It's a few days after the election, and I've had time to calm down. I'm sorry Buckethead's offended by what I wrote. I regret the tone of the piece, but it accurately reflects what I was feeling at the time. I am bitterly disappointed. I'll try to be as clear as possible as to why.
Based on my examination of the issues in this campaign and the track records of the candidates, I felt that Kerry represented the best choice. The policy documents on his web site contained solid ideas to address a number of problems in the country, and were for the most part in line with my own ideas to repair the situation.
Fundamentally, you can vote your heart, or you can vote your head. Sometimes, when you're lucky, you get to vote both.
I am essentially a two-issue person: I am concerned with the financial structure and mechanisms of the federal government, and with war. As readers here know, I know a reasonable amount about the first, and little about the second.
No credible support of Bush's first term financial policy exists. A good number of the expert, fiscally conservative Republicans publicly departed the party over this issue. The only economists left on the supply-side bandwagon are spending what remains of their credibility at a tremendous rate. I have pleaded, time and again, for any substantive discourse on this topic. What I unfailingly receive are declarations that "taxes are lower", or some such. On who? By how much? And at what cost? A one-dimensional analysis of Bush's two tax cuts yields the not-quite-astonishing fact that a lot of people paid slightly less in tax, and a very few people paid a lot less in tax.
If I offered to pay you $300 now on the condition that I also get to put $2000 on your credit card balance (and I get the cash), would you take the deal? No rational person would.
This administration (and rose-glassed Republicans) have argued that "deficits don't matter". Deficits do matter, when the difference between deficit growth and economic growth becomes too great. There are numerous examples throughout the world (and in American history) of what happens when governments go bankrupt.
This administration has the worst record on spending in modern times. They increased discretionary spending at a record 7% per year, and that does not include huge expenditures on the military, primarily due to Iraq, which will inflate the true deficit by hundreds of billions more.
Republicans defend Bush's policies with two arguments: First, tax cuts for the wealthy will lead to economic growth, which will make up for the spending. The second is "numbers don't matter".
I have repeatedly addressed the first, here on Perfidy. I have done so with facts, and with numbers, and with references. In return I have seen nothing other than a repetition of supply-side mantras, usually prefixed by "everybody knows that...". Well, it just ain't so. Supply-side economists are the laughingstock of the profession for a very simple reason: The predictive quality of their models hovers around zero. When you put forward a theory that theory will make predictions, based on observations and actions, of outcomes. The relatively tame predictions of the supply-side economists have suffered greatly at the hands of reality. The outlandish claims and predictions of the political class with respect to the same ideas have no identifiable relationship to reality.
The "numbers don't matter" argument is unnerving, to say the least. If numbers don't matter, why bother altering the taxes at all? Hell, why bother paying taxes at all? Why don't we just drive the deficit up into the stratosphere? Economic growth will take of it, right?
It is very rare to encounter someone of either party that believes that we can run a federal government without any taxation at all, if the government is to continue performing its current set of functions. So the numbers do matter after all, and we are in agreement. What we're really arguing are where the lines are. What constitutes acceptable taxation, spending, and deficit? The deficit-as-percentage-of-GDP argument simply does not hold; by that measure we are a year or two away from record debt. A continuation of Bush's massive spending increases guarantees that it will occur. Further tax cuts will exacerbate the problem.
But this isn't really a place where I'm going to argue the numbers because I've done it before. And from what I can see, speaking to my Republican friends, you're not interested. I am perplexed as to the source of your continued support for supply-side fiscal policy, tilted towards the very wealthy. I wish it were otherwise.
The war in Iraq is an extraordinarily complex creature. Let me simplify to this: Polls have found that 75% of registered Republicans believed, in the runup to the election, that Saddam Hussein was responsible at least in part, for 9/11. It follows that if you believe that, a war in Iraq makes sense. Amongst the other 25%, the prevailing attitude seems to be that although the public reasoning given for the war was proven wrong, there were other perfectly good reasons for the war. I place value on the public statements of a politician, in the political process; I hold them to those statements. If we do not, where is the incentive to govern in the light?
