| James N. Markels | ||||
|
|
Personal
Information Constitutionalist
Party Political/Policy
Writing Creative
Writing Resume |
by
James N. Markels This
being my last column before the election, here’s my chance to make the
Big Prediction (guaranteed to be wrong, or your money back).
Will it be Kerry or Bush? Landslide
or squeaker? If you have a
coin to flip, your guess at this point is as good as mine.
But one thing is for sure: The debates have greatly changed the
landscape of the campaign, and the contender that is first to realize
this will likely pull out the close win. Before the debates, the campaigns had settled into
caricatures that were, for the most part, richly deserved.
Bush was the steward of an unpopular war but blessed with a lot
of determination, while Kerry was a flip-flopper who wasn’t Bush.
The balance of the equation was leaning toward Bush because even
those who weren’t big on Bush’s policies liked the idea of having a
strong leader in the White House. But it seems to me that the debates have refashioned
the candidates into new images, each with new weaknesses for the other
side to exploit. Bush’s
leadership strength has been recast as a habit of bumbling—Bush starts
something but then fails to finish it well.
Kerry has largely side-stepped his flip-flopping image for
something I would call the “magic wand” approach: Simply promise
that you’ll do things better, as if by magic, without having to
actually prove that it can be done. Rewind to the first debate. The
first question, when Kerry was asked if he’d do a better job as
president than Bush in protecting America from terrorism, resulted in a
stream of promises. “I
have a better plan for homeland security. I have a better plan to be
able to fight the war on terror by strengthening our military,
strengthening our intelligence, by going after the financing more
authoritatively, by doing what we need to do to rebuild the alliances .
. . [w]e can do a better job of training the Iraqi forces to defend
themselves, and I know that we can do a better job of preparing for
elections,” he said. Oh really? How?
Let’s take the training example.
Later, when Bush was asked about his criteria for bringing home
American troops from Iraq, he responded, “[T]he best way for Iraq to
be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job.
And that’s what we're doing. We’ve got 100,000 trained now,
125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year.”
Alright, so one would expect Kerry to retort about how these
numbers are inadequate, right? Nope. Kerry instead argued that “our troops have been left on
these extraordinarily difficult missions” without enough backup,
leaving “a sense of American occupation” that may never end.
Bush laid out the numbers as to what was going on in the training
area and Kerry could have shown us what a “better job” entails.
But he didn’t. Perhaps
that was an opportunity wasted, but it’s more likely that Kerry
didn’t have a big point to make anyway.
When asked about homeland security, Kerry asked, “[W]hat kind
of mixed message does it send when you have $500 million going over to
Iraq to put police officers in the streets of Iraq, and the president is
cutting the COPS program in America?”
So the president is pushing the training of Iraqis satisfactorily
after all. But Kerry can
claim “we can do a better job” because, magically, he says he can do
it. More Iraqi forces will
fall from the sky or something. Ta-da! In
fact, Saturday Night Live parodied Kerry’s approach in the last show
by having the SNL Kerry repeatedly announce, “And I have a plan,” at
the end of his answer, and then sitting down.
On
the Bush side, Kerry and Edwards have been making good use of the
general malaise that Americans have been feeling towards the situation
in Iraq, but in the debates Bush has done most of the damage to himself
by managing a woefully weak defense for his decisions.
His explanation for the recent difficulties and
possible missteps has been to remind everyone that this is “hard
work.” That’s not good
enough. When dealing with the Duelfer report that cited no
evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Bush argued that
“what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so
he could reconstitute a weapons program.”
But that also means that continued sanctions could have worked,
too. With
any complicated mission like Iraq, there are a million decisions that
can always be second-guessed with the benefit of hindsight.
When those questions arise, it is imperative for those in charge
to be able to articulate why a particular decision was made and how the
information at the time compelled that decision.
If the other side thinks another decision was better, it behooves
them to make that case from the same vantage point.
But Bush’s mantra that America needs a strong, steady president
to win the war on terror doesn’t help him if he’s not adequately
defending the decisions he’s made.
It’s enough to make a supporter of the war, like
me, wonder whether Bush has the insight and leadership to make things
work out. The
result has been that Bush looks like a bumbler, and that gives Kerry a
free pass with his magic wand. When
you aren’t doing a good job defending your own policies, the other
side doesn’t need to offer much more than promises to attract voters.
|
||
