I know, doesn't mean anything to many people, but could mean something to moderate Republicans and the 'investor class'. This is after the Financial Times also endorsed Kerry.
America's next president
The incompetent or the incoherent?
Oct 28th 2004
With a heavy heart, we think American readers
should vote for John Kerry on November 2nd
YOU might have thought that, three years after a
devastating terrorist attack on American soil, a
period which has featured two wars, radical
political and economic legislation, and an
adjustment to one of the biggest stockmarket
crashes in history, the campaign for the
presidency would be an especially elevated and
notable affair. If so, you would be wrong. This
year's battle has been between two deeply flawed
men: George Bush, who has been a radical,
transforming president but who has never seemed
truly up to the job, let alone his own ambitions
for it; and John Kerry, who often seems to have
made up his mind conclusively about something
only once, and that was 30 years ago. But on
November 2nd, Americans must make their choice,
as must The Economist. It is far from an easy
call, especially against the backdrop of a
turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our
instinct is towards change rather than
continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush.
Whenever we express a view of that sort, some
readers are bound to protest that we, as a
publication based in London, should not be
poking our noses in other people's politics.
Translated, this invariably means that
protesters disagree with our choice. It may
also, however, reflect a lack of awareness about
our readership. The Economist's weekly sales in
the United States are about 450,000 copies,
which is three times our British sale and
roughly 45% of our worldwide total. All those
American readers will now be pondering how to
vote, or indeed whether to. Thus, as at every
presidential election since 1980, we hope it may
be useful for us to say how we would think about
our vote--if we had one.
The case against George Bush
That decision cannot be separated from the
terrible memory of September 11th, nor can it
fail to begin as an evaluation of the way in
which Mr Bush and his administration responded
to that day. For Mr Bush's record during the
past three years has been both inspiring and
disturbing.
Mr Bush was inspiring in the way he reacted to
the new world in which he, and America, found
itself. He grasped the magnitude of the
challenge well. His military response in
Afghanistan was not the sort of poorly directed
lashing out that Bill Clinton had used in 1998
after al-Qaeda destroyed two American embassies
in east Africa: it was a resolute, measured
effort, which was reassuringly sober about the
likely length of the campaign against Osama bin
Laden and the elusiveness of anything worth the
name of victory. Mistakes were made, notably
when at Tora Bora Mr bin Laden and other leaders
probably escaped, and when following the war
both America and its allies devoted insufficient
military and financial resources to helping
Afghanistan rebuild itself. But overall, the
mission has achieved a lot: the Taliban were
removed, al-Qaeda lost its training camps and
its base, and Afghanistan has just held
elections that bring cautious hope for the
central government's future ability to bring
stability and prosperity.
The biggest mistake, though, was one that will
haunt America for years to come. It lay in
dealing with prisoners-of-war by sending
hundreds of them to the American base at
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, putting them in a legal
limbo, outside the Geneva conventions and
outside America's own legal system. That act
reflected a genuinely difficult problem: that of
having captured people of unknown status but
many of whom probably did want to kill
Americans, at a time when to set them free would
have been politically controversial, to say the
least. That difficulty cannot neutralise the
damage caused by this decision, however. Today,
Guantánamo Bay offers constant evidence of
America's hypocrisy, evidence that is disturbing
for those who sympathise with it, cause-
affirming for those who hate it. This
administration, which claims to be fighting for
justice, the rule of law and liberty, is
incarcerating hundreds of people, whether
innocent or guilty, without trial or access to
legal representation. The White House's proposed
remedy, namely military tribunals, merely
compounds the problem.
When Mr Bush decided to frame his foreign policy
in the sort of language and objectives
previously associated with Woodrow Wilson, John
Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, he was bound to be
greeted with cynicism. Yet he was right to do
so. To paraphrase a formula invented by his
ally, Tony Blair, Mr Bush was promising to
be "tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of
terrorism", and the latter he attributed to the
lack of democracy, human rights and opportunity
in much of the world, especially the Arab
countries. To call for an effort to change that
lamentable state of affairs was inspiring and
surely correct. The credibility of the call was
enhanced by this month's Afghan election, and
may in future be enhanced by successful and free
elections in Iraq. But that remains ahead, and
meanwhile Mr Bush's credibility has been
considerably undermined not just by Guantánamo
but also by two big things: by the sheer
incompetence and hubristic thinking evident in
the way in which his team set about the
rebuilding of Iraq, once Saddam Hussein's regime
had been toppled; and by the abuses at Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq, which strengthened the
suspicion that the mistreatment or even torture
of prisoners was being condoned.
Invading Iraq was not a mistake. Although the
intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction has been shown to have been flimsy
and, with hindsight, wrong, Saddam's record of
deception in the 12 years since the first Gulf
war meant that it was right not to give him the
benefit of the doubt. The containment scheme
deployed around him was unsustainable and
politically damaging: military bases in holy
Saudi Arabia, sanctions that impoverished and
even killed Iraqis and would have collapsed. But
changing the regime so incompetently was a huge
mistake. By having far too few soldiers to
provide security and by failing to pay Saddam's
remnant army, a task that was always going to be
long and hard has been made much, much harder.
Such incompetence is no mere detail: thousands
of Iraqis have died as a result and hundreds of
American soldiers. The eventual success of the
mission, while still possible, has been put in
unnecessary jeopardy. So has America's
reputation in the Islamic world, both for
effectiveness and for moral probity.
If Mr Bush had meanwhile been making progress
elsewhere in the Middle East, such mistakes
might have been neutralised. But he hasn't.
Israel and Palestine remain in their bitter
conflict, with America readily accusable of
bias. In Iran the conservatives have become
stronger and the country has moved closer to
making nuclear weapons. Egypt, Syria and Saudi
Arabia have not turned hostile, but neither have
they been terribly supportive nor reform-minded.
