John Kerry for President
Editorial
The New York Times
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.
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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.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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