity.

That was another road not taken, remember?

And imagine a restoration of Bill Clinton's simple proposition that 
recovery from disasters, natural or terrorist, is too important to be 
left to incompetent political cronies, and is led by a guy who is 
delightfully ignorant of patronage politics.

Still another road not taken.

As John Kerry had the temerity to say this week in Rhode Island: ''Today 
more than ever, when the path taken last year and four years earlier 
takes us into a wilderness of missed opportunities, we need to keep 
defining the critical choices over and over, offering a direction not 
taken but still open in the future."

Or, as he also said, ''Katrina reminds us that too often the political 
contests of our time have been described like football games with color 
commentary: One team of consultants against another, red states against 
blue states, Democratic money against Republican money; a contest of 
height versus hair -- sometimes. But the truth is democracy is not a 
game; we are losing precious time each day in a different America than 
the one we can inhabit if we make different choices."

I am aware how chic it is during the year following a presidential 
election to jump down the throat of the poor slob who lost, trumpeting a 
hindsight that wasn't clear until long past midnight on Election Day. 
Deconstructing Kerry's screed the other day would also be easy in that 
honored context -- except for one little point.

A great many Americans have been first shocked and then angered at the 
mess Bush has made of his reelection this year, even before a botched 
response to a tragic event made them furious. Kerry spoke for them this 
week, calling Bush out after a grotesque campaign that sold the absurd 
proposition that only the president could keep the nation safe and 
secure and that Kerry couldn't.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/22/kerrys_roads_not_taken/
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