John Eisenhower

By JOHN EISENHOWER
Guest Commentary


EDITORS NOTE: This commentary was originally published Sept. 9, 2004.

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.


Link

 

Its time for Bush to get worried

By Frank Luntz
October 15, 2004

The big story of the US presidential election up to Thursday was how few undecided voters there were. Now the final presidential debate is over, these voters have essentially made up their minds - and it is George W.Bush who should be worried. If John Kerry is elected the 44th president, it will be because of a single night in Miami, Florida, when he came to debate and Mr. Bush came to - well, no one is quite sure. The double-digit lead that Gallup polls, long considered an authority for presidential polling, gave Mr. Bush after the Republican convention was fully erased by that fateful 90-minute confrontation.

Step by step, debate-by-debate, John Kerry has addressed and removed many remaining doubts among uncommitted voters. My own polling research after each debate suggests a rather bleak outlook for the Bush candidacy: many who still claim to be “undecided” are in fact leaning to Mr. Kerry and are about ready to commit.

Can Mr. Bush turn the tide in just 18 days? Absolutely, but his candidacy must address voters who still harbour economic and national security concerns. But that requires a fundamental shift in the president’s strategy and message. Asserting that the economy is strong and Iraq a success is simply not credible to the majority of Americans or to the stubborn 5 per cent who remain uncommitted.

The first thing Mr Bush should remember is to forget about using statistics to prove the economy is on the right track. Uncommitted voters, who tend to fall below the US average in education and income, just do not buy it. They feel squeezed by reduced employee benefits and higher prices. The president must articulate their frustration and, in the words of Bill Clinton, “feel their pain”. But that is not enough. Mr. Bush has explicitly to outline his plan to improve voters’ daily lives.

From the “outsourcing” of US jobs overseas to rising budget deficits and spiralling costs of petrol and health insurance, America’s remaining uncommitted voters want more “solutions” and less rhetoric. The candidate who offers more of the former stands a very good chance of winning. Here, Mr. Kerry has the advantage. In the first two debates, he perfected an effective technique of agreeing with the president on the problems and the principles behind them but then disagreeing on solutions and execution. In all three debates, uncommitted voters preferred Mr. Kerry’s consensus-building style to Mr. Bush’s confrontational approach.

Mr. Bush, to recover the voters he lost in the debates, must put the domestic policy debate in the wider context of the war on terror where he is still more trusted than his opponent. He has repeatedly missed opportunities to pivot from Iraq to terrorism, and he never effectively drew the link between national security and economic security. If Mr. Kerry repeats his line that the president should not have chosen tax cuts over national security, Mr. Bush should counter by noting Mr. Kerry’s lacklustre 20-year record in the Senate. That is a proposition that swing voters could readily sign up to.

On the economy, Mar Bush cannot afford simply to defend his record. He must offer hope for the future. As statistics do not work, he must talk about the economy through stories of real Americans employees, small business owners and family farmers explaining how a second Bush term would boost the economy. Outsourcing, whether Republicans like it or not, is the key economic issue of 2004. The Bush administration got off to a bad start by appearing to defend the practice as a beneficial part of free trade. While that may be good economics, it is terrible politics. The president’s current response, to offer better education as the solution, is no solace to voters in swing states such as Ohio who have lost their jobs.

The president started well at articulating a Republican solution to outsourcing in his second debate when he said: “America must be the best place in the world to do business.” But without more detail, he is just not credible. Better education is a start, but he needs to talk about how oppressive taxation, regulation and litigation systems are sending jobs overseas and how he can fix that. Another big issue is healthcare. Here, Mr Bush repeatedly scored points by focusing on how rising medical liability premiums are driving up healthcare and health insurance costs.
On certain key issues, Mr Bush would do well to position himself in contrast to the “special interests” in Washington who oppose reform. On education, on taxes, on energy as well as on healthcare, the president sits on the opposite side to such interests. If he outlines his plans for a second term, he could paint himself as the reformer to Mr Kerry’s defence of the status quo.

Mr Bush was right to stop the angry, dismissive facial gestures that hurt him in the first debate. But if he wants to be the speaker rather than spectator at the next presidential inauguration, he will need to turn in a perfect performance every day from now through the election perfection that has eluded him so far.


The writer is a pollster and president of the Luntz Research Companies

Courtesy Financial Times



Link