I'm posting this for a friend; inspiring stuff. Inspiring enough that it worked, and the recipient is showing it around today to her friends.
What follows is a letter my father wrote to his mother-in-law, a lifelong republican living in Florida who voted for Nader in 2000. Feel free to pass it along to any undecided swing-state voters. I've replaced the names with underscores to protect privacy.
Dear
__,
I write to you about an issue of real urgency. It now appears that your state, Florida, may well decide the national election. Polls suggest that the vote count may be as close as in the last election. In 2000, if even half of those who voted for Nader had voted for Gore, Bush would not have been elected.
At the time, Bush's campaign strategy was aimed at portraying him as a man of the political center, a person who would unite the country. After three and a half years, it is painfully clear that he had a very different aim in mind. His alliances with the most right-wing elements in America are clear to all of us. Perhaps if Americans knew then how different his reals aims were from his campaign promises, the outcome of the election of 2000 might have been different.
Worse, in the name of Christianity, or the most conservative and fundamentalist ideas of Christianity, the Bush administration will, if reelected, attempt to do with womens' reproductive rights entirely, and to give fundamentalists control over many aspects of American life.
I know how hard it is to change long-standing allegiance to a political party. You should ask yourself, though, if Bush represents what you understand to be the aims of the Republican party. Literally, republican means of or pertaining to the republic, that is, the Nation as a political unity. Thus it was the Republican party under Lincoln who had the courage to save the republic during the Civil War. Thus it was that Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican and one of our greatest presidents had the courage to take on the giant industrial trusts in order to give working men and women more equitable wages and better working conditions. He knew that in the first years of the last century, powerful industrial and financial interests had to be controlled, even if they had been enthusiastic supporters of his political party.
It was Theodore Roosevelt, as well, who understood the importance of saving the land from uncontrolled development by industry. To this end he was instrumental in setting up the National Parks. In short, throughout his one and one half terms as president he was a true republican, acting for the good of the nation.
In nothing that the Bush Administration has done or attempted to do can I see any sense of acting for the good of the republic.
The war in Iraq has not made this country one bit safer; the diversion of military effort has crippled efforts to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. The Coast Guard, supposed to protect the American coast from attempts to smuggle weapons of mass destruction to the US is now in Iraq. The US customs which must now more actively police the Canadian and Mexican boders as well as our posts has not been augmented. Domestic intelligence services Arabic translators have been sent to Iraq instead of working to intercept Arabic language communications in the US, to cite only a few cases.
The Bush deficit is another story and not a happy one. The tax cut for the rich (how much money did you save on this tax cut?). The deficit will have to be paid someday, but by then Bush will have retired. You and I (among others) will pay in sharply reduced social security benefits, and reductions in other government services like education. But say you, how does that concern me?
You may not have kids in school, but when schools in Florida do not have the money to educate the young, or only educate them badly, the angry, frustrated sixteen years olds dumped into the streets by this defective system will turn to a traditional vocation of those betrayed by the educational system: crime. Guess who their victims of choice will be? The old folks. Does this sound scary? People who don't have kids in the public schools forget that a strong system on public education is supposed to make good citizen who believe that the political and social system helps them.
Take away the education system and what is left are holding tanks to give the less well off only rudimentary skills. In poor states there will be more poor students, because the federal government will not have the money to help the schools. The upper middle class will use private education and the relative few elite public schools to educate their kids. More jobs will get exported to other countries who are willing to spend more money on education. More upper middle class Americans will live in gated communities.
The present national debt may well require cuts in Social Security; Bush's legislative approach to prescription drug costs was entirely dictated by the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, the Bush approach to government regarding retirees is "don't expect help from the government." The Bush tax cuts not, by the way for you and us are designed to do one thing: cut back as much as possible the role of government in commercial regulation, aid to education, cushioning the cost of medical care, etc. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is directed entirely toward the corporate world.
The policies of the military in Iraq (torture of Iraqis has inflamed the entire Middle East); the disastrous lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq, and worst of all the contemptible notion that because we are fighting terrorists in Iraq they will be too busy to attack us in the United States say to me that Bush and his cronies have lied and mislead us in a way unparalleled in the past century.
A good friend, a retired senior CIA operative and a conservative Republican, said to me recently that Bush's decision to invade Iraq was the single worst foreign policy decision by an American president in a century. In a recent debate, when asked if he could recall any mistakes he made in his presidency, Bush could think of none. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Bush will change the nature and direction of his government is reelected.
I think that it is clear that there are vast deficiencies in the Bush view of government, but you may say, "why should I vote for Kerry?" Any change will be for the best. Further, Kerry will without doubt bring realism back to foreign policy. He will make Iraqis take responsibility for order in the own country. He will bring greater pressure in Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear arms aspirations. Why do you think Iran is intent on building a nuclear weapon? Because these weapon, they feel, will be proof against an American invasion, and they are right!
Kerry will do something about prescription drug costs, he will do something about about the vast deficit that threatens the ability of the government to provide basic services (the tax breaks for the rich cannot be defended on any economic grounds); he will undo the influence of religious zealots on government. Remember, as Nader cannot be elected, a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.
Bush used the very threat now universally shown to be bogus the "we can't wait for the mushroom cloud from an Iraqi A-bomb" before we act. Well, why the waiting in the case of Iran and North Korea? Another simple answer: we are out of troops; our military option is nil; Bush and his crowd were so preoccupied with flexing muscles in Iraq that the took their eyes off of the other threats.
What this comes to is that for George Bush, what happens in foreign countries is important or actionable only when it dovetails with some of his simpleminded preconceptions. He thought that invading Iraq was a muscular response to terrorism. Osama Bin Laden must have been delighted. Now he could point to this invasion as proof of what he always maintained, that America wanted to attack Islamic countries. Brer Rabbit and briar patch. This is not a matter of public relations: the Islamic world is now more than ever convinced that we are anti-islam. Our actions have made this idea ever easier to believe by the hundreds of millions of Muslims whose access to broad-based sources of information is extremely limited, and has given Muslim terrorists more ammunition in their attempts to recruit impressionable young Muslims to their cause.
_ and I hope you will give these ideas careful consideration. Kerry may not be someone to have a beer and burger with, but we don't want that in a president.