An agonizing choice Conservatives have plenty of cause to abandon Bush BY BOB BARR Voting for president used to be so easy, at least for a conservative. There was the Republican candidate. You knew he generally stood for lower taxes, less government spending, giving fewer powers to the government, lower deficits and a zealous regard for individual privacy. Then, there was the Democrat. You knew he generally stood for higher taxes, more government and deficit spending, and a zealous regard for civil liberties. Throughout my own presidential voting history, the choices have rarely, if ever, been agonizing. Nixon vs. McGovern? Carter vs. Reagan? Reagan-Mondale? Dukakis, a Massachusetts liberal? Clinton? Al Gore? Ah, the good ol' days. Each of those races presented clear choices, easily resolved. Now we have the election of 2004. For the first time in my voting life, the choice in the race for president isn't so clear And, among true conservatives, I'm not alone. What's making the contest so difficult? It's certainly not that both candidates are so conservative that we have a choice of riches. It's not even that John Kerry is sort of right wing compared to George W. Bush. The incumbent clearly is the more "conservative" of the two. But the concerns for many conservative voters -- concerns that may cause them not to vote for Mr. Bush on Nov. 2 -- fall generally into three categories: fiscal, physical (as in the physical security of our nation) and freedom (as in protecting our civil liberties). When Bush became president Jan. 20, 2001, he inherited an enviable fiscal situation. Congress, then controlled by his own party, had -- through discipline and tough votes -- whittled down decades of deficit spending under presidents of both parties, so that annual deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars had been transformed to a series of real and projected surpluses. The heavy lifting had been done. All Bush had to do was resist the urge to spend, and he had to exert some pressure on Congress to resist its natural impulses to do the same. Had he done that, he might have gone down in history as the most fiscally conservative president in modern times. Instead, what we got were record levels of new spending, including nearly double-digit increases in nondefense discretionary spending. We now have deficits exceeding those that the first Republican-controlled Congress in 40 years faced when it convened in January 1995. The oft-repeated mantra that "the terrorists made us spend more" rings hollow, especially to those who actually understand that increases in nondefense discretionary spending are not the inevitable result of fighting terrorists. It also irritates many conservatives, whether or not they support the war in Iraq, that so much of defense spending is being poured into the black hole of Iraq's internal security, while the security of our own borders goes wanting. That brings us to the second major beef conservatives have with the president. He's seen as failing to take real steps to improve our border security. In many respects, because of his apparent desire to appease his compadre to the south -- Mexican President Vincente Fox -- Bush has made matters worse. More people are entering our country illegally than ever before, more than 3 million this year alone -- and most of them are stampeding across from Mexico. It seems as if every time an effort is made to implement measures that would crack down on illegal immigration, Fox complains, and the White House tells our enforcement folks to back off. Perhaps that is why intelligence reports indicate al-Qaeda is actively recruiting in Central America. At the same time, here at home, many law-abiding citizens accurately perceive that their own freedoms and civil liberties are being stripped. They are being profiled by government computers whenever they want to travel, their bank accounts are being summarily closed because they may fit some "profile," they are under surveillance by cameras paid for by that borrowed federal money, and, if the administration has its way, they will be forced to carry a national identification card. That skewed sense of priorities really rankles conservatives. Those are but three tips of the iceberg that signal the deep dissatisfaction many conservatives harbor against the president. Thus far, however, with Bush's political gurus telling him he's ahead and to just lay low and not make any major gaffes, he seems unwilling to recognize the problems on his right flank. Or he seems to have concluded that he doesn't need to address those concerns because the ineptitude of the Kerry campaign hasn't forced him to. But the race appears to be tightening again. It's likely to remain tight until Election Day. Those dissatisfied conservative voters will become increasingly important, but it's going to be impossible for the president to pull them back in with hollow, last-minute promises. Bush's problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda. History's a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don't take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do. Hmmm. Who's the Libertarian candidate again? Lifelong Republican Bob Barr represented parts of Cobb County and northwest Georgia in Congress from 1995 to 2003. http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/news_flankingaction.html
