2004/10/10 The whole world is watching America's presidential election which is barely four weeks away. The election is intriguing in many ways, especially when viewed from Taiwan, which held its own election early this year in a similarly intriguing fashion. Incumbent president George W. Bush of the Republican Party is the frontrunner in a basically two-man race with Sen. John Kerry of the Democratic Party, assuming that Ralph Nader is but a spoiler and also-ran. The simple fact that Bush is leading, at least in the polls, is intriguing. Why? Because the United States under Bush is worse than it was three and a half years ago. Are the American people too gullible or too forgetful? Certainly, they are just like their Taiwanese friends as far as the election is concerned. The glaring issue is Iraq, Bush's Vietnam in which more than 1,000 American troops have lost their lives together with hundreds of billions of dollars. Everybody knows the war in Iraq is not justified. It is Bush who misled the world and the American people about the threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein who was alleged to have possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush started the war without U.N. approval. Now, more than one year after the "liberation" of Iraq, no traces of weapons of destruction have been found. The "smoking gun" is yet to be found. How could Bush defend his action? In television debate with Sen. Kerry, he kept saying "the world is better off without Saddam... progress is being made." He also claims himself as a "war president" who is best qualified to lead his country to victory. He attacked his opponent as a "flip-flopper" who "sends mixed signals." Those foreigners like us would think that Iraq would bury Bush's hope for re-election. But the polls indicated otherwise. The tragedy in Iraq has boosted Bush's chances for re-election. Is that intriguing, if not unthinkable? The same strange thing happens in the field of the economy. If Iraq is a blunder that has strangely benefited Bush, the U.S. economy is even more so. There are people who marvel at the U.S. economy under Bush, which has enjoyed an annual growth of 2.5 per cent, which compares favorably with Europe's 1 per cent. But this is misleading. The fact is that the average American family is worse off than it was nearly four years ago. Median income has fallen by more than US$1,500 in real terms, with families being squeezed as wages lag behind inflation. Bush's tax cut has benefited only the rich. Bush is boasting of his job creation. But the fact is that "this is the first time since the early 1930s that there has been a net loss of jobs over the span of a presidential administration," according to Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics in 2001 who teaches at Columbia University. Prof. Stiglitz and nine other American Nobel prize winners in economics signed an open letter in August, criticizing Bush for having "embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation... President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem." Sound familiar? Sure. Here in Taiwan we have also heard voices from leading scholars criticizing the incumbent president and his administration for mismanagement of the economy. But did the voters listen? The plain fact is that voters, be they in the U.S. or Taiwan, tend to listen to the pied piper at election time. The can only blame themselves for their suffering.