The best available information on the Iraq-9/11 link at this time was and is the report of the 9/11 commission, which dimissed the possibility. The Bush Administration did not take the country to war directly on the issue of Saddam's role in 9/11. That role was continuously intimated, though -- and a trusting GOP party base took their leader's subtext at face value. The claimed direct support for the war was weapons of mass destruction.
I was a fence-sitter on the decision to go to war. The public evidence simply did not support war on the WMD issue. But...there was the President and his top advisors on television, advocating forcefully for war, and using phrases like "we know he has them". In a democracy you need to put some trust in elected leaders, and that led me to assume that Bush must have been in possession of evidence that had to stay secret. It was the only thing that made sense at the time -- intelligence must have shown proof positive that there some incredibly bad things going on there, and it was time to go in.
What we know now is that no such hard evidence ever existed, or was ever presented to the President. What weak evidence remained has since been demolished by internal collapse, or by the reality of what we have found in the country, now that we "own" it.
The President gambled that he would find WMD in Iraq. If we assume that he placed faith in his top advisors and only they were in possession of the details that would have led to a different decision, we must conclude that the President has a poor ability to pick solid people for his team. A lot of liberals (come on, let's admit it) have accused the President of being a liar. I do not. I feel utterly comfortable with calling him a gambler, though.
On the financial issue, the President engaged a tax cut policy with no likely positive outcome for anyone other than the wealthiest citizens in the country. The tax cut did come with serious, destructive side effects; these risks were well-known, in advance.
So on the two issues that matter the most to me, this President engaged policy that came with massive, dangerous, and well-known risks. He did so to achieve a very limited up-side outcome; to achieve even that limited outcome required dozens of known problems to break in the President's favor. They did not.
We can argue all day long about Iraq and whether long-term success is possible there. What we should not be arguing about is this: The outcome in Iraq is not what the President and his core team expected. As combat opened in Iraq, the working plan, authorized by the President, was to have force levels drawn down to below 60,000 troops within 90 days.
I will not make the argument that the outcome on tax cuts was not what the President expected, because I do not believe the President expected anything remotely resembling the outlandish claims of various GOP politicians to come true.
Let me return to the disappointment of democrats, and to the disappointment of this liberal. Bush's victory has been a bitter pill. Why? Based on my view of policies and supporting evidence, it reveals a fundamental flaw in this democracy's ability to make rational decisions. On the two issues I have highlighted here, I simply cannot find any rational, factual support for his decisions, now or at the time he made them. And that, friends, is disappointing as hell.
Most liberals looked at this election with hope and faith. They were not looking at their party, and they were not looking at their candidate when they felt these things. They were looking at their entire system of government. Surely now, in the face of such poor decision-making, such obvious division, such disparity between predicated and actual outcomes, the rationality of democracy would exert itself. We were confident that enough Republican moderates (and I consider Mr. and Mrs. Buckethead to be two of them) would look at the same facts, the same speeches, and come to something close to the same conclusions. All across the country, the serious, moderate Republican columnists (who also appeal to moderate Democrats) made substantial criticisms of the Bush administration, and many of them publicy declared their intention to vote for Kerry, based on Bush's performance.
We were waiting, held breath, for the relief that would come as the elections would yield a basic assurance that most of us saw the same facts and reasoned the same way.
It has been devastating to watch "liberal" goals be discarded, one after the other, by this Administration. I refuse to call them conservative, because they are not. At least, they are not conservative in any positive sense I care to associate with the word.
We really care about the environment; Bush threw Kyoto and the EPA in the trash and never came up with an alternative. We care about equality; Bush voters believe that racial equality and the equality of homosexuals are disjoint issues. We believe that the best foreign policy and outcome comes from cooperation and trust; Bush has alienated virtually the entire world with a bullying attitude, squandered lives and vast resources on a pointless exercise of cultural engineering. We care deeply about freedom; Bush's embrace of religion and his integration of it into the secular decision making process and apparatus scares us, because the past and the present show us where highly public religion leads. We care about the fiscal stability of our government; Bush has recklessly gone where no budget has gone before, while inexplicably proclaiming that he has done the opposite. We think that the future our children will inherit will involve the environment, religion, equality, globalization and fiscal stability; Bush has jeopardized virtually all of it, for no discernible reason.
