The New Yorker Magazine editorial

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Ted Dolotta" <Ted () Dolotta ORG>
Date: October 28, 2004 4:04:21 PM EDT
To: "IP List" <dfarber () cs cmu edu>
Subject: The New Yorker Magazine editorial
Reply-To: <Ted () Dolotta ORG>

I am not sure (although I should know -- I have subscribed
to The New Yorker Magazine since 1960), but I think this may
be the first time in its history that The New Yorker endorsed
a presidential (or any political?) candidate.

ted

P.S.  This same issue of The New Yorker (Nov. 1) has a remarkable,
        32-page portfolio of a photographic essay that Richard
        Avedon was working on when he died a few months ago.
        Well worth staring at for a bit.

==============================================================

The New Yorker Magazine

Issue of 2004-11-01 -- Posted 2004-10-25

THE TALK OF THE TOWN -- COMMENT

THE CHOICE

This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in
American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction,
reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly
independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the
challenger-who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both
the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war-as a coward and a
traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger's
adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is
one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up
"Happy Days Are Here Again."

The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on
November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays.
On Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million
Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable
plurality, voted to make Al Gore President of the United States.
Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in
the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state,
George W. Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-
thousandth of Gore's national margin; irregularities, and there were
many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and the
state's electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush's brother, who
was the governor, and one of Bush's state campaign co-chairs, who was
the Florida secretary of state.

Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday,
December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he
wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently
partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to
put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to
conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes
of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself.
By ignoring them-by cutting off the process and installing Bush by
fiat-the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also
of constitutional republicanism.

A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic
equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the
damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made
some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his
election-in the composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued
his policy goals, perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no
such effort. According to Bob Woodward in "Plan of Attack," Vice-
President Dick Cheney put it this way: "From the very day we walked in
the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it
was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was
not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on
that agenda, we won the election-full speed ahead."

The new President's main order of business was to push through
Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor
the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such
as weakening environmental protection and cutting off funds for
international family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside
what became known (in English, not Arabic) as "the base," which is to
say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical
component. The President's enthusiastic embrace of that movement was
such that, four months into the Administration, the defection of a
moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, cost his party control of
the Senate. And, four months after that, the President's political
fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but inexorable decline.
Then came the blackest Tuesday of all.

September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of
solidarity, global and national-solidarity with and solidarity within
the United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a
second opportunity to create something like a government of national
unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the
political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through
more elements of his unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11,
in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and
recaptured control of the Senate by portraying selected Democrats as
friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many
Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound
differences in outlook between the two candidates and their parties?

The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies
and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities-political and,
apparently, ideological-in both Houses of Congress. Substantively,
however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and-strikingly
for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism-incompetence.


In January, 2001, just after Bush's inauguration, the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the
coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five
trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to
do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique.
Last year's federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion
dollars; this year's will top four hundred billion. According to the
C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the
period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3
trillion.

Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming
fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that
most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the
legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects
them to go away on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to
make their ultimate results look less scary. If Congress extends the
expiration deadlines-a near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans
retain control of Congress-then, according to the C.B.O., the
cumulative deficit between 2005 and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5
trillion.

What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The
President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after
9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq's
collapse in April, 2000. It's true that even badly designed tax cuts
can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn't make them wise
policy. "Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income
Americans," Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry.
This is false-a lie, actually-though at least it suggests some dim
awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is
politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate
economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who
will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and
moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some
relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller
marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly.
Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings
have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person
in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of
ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket
eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top
one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two
hundred and ninety-two dollars.

These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will
likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net
loss of American jobs. This Administration's most unshakable
commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the
sort of income that rewards wealth and onto the sort that rewards
work. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, another
Washington research group, estimates that the average federal tax rate
on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now
about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it's about twenty-three per
cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand tax-free
savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains,
and permanently abolish the estate tax-all of which will widen the
widening gap between the richest and the rest.

Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into
his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-
dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record
since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries
affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed
rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as "new source
review," which requires power-plant operators to install modern
pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it
turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation's largest
polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by
Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new
rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions
from power plants. The E.P.A.'s regulation drafters had copied, in
some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing
the utility industry.