Andrew Sullivan is another conservative that is agonizing over the election and has pretty much abandoned Bush, and he writes this excellent blog. Kerry's Momentum Can Bush Stop It? Presidential campaigns have issues; and they have candidates; and they have polls. But they also have something intangible called momentum. And that's what John Kerry has right now. In the eight days since the first debate, you can feel the Democrat slowly gaining what the first president Bush called the "Big Mo." The polls have turned around in as little as a week from a clear and growing Bush lead into what is, by most measurements, a tie. That's a very striking shift this late in the game and the Bush-Cheney campaign tried all week to reverse or stall it. And they failed. The first attempt to stem the new Democratic direction came in the vice-presidential debate. A seated, snarly Cheney ripped the bark of John Edwards, firing up the Republican base, and achieving what many called a win. But Edwards quietly more than held his own. He artfully redirected Cheney's constant jibes into positive plugs for his own views; he smiled and retained composure. My own impression was that Edwards easily won the debate on substance, but I was in a minority. No one, however, believed that the debate changed the direction of the election as a whole. Vice-presidential debates never do. And so last Friday night, you saw the president give it all he's got. Bush was immeasurably better both in substance and style than he had been the week before - mostly coherent, energetic and even eloquent at times. On abortion, Iraq, and even stem cell research, he was strong, and even moving. But he was so intent on appearing back in control that he veered at times toward over-aggression, almost shouting his answers at the audience, interrupting the moderator by yelling over him, and throwing around the "liberal" label at Kerry with the abandon of a slightly desperate man. He tried to get the debate back onto Kerry's undistinguished and generally left-wing domestic record. "You can but you can't hide," Bush said twice in what was obviously designed to be the soundbite that endured. But the problem was: Kerry certainly didn't seem too liberal. He emphasized fiscal responsibility more effectively than Bush did. He promised to add 40,000 new troops to the military. He vowed to restore old traditions of global coalitions. Stylistically, he was serene. If Bush stomped around the stage, Kerry glided. He was more detailed than the president in exactly what he was planning to do in Iraq - something that particularly appeals to skeptical undecided voters. In an odd twist, the president said that Kerry's plan in Iraq was essentially a copy of the Bush plan. In that case, why would a vote for Kerry be so damaging to the war on terror? Immediate polling gave the debate narrowly to Kerry. Some focus groups were even more pro-Kerry. Bush's far stronger performance undoubtedly reassured his base, and rescued Republican morale. And morale is undoubtedly important. But, again, it didn't stop the Kerry momentum. And that's grim news for the Bush campaign. More damaging, however, than Kerry's unexpectedly resilient debate performances are what Harold MacMillan once famously called "events, dear boy, events." The week began with a leaked private speech by L. Paul Bremer, Bush's hand-picked head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Bremer told his audience that "the single most important change - the one thing that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation. He revealed that he had asked Washington to send more troops and had been turned down. He also said that insufficient troop levels had meant critical weapons sites had been left unguarded in the early days of the invasion. The White House dutifully got Bremer to write an op-ed saying he supported the president's Iraq policy - but the damage had been done. Bush's right-hand man had admitted that the war strategy had been flawed from the very beginning. To make matters worse, National Review, a reliably pro-Bush political magazine, ran a cover story, summing up the new consensus about the Iraq occupation. Its headline: "What Went Wrong?" When your own side is asking questions like that three weeks before an election, you're in trouble. And then the Duelfer report provided another body-blow. The fundamental rationale for the war - the threat from Saddam's existing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction - was declared wrong by the president's own study group. Yes, you can still argue that the decision to go to war was still the right one. I certainly would. But you simply cannot argue that the Bush administration's central rationale has been borne out. On the contrary. It has been demolished. It's very hard for a president to recover from that. and what it has done is essentially remove from Bush's candidacy the benefit of the doubt. He has to earn people's trust again. And Bush, who has lived in a bubble of self-reinforcing support for four years, seems somewhat baffled as to how to do that. He seems to have forgotten how to reach that skeptical, undecided voter. In last Friday's debate, his response was therefore simply to say what he has said in the past - but louder. And that was also the undeniable inference from both Cheney's and Bush's performances. They were geared toward firing up their base. Cheney pulled no punches. Bush came out swinging. But neither tried to charm anyone in the middle. When asked to name three mistakes he had made as president, Bush couldn't name one. A little humility would go a long way at this point, but Bush seems unable to summon it up. Edwards and Kerry, meanwhile, were clearly aiming for the independent, undecided, female voter. Edwards congratulated Cheney on the way he has loved his gay daughter. He supported Cheney in the war on Afghanistan. Kerry tried to portray himself