Libya's renunciation of WMD is the sole clear
piece of progress.
This only makes the longer-term project more
important, not less. To succeed, however,
America needs a president capable of admitting
to mistakes and of learning from them. Mr Bush
has steadfastly refused to admit to anything:
even after Abu Ghraib, when he had a perfect
opportunity to dismiss Donald Rumsfeld, the
defence secretary, and declare a new start, he
chose not to. Instead, he treated the abuses as
if they were a low-level, disciplinary issue.
Can he learn from mistakes? The current approach
in Iraq, of training Iraqi security forces and
preparing for elections to establish an Iraqi
government with popular support, certainly
represents an improvement, although America
still has too few troops. And no one knows, for
example, whether Mr Rumsfeld will stay in his
job, or go. In the end, one can do no more than
guess about whether in a second term Mr Bush
would prove more competent.
Making sense of John Kerry
That does at least place him on equal terms with
his rival, Mr Kerry. With any challenger, voters
have to make a leap of faith about what the new
man might be like in office. What he says during
the campaign is a poor guide: Mr Bush said in
2000 that America should be "a humble nation,
but strong" and should eschew nation-building;
Mr Clinton claimed in 1992 to want to
confront "the butchers of Beijing" and to
reflate the economy through public spending.
Like those two previous challengers, Mr Kerry
has shaped many of his positions to contrast
himself with the incumbent. That is par for the
course. What is more disconcerting, however, is
the way those positions have oscillated, even as
the facts behind them have stayed the same. In
the American system, given Congress's
substantial role, presidents should primarily be
chosen for their character, their qualities of
leadership, for how they might be expected to
deal with the crises that may confront them,
abroad or at home. Oscillation, even during an
election campaign, is a worrying sign.
If the test is a domestic one, especially an
economic crisis, Mr Kerry looks acceptable,
however. His record and instincts are as a
fiscal conservative, suggesting that he would
rightly see future federal budget deficits as a
threat. His circle of advisers includes the
admirable Robert Rubin, formerly Mr Clinton's
treasury secretary. His only big spending plan,
on health care, would probably be killed by a
Republican Congress. On trade, his position is
more debatable: while an avowed free trader with
a voting record in the Senate to confirm it, he
has flirted with attacks on outsourcing this
year and chosen a rank protectionist as his
running-mate. He has not yet shown Mr Clinton's
talent for advocacy on this issue, or any
willingness to confront his rather protectionist
party. Still, on social policy, Mr Kerry has a
clear advantage: unlike Mr Bush he is not in
hock to the Christian right. That will make him
a more tolerant, less divisive figure on issues
such as abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell
research.
The biggest questions, though, must be about
foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.
That is where his oscillations are most
unsettling. A war that he voted to authorise,
and earlier this year claimed to support, he now
describes as "a mistake". On some occasions he
claims to have been profoundly changed by
September 11th and to be determined to seek out
and destroy terrorists wherever they are hiding,
and on others he has seemed to hark back to the
old Clintonian view of terrorism as chiefly a
question of law and order. He has failed to
offer any set of overall objectives for American
foreign policy, though perhaps he could hardly
oppose Mr Bush's targets of democracy, human
rights and liberty. But instead he has merely
offered a different process: deeper thought,
more consultation with allies.
So what is Mr Kerry's character? His voting
record implies he is a vacillator, but that may
be unfair, given the technical nature of many
Senate votes. His oscillations this year imply
that he is more of a ruthless opportunist. His
military record suggests he can certainly be
decisive when he has to be and his post-Vietnam
campaign showed determination. His reputation
for political comebacks and as a strong finisher
in elections also indicates a degree of
willpower that his flip-flopping otherwise
belies.
The task ahead, and the man to fit it
In the end, the choice relies on a judgment
about who will be better suited to meet the
challenges America is likely to face during the
next four years. Those challenges must include
the probability of another big terrorist attack,
in America or western Europe. They must include
the need for a period of discipline in economic
policy and for compromise on social policy, lest
the nation become weak or divided in the face of
danger. Above all, though, they include the need
to make a success of the rebuilding of Iraq, as
the key part of a broader effort to stabilise,
modernise and, yes, democratise the Middle East.
Many readers, feeling that Mr Bush has the right
vision in foreign policy even if he has made
many mistakes, will conclude that the safest
option is to leave him in office to finish the
job he has started. If Mr Bush is re-elected,
and uses a new team and a new approach to
achieve that goal, and shakes off his fealty to
an extreme minority, the religious right, then
The Economist will wish him well. But our
confidence in him has been shattered. We agree
that his broad vision is the right one but we
doubt whether Mr Bush is able to change or has
sufficient credibility to succeed, especially in
the Islamic world. Iraq's fledgling democracy,
if it gets the chance to be born at all, will
need support from its neighbours--or at least non-
interference--if it is to survive. So will other
efforts in the Middle East, particularly
concerning Israel and Iran.
John Kerry says the war was a mistake, which is
unfortunate if he is to be commander-in-chief of
the soldiers charged with fighting it. But his
plan for the next phase in Iraq is identical to
Mr Bush's, which speaks well of his judgment. He
has been forthright about the need to win in
Iraq, rather than simply to get out, and will
stand a chance of making a fresh start in the
Israel-Palestine conflict and (though with even
greater difficulty) with Iran. After three
necessarily tumultuous and transformative years,
this is a time for consolidation, for discipline
and for repairing America's moral and practical
authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often
said, there is a need in life for
accountability. He has refused to impose it
himself, and so voters should, in our view,
impose it on him, given a viable alternative.
John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would
be in a better position to carry on with
America's great tasks.