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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (7367)	3/15/2004 5:55:37 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Ah ha. A substantive response. Bravo! I don't think so he provided the leadership to the Pentagon and the others to tell them to plan well. Well, Rumsfeld is IMO a brilliant military strategist. He has done more to bring our military kicking and screaming into the present than anyone else. McNamara had the right ideas, but not the balls to pull them off. Rumsfeld has and is. In that respect, I think Bush chose a superb man for the job. The military side of the campaign against Iraq was absolutely brilliant. It is the political side that has been a disaster. Can't blame Rumsfeld for that. I give Bush full points for that appointment. So on military preparedness and leadership and defense planning (leaving out the USE of the military in Iraq, which is a different issue), I give Bush an A. Maybe an A-. But no less than that. I also give him full points for picking Powell for Secretary of State. The problem is that Bush doesn't listen enough to Powell. And therein, IMO, hangs Bush's greatest weakness. he is too rigid about his core principles. He believes what he believes even beyond the point that it is intelligent to believe it. He gets a C- at best, maybe a D, for leadership flexibility. But Kerry has the opposite problem. While Bush hangs on to beliefs far too long, Kerry doesn't seem to believe anything for more than the time it take to change his mind, which he changes about as often as I change the oil in my car. So, which is better, somebody who is too slow to change their mind, or someone who is too fast to? I really don't know. I look for a middle candidate, someone between the Absolutist Bush and the Relativist Kerry, an Aristotelian moderate, and I don't find him. As to the war on terror, the problem is that isn't really a war, and it is something on a scale we have never seen before -- and indeed I'm not sure that the world has seen before. State terrorism on this scale, yes. We have seen mass murders in state positions -- Stalin, Hitler, Pot Pol, etc., -- and there are some ways to deal with that. But this free-flowing international terror with the massive funding and organizational skills of Al Qaeda (and yes, they are brilliant organizers, make no mistake about it), driven by religious fervor we simply cannot comprehend, make them far beyond anything the IRA, the ETA, the Red Brigades, even Hamas, ever dreampt of. This is something the world has never seen before. So any approach has to be a try-out. We have to invent answers. Has Bush done a good job on that? I would say somewhat. There has been no new 9/11 attack on our home territory. That's success. But there are still lots of holes. Our intelligence operations, which were largely dismanteled by Clinton, are taking far too long to redesign, rebuild, and redirect to meet this new threat. And I don't think we have found the right balance between retaining civil liberties while accepting the risks thereof and giving up civil liberties to attempt to find more security. So I give Bush a gentleman's C on the war on terror. But, would Kerry do better? What affirmative program is Kerry recommending? What specific changes would he make? Would he amend the Patriot Act which he voted for, and if so how? All we have so far is fluff. Generalities that aren't going to count for a can of okra when it comes to dealing with al Qaeda. And between somebody whose programs have at least been successful in keeping terror out of the country, and somebody who has given us no clue what exactly he would do differently to keep us safe, I don't see a compelling argument for changing horses in this mid stream. I'm not happy with the horse I'm riding. But I don't see a compelling reason to change, either. This is too long, so I'll address your other points in another post.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (7367)	3/15/2004 6:09:49 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 81568

Continuing. The economy. Now that indeed has been very bad. As I noted, he inherited some structural problems, one of them being that the amount of capital spending that went into Y2K upgrades meant that when he took over in January, 2001, inevitably there was going to be a significant drop-off in capital spending. And the bursting of the tech bubble was inevitable, and nothing to do with him. OTOH, he hasn't done nearly enough to address these problems. Those who accuse him of hob-nobbing with corporate magnates at the expense of small business, where the economic growth really lies, are right. His tax cuts were a mistake. His budget deficits are awful. (The only partial excuse he has is that Congress shares the blame for voting for all this stuff. But he's the leader, so he has to shoulder the bulk of the blame.) The outsourcing problem is not directly his fault -- it's a systemic problem with globalization, which was actually a big Clinton priority that Bush inherited (has Bush signed a single major globalization treaty? I can't think of one offhand). But he hasn't been outspoken against it. He hasn't even tried to use the bully pulpit. He hasn't even tried any programs, even though I can't think of any that would be both effective and comply with international law. On the economy, Bush is lucky to scrape by with a D. Now, what would Kerry do better? Agsin, we have no specifics. He has never run such much as a town budget. He has shown me no understanding of business principles and practices -- maybe he has it, maybe not, but if he does, he's never shown it. What legislation has he introduced into Congress in the past, what, 30 years or so he's been in office to show what principles would govern his administration? If he's laid out a coherent, specific economic plan which is consistent with his years of service in the Senate, I haven't seen it. He's been in the Senate a lot longer than Bush has been in the Presidency. He's had plenty of chances to make his policies and principles well known by introducting and pushing for legislation consistent with his economic vision. Where is the record? If it's there, frankly I haven't seen it. He hasn't said what he will do specifically about outsourcing. He hasn't introduced into Congress legislation to address the outsourcing issue, has he? He hasn't, as far as I have seen, said specifically where he will cut the budget other than the military, and indeed he is proposing massive increases in health spending. He hasn't proposed reforming the income tax, the complexity of which is a huge drag on our economic and psychic health; all he's proposed is increasing taxes on folks like you and me, and frankly I pay enough in taxes already. If Kerry had shown me over the past ten years an understanding of our economic needs and a consistent set of principles introduced into proposed legislation that we could look and examine and consider the merits of, that would be great. But what we have is the known and barely competent against the unknown and untested. It's not a very attractive choice, is it?