Nowhere in Buckethead's missive has he put forward reasons for a Bush vote. In the absence of such I can only speculate, and my honest speculation goes something like this:
1. Terrorism is the greatest problem facing the country. Bush is "better on terror", because he will take the fight to the enemy and prevent future disasters; Kerry would focus more at home, and with him as President there will be a higher probability of a terrorist attack.
2. Fighting Arabs/Iraqis in Baghdad is better than fighting them here.
2. "Activist" judges are destroying the American Way of Life. Tolerating certain behaviors is fine; giving deviants official recognition is unacceptable. Kerry would force homosexuality into everyday lives, and homosexuals would "take control".
3. Higher medical costs are due to a tort system out of control. Bush would reign in medical malpractice; Kerry would make the problem worse because of "trial lawyer support", or socialize medicine in some way, which would mean a drastic reduction in service and availability.
4. Tax cuts for the wealthy help the economy, spur job growth, and "raise all boats"; Kerry would roll back the tax cut and choke off the economy.
5. A "liberal elite" has dominated the political scene. This liberal elite "despises" regular Americans and is trying to socially engineer the country . George Bush brings regular-guy, common sense to the job; Kerry is a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.
6. The "liberal media" lies about almost everything. George Bush can be trusted to tell the truth.
7. Republicans run a tight ship; Democrats would tax and spend.
8. Bush has had four years experience in the job, in tough times. Kerry has no experience as a leader.
9. A President with solid "moral values", and public Christianity is the best measure of this; a vote for Kerry is a vote for immorality.
10. Environmental science is bogus, and full of crazy predictions from liberal scientists who just want to make money. George Bush is right to roll back environmental controls, Kerry would wreck the economy with regulations to protect us from problems that don't really exist.
Am I somewhere close to correct with this? These particular ten points strike me as rationally demonstrable to be false; that argument is not relevant at this time.
I think Dan Drezner put it best, when he declared his intention, as a lifelong Republican, to vote for Kerry. He said that he just couldn't understand Bush's decision-making process, and while he disagreed with some of John Kerry's policies, he could understand how he made them.
We are dismayed because we do not understand how George Bush and his administration make decisions. We despair when a majority in this country support something we do not understand, and offer no additional reasoning for that support. We despair when, as in this year of issues that seemed dramatically simplified and obvious, far more so than in decades past, that our policies and beliefs are so mercilessly discarded by the tyranny of a majority that is actively hostile towards the personal freedom, collective responsibility and tolerance that we cherish. We are additionally left with the ugly aftertaste of intolerance, knowing that intolerance for sexual preference tipped the balance in this election.
You claim the existence of a massed heartland of reasoned conservatism. I have perhaps claimed something similar, a wide bastion of reasoned liberalism.
I despair because neither exists. I do not understand how this electorate makes decisions. Countless conversations with dozens of Republicans have come to naught; careful shared discussion of facts and policy which often led to fragile consensus on courses of action are discarded in a matter of seconds before a raised fist of misdirected anger, as tribal urges render that discourse meaningless, powerless in a new tangled context of emotion-driven, faith-driven political power.
Have I not been open to other views? I believe that I have been. I have admitted when I have been wrong, and if I have been demanding in the nature of discourse, it has not been to create a separate standard for myself.
I find it telling that in years of discussions on recent Republican policy with dozens of those on the other side, none has ever sought to convince me of their correctness; it was for me to be informed of that correctness. Perhaps I am not worth the investment. More likely, it is that some form of faith lies at the heart of these policies, and my good friends have simply been humoring me, knowing that unless that faith was present in me, no conversion could take place.
A missionary spends years in the field; good, enjoyable years of toil bringing truth, a desire to help, and the will to leave the world a better place than he found it. If his works are "writ in water" and without effect, does he not doubt? When does a man decide to turn inward, and for what reason?
I claim a right to decide it, when and where I choose.
on
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