"I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the land," Bush mused
dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you'd say nothing of the kind.
The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow
oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast
stretches of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development.
By stripping away restrictions on the use of federal lands, often
through little-advertised rule changes, the Administration has
potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger than Indiana
and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration.

During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the
Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot
Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has
been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader
information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About
others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for
example, permits government investigators to obtain-without a subpoena
or a search warrant based on probable cause-a court order entitling
them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and
Internet service providers, among other public and private entities.
Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section
215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information
from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be
more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling.

Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice
Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven
weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its
investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The
arrests have continued, but eventually the Administration simply
stopped saying how many people were and are being held. In any event,
not one of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a
terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way that foreign
nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since
September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than
five hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions,
after hearings that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by
Ashcroft, were held in secret. Since it is official policy not to
deport terrorism suspects, it is unclear what legitimate anti-terror
purpose these secret hearings serve.

President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but
the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that's the
right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with
conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one
of his judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for
Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans
blocked more than sixty of Clinton's nominees; Senate Democrats have
blocked only ten of Bush's. (Those ten, by the way, got exactly what
they deserved. Some of them-such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted years of
her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that practice
racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old
with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr
Report-rank among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.)

Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it
has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary,
especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court's worst decisions
of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its
best-salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for
terrorist suspects, striking down Texas's anti-sodomy law, banning
executions of the mentally retarded-were reached by one- or two-vote
majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from reversal.) All
but one of the sitting justices are senior citizens, ranging in age
from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap since the last
appointment-ten years-is the longest since 1821. Bush has said more
than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite
justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their
images.

The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An
executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their
papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for
secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President's hostility to
science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on
federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness
to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to "the base,"
is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent
to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration's energy
policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency
requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility.
Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted
with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed
to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money
that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education
programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.


Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But
this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education,
and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect
of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential
responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the
"war on terror"-more precisely, the struggle against a brand of
Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly
ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.

Bush's immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an
almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the
universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus.
His decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban
rulers of Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal
base of operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the
near-unanimous support of the American people and of America's allies.
Troops from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain
are serving alongside Americans in Afghanistan to this day.

The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month's
Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is
clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left
undone, despite fervent promises at the outset that the chaos that was
allowed to develop after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in the
nineteen-eighties would not be repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in
eastern and southern regions. Bin Laden's organization continues to
enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans as well as Pakistanis on both
sides of their common border. Warlords control much of Afghanistan
outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the territorial
writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium
production has increased fortyfold.

The White House's real priorities were elsewhere from the start.
According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a
Situation Room crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld
suggested launching retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and
others pointed out to him that Al Qaeda-the presumed culprit-was based
in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there
were better targets in Iraq. The bottom line, as Bush's former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said, was that the Bush-Cheney
team had been planning to carry out regime change in Baghdad well
before September 11th-one way or another, come what may.

At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying
that without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is
probably true, and Saddam's record of colossal cruelty--of murder,
oppression, and regional aggression--was such that even those who
doubted the war's wisdom acknowledged his fall as an occasion for
satisfaction. But the removal of Saddam has not been the war's only
consequence; and, as we now know, his power, however fearsome to the
millions directly under its sway, was far less of a threat to the
United States and the rest of the world than it pretended-and, more
important, was made out-to be.

As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain,
Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to
no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome
views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-
created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism
been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments and
warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central
Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the
chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than
the chants of millions of marchers.

The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four
assumptions: first, that Saddam's regime was on the verge of acquiring
nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with
Al Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and
others) might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within
Iraq the regime's fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and
rapid and peaceful democratization; and, fourth, that a similar
democratic transformation would be precipitated elsewhere in the
region, accompanied by a new eagerness among Arab governments and
publics to make peace between Israel and a presumptive Palestinian
state. The first two of these assumptions have been shown to be
entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind them do
someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was a
help rather than a hindrance.