as a fiscal conservative who would not raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000 a year. They worked against type. That's a sign of confidence. And then the final employment numbers before the election showed an increase only half of expectations. It's foolish to believe that the U.S. economy is in deep trouble. The unemployment rate is the same as it was in 1996 when Bill Clinton won re-election in a landslide. But in a few critical swing states - like Ohio - the middle class is worried and increasingly squeezed. Bush remains the first president since the 1920s to preside over a net loss of jobs in his term of office. Again, you can defend his policies nonetheless. But it's hard to get around statistics like that. Eventually, they stick. And they are. The same goes for a huge and growing deficit, abetted by vast new spending. in the Friday debate, Bush was asked to account for it. It was obvious that he couldn't. It's worth recalling at this point that very few incumbent presidents get re-elected by a narrow margin. They tend to get back in a landslide - Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Or they lose badly - Carter, Bush 1. The current neck-and-neck in the polls is therefore unlikely to be the final result. Someone may well break out in the next couple of weeks. The polls still show undecideds heavily in favor of Kerry. And registration is at record levels, suggesting a heavy turnout. Maybe the news will improve for Bush; maybe the next debate will turn things around. But if I were Karl Rove, I'd be worried right now. Democrats have long argued that John Kerry is a strong closer. I'm beginning to see why. http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20041010
Another life long Republican figurehead casts a vote for Kerry. John Eisenhower: Why I will vote for John Kerry for President By JOHN EISENHOWER Guest Commentary The Presidential election to be held this coming Nov. 2 will be one of extraordinary importance to the future of our nation. The outcome will determine whether this country will continue on the same path it has followed for the last 3½ years or whether it will return to a set of core domestic and foreign policy values that have been at the heart of what has made this country great. Now more than ever, we voters will have to make cool judgments, unencumbered by habits of the past. Experts tell us that we tend to vote as our parents did or as we “always have.” We remained loyal to party labels. We cannot afford that luxury in the election of 2004. There are times when we must break with the past, and I believe this is one of them. As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration’s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. The fact is that today’s “Republican” Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word “Republican” has always been synonymous with the word “responsibility,” which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today’s whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion. Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations, has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance. In the Middle East crisis of 1991, President George H.W. Bush marshaled world opinion through the United Nations before employing military force to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Through negotiation he arranged for the action to be financed by all the industrialized nations, not just the United States. When Kuwait had been freed, President George H. W. Bush stayed within the United Nations mandate, aware of the dangers of occupying an entire nation. Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, “If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both.” I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today. The Republican Party I used to know placed heavy emphasis on fiscal responsibility, which included balancing the budget whenever the state of the economy allowed it to do so. The Eisenhower administration accomplished that difficult task three times during its eight years in office. It did not attain that remarkable achievement by cutting taxes for the rich. Republicans disliked taxes, of course, but the party accepted them as a necessary means of keep the nation’s financial structure sound. The Republicans used to be deeply concerned for the middle class and small business. Today’s Republican leadership, while not solely accountable for the loss of American jobs, encourages it with its tax code and heads us in the direction of a society of very rich and very poor. Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I will vote for him enthusiastically. I celebrate, along with other Americans, the diversity of opinion in this country. But let it be based on careful thought. I urge everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, to avoid voting for a ticket merely because it carries the label of the party of one’s parents or of our own ingrained habits. John Eisenhower, son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, served on the White House staff between October 1958 and the end of the Eisenhower administration. From 1961 to 1964 he assisted his father in writing “The White House Years,” his Presidential memoirs. He served as American ambassador to Belgium between 1969 and 1971. He is the author of nine books, largely on military subjects. http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=44657
I guess since we are just throwing stuff out there to see if it hits the fan: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004250 CAMPAIGN 2004 George Bush vs. the Naive Nine Why this lifelong Democrat will vote Republican next November. BY ZELL MILLER If I live and breathe, and if--as Hank Williams used to say--the creek don't rise, in 2004 this Democrat will do something I didn't do in 2000, I will vote for George W. Bush for president. I have come to believe that George Bush is the right man in the right place at the right time. And that's a pretty big mouthful coming from a lifelong Democrat who first voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate the 12 cycles since then. My political history to the contrary, this was the easiest decision I think I've ever made in deciding who to support. For I believe the next five years will determine the kind of world my four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren will live in. I simply cannot entrust that crucial decision to any one of the current group of Democratic presidential candidates. Why George Bush? First, the personal; then, the political. I first got to know George Bush when we served as governors together, and I just plain like the man, a man who feeds his dogs first thing every morning, has Larry Gatlin sing in the White House, and knows what is meant by the term "hitting behind the runner." I am moved by the reverence and tenderness he shows the first lady and the unabashed love he has for his parents and his daughters. I admire this man of faith who has lived that line in that old hymn, "Amazing Grace," "Was blind, but now I see." I like the fact that he's the same on Saturday night as he is on Sunday morning. And I like a man who shows respect for others by starting meetings on time. That's the personal. Now, the political. This is a president who understands the price of freedom. He understands that leaders throughout history often have had to choose between good and evil, tyranny and freedom. And the choice they make can reverberate for generations to come. This is a president who has some Churchill in him and who does not flinch when the going gets tough. This is a president who can make a decision and does not suffer from "paralysis analysis." This is a president who can look America in the eye and say on Iraq, "We're not leaving." And you know he means it. This is also a president who understands that tax cuts are not just something that all taxpayers deserve, but also the best way to curb government spending. It is the best kind of tax reform. If the money never reaches the table, Congress can't gobble it up. I have just described George W. Bush. Believe me, I looked hard at the other choices. And what I saw was that the Democratic candidates who want to be president in the worst way are running for office in the worst way. Look closely, there's not much difference among them. I can't say there's "not a dime's worth of difference" because there's actually billions of dollars' worth of difference among them. Some want to raise our taxes a trillion, while the others want to raise our taxes by several hundred billion. But, make no mistake, they all want to raise our taxes. They also, to varying degrees, want us to quit and get out of Iraq. They don't want us to stay the course in this fight between tyranny and freedom. This is our best chance to change the course of history in the Middle East. So I cannot vote for a candidate who wants us to cut and run with our shirttails at half-mast. I find it hard to believe, but these naive nine have managed to combine the worst feature of the McGovern campaign--the president is a liar and we must have peace at any cost--with the worst feature of the Mondale campaign--watch your wallet, we're going to raise your taxes. George McGovern carried one state in 1972. Walter Mondale carried one state in 1984. Not exactly role models when it comes to how to get elected or, for that matter, how to run a country. So, as I have said, my choice for president was an easy decision. And my own party's candidates made it even easier. Mr. Miller is a Democratic senator from Georgia and the author of "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat," published last month by Stroud & Hall. You can buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
Why Koch is on Bush's bandwagon Jeff Jacoby (archive) August 30, 2004 Ed Koch identifies himself with pride as a lifelong Democrat. The former New York City councilman, congressman, and three-term mayor says his values have always been those of the broad Democratic center -- the values of FDR and Harry Truman, of Hubert Humphrey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He disdains the Republican worldview as cold and unfeeling -- "I made it on my own, and you should too." The Democratic philosophy, by contrast, he sums up as: "If you need a helping hand, we'll provide it." No surprise, then, that Koch disagrees with George W. Bush on just about every domestic issue, from taxes to marriage to prescription drugs. But he's voting for him in November. "I've never before supported a Republican for president," Koch told me last week. "But I'm doing so this time because of the one issue that trumps everything else: international terrorism. In my judgment, the Democratic Party just doesn't have the stomach to stand up to the terrorists. But Bush is a fighter." Koch was surprised and impressed by Bush's resolve after Sept. 11. "He announced the Bush Doctrine -- he said we would go after the terrorists and the countries that harbor them. And he's kept his word." Koch doubts that the leadership of his own party could have mustered the grit to topple the Taliban or drive Saddam Hussein from power, let alone to press on in what is going to be a long and grinding conflict. "Already, most