In Bush's rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with
precision bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended
exactly three weeks later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That
military operation was indeed a success. But the cakewalk led over a
cliff, to a succession of heedless and disastrous mistakes that leave
one wondering, at the very least, how the Pentagon's civilian
leadership remains intact and the President's sense of infallibility
undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders as
General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an
adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government
buildings, hospitals, museums, and-most inexcusable of all-arms
depots. ("Stuff happens," Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained,
though no stuff happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but
ignored the State Department's postwar plans, compiled by its Future
of Iraq project, which warned not only of looting but also of the
potential for insurgencies and the folly of relying on exiles such as
Ahmad Chalabi; the project's head, Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The
White House counsel's disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of
prohibitions on torture as "quaint" opened the way to systematic and
spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a
moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic
of the Administration's management style, no one in a policymaking
position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may cleave
to his arguments about a grand coalition ("What's he say to Tony
Blair?" "He forgot Poland!"), the coalition he assembled was anything
but grand, and it has been steadily melting away in Iraq's cauldron of
violence.

By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost of this war
will be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by Lawrence
Lindsey, who headed the President's Council of Economic Advisers
until, like numerous other bearers of unpalatable news, he was
cashiered) and rising. And there are other, more serious costs that
were unforeseen by the dominant factions in the Administration
(although there were plenty of people who did foresee them). The
United States has become mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war that
has taken more lives since the mission was declared to be accomplished
than before. American military deaths have mounted to more than a
thousand, a number that underplays the real level of suffering: among
the eight thousand wounded are many who have been left seriously
maimed. The toll of Iraqi dead and wounded is of an order of magnitude
greater than the American. Al Qaeda, previously an insignificant
presence in Iraq, is an important one now. Before this war, we had
persuaded ourselves and the world that our military might was
effectively infinite. Now it is overstretched, a reality obvious to
all. And, if the exposure of American weakness encourages our enemies,
surely the blame lies with those who created the reality, not with
those who, like Senator Kerry, acknowledge it as a necessary step
toward changing it.

When the Administration's geopolitical, national-interest, and anti-
terrorism justifications for the Iraq war collapsed, it groped for an
argument from altruism: postwar chaos, violence, unemployment, and
brownouts notwithstanding, the war has purchased freedoms for the
people of Iraq which they could not have had without Saddam's fall.
That is true. But a sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its
fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious
rationale-and, as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in
American foreign policy has been likewise undermined. Foreign-policy
idealism has taken many forms-Wilson's aborted world federalism,
Carter's human-rights jawboning, and Reagan's flirtation with total
nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed intervention in
Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other examples. The
neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration, post-
9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic
purpose in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its
autocracies and dictatorships. Yet this Administration's adventure in
Iraq is so gravely flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in
the future, faced with yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be
expected to retreat, a victim of its own Iraq Syndrome.


The damage visited upon America, and upon America's standing in the
world, by the Bush Administration's reckless mishandling of the public
trust will not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see
the damage arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the
challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W.
Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy,
health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national
security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against
terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush's
curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery. Pollsters like
to ask voters which candidate they'd most like to have a beer with,
and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask which candidate
is better suited to the governance of our nation.

Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has
demonstrated steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical
courage he showed in combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage
when he raised his voice against the war, a choice that has carried
political costs from his first run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a
campaign of character assassination from a local newspaper that could
not forgive his antiwar stand, right through this year's Swift Boat
ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief of the Bank of
Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering operation that
favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his investigation forced
him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he rejected the
cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his own party
with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver North in
the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the
bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era
P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for
Washington's normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-
nineties, was the signal accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol
Hill, and it is emblematic of his fairness of mind and independence of
spirit. Kerry has made mistakes (most notably, in hindsight at least,
his initial opposition to the Gulf War in 1990), but-in contrast to
the President, who touts his imperviousness to changing realities as a
virtue-he has learned from them.

Kerry's performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public
groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was
discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to
acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the
Administration's appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very
late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to
destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no
evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and
scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned
and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the
unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry's mettle has
been tested under fire-the fire of real bullets and the political fire
that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected-and
he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a
properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has
pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has
sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of
primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic
temperament. In campaigning for America's mainstream restoration,
Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the
urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life
for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his
character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters,
and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty
and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

- The Editors

Copyright c CondNet 2004. All rights reserved.















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