of the world is caving. If you didn't have Bush standing there, you'd have everybody following Spain and the Philippines" in retreat, he says, trying to appease the terrorists instead of fighting them. How much of his party does Koch speak for? We won't know for sure until Election Day, when exit polls help gauge how many Democrats crossed party lines to support Bush. But Koch knows he's not the only Democrat to regard the war against militant Islam as the most critical issue of the campaign. And he doesn't think he was the only one dismayed by what he saw at the Democratic convention in July. From Michael Moore's seat of honor next to Jimmy Carter, to the thunderous applause that greeted Howard Dean, to the 9 out of 10 delegates who want to pull the plug on Iraq, the convention exposed the radical antiwar mindset that dominates the Democratic Party leadership. But hasn't Kerry pledged to stay in Iraq and to go after the terrorists? "That's what he says to appeal to moderates and conservatives during the campaign," Koch replies. But the party activists who nominated him would compel him to back down once he was in office. The people now running the Democratic Party want no part of the war, and "when the chips are down, Kerry will do what they want." It bears repeating: This is a faithful Democrat talking. And it is as a faithful Democrat that Koch so sharply resists his party's left wing. ("The radicals don't like me," he once wrote. "And they have good reason, because I despise them.") Though he calls himself a "liberal with sanity," he governed the largest city in America as a decided centrist. Twice he was re-elected in massive landslides. New Yorkers came to trust Koch's instincts and judgment because they resonated so closely with their own. And what those instincts and common sense tell Koch today is that nothing matters more than beating back the threat from Islamic terrorists. "I want a president who is willing to go after them before they have a chance to kill us," he says. "Party affiliation is an important consideration," but it's not more important than winning the war. In his 1984 autobiography, "Mayor," Koch tells of his appearance before the Republican Party's platform committee in 1980. "I was the first Democratic mayor to do so in anyone's memory. And it caused a stir." For the better part of an hour, Koch gave the Republicans his views on some of the era's most intractable municipal issues, including unfunded federal mandates, block grants, and the heavy burden of Medicaid. "They were with me on all of these items," Koch recalled -- so much so that when the session ended, GOP Chairman Bill Brock half-jokingly invited him to join the Republican Party. "I respectfully decline," Koch answered. "Then we all went outside for pictures. There I was asked by a reporter, `Mr. Mayor, isn't this political treason?' "I said, 'If this be treason, make the most of it. But it ain't.'" It ain't treason this time either. In 1980, Koch's highest concern was the fiscal security of New York City. In 2004, it is the national security of the United States. Americans are at war with fanatical enemies, and above all else, they need a commander-in-chief who can face those enemies without flinching. Koch's political home remains where it has always been -- in the party of FDR and Truman, Humphrey and Moynihan. He is a loyal Democrat. But as JFK once said, sometimes party loyalty asks too much. ©2004 Boston Globe http://www.capecodonline.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000704
Yes, we know how Miller feels about this election ron. The difference is that these people have constantly backed Bush and this administration. Now they feel that their party is going in the wrong direction and needs to get back to the republican agenda that they believe is seriously off course. Miller hasn't been in the democratic camp for years. And Koch is a loon!
Notice which articles seem articulate and well thought out and which ones look like looney rants. I mean, seriously, "some want to raise our taxes a trillion, while the others want to raise our taxes by several hundred billion." He's just spitting rhetoric, there's no basis for any of that. Thank God Yosemite Zell is retiring, the last thing we need is Dixiecrats still in office in the 21st century. Sullivan summed it up perfectly: http://andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_08_29_dish_archive.html#109409893313020605
Sam, with this post above, you are contributing to a hostile environment for those who do not share your opinion. I hereby warn you.
I am agonizing whether to eat lunch at Subway or Quiznos today. Maybe I'll search the 'net for a blog that will help me decide.
Well, if you can find a blog by Jared Fogel where he tells you to eat Quiznos, that would be really cool.
I think I speak for the group when I say... bwa ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HA.
I will see your warning and give you a code blue, 1.03 greenline warning. I would hate to have to make it a code violet, 1.03 blueline warning, but if this keeps up, what choice will I have?
Are you sure vBulletin 2.2.9 supports this extreme measure? I heard bluelining during peak traffic times can trigger randomized counterattack measures which may or may not cause yellow mode auto-shutdowns. Refer to your orange tech manual appendix for more details.
Oh Traitor J you of all people saying Sam is creating a hostile enviroment is like Bush saying Britney Spears has no talent.
Yes, just because someone has no business pointing something out, does not make their observation any less true, that was very perceptive of you,
