Commentary—

A Second, Humble Opinion

By Curtiss Clark

Reflecting the apparent even split among the electorate this year about who would make the better President, George W. Bush or John Kerry, there was a split this year on the issue between The Bee’s usual editorial writer, me, and its editor and publisher, R. Scudder Smith. Because we are friends of more than 30 years, usually see eye-to-eye, and are given to treat each other with respect and forbearance, it was decided that the author of The Bee’s formal endorsement of a candidate would be determined by lottery. So we reached into my pay envelope to see who had signed my check. I lost.

Graciously, I was given this somewhat smaller soapbox on page 2 to offer a second, humble opinion:

We endorsed the election of George W. Bush as the better of two unimpressive presidential candidates in 2000. We were swayed by his promise to use half an estimated $5.6 trillion budget surplus over ten years to shore up social security and pay down the national debt and to use the other half for across-the-board tax cuts and strengthening budget priorities like education.

Today we have a $413 billion budget deficit with the national debt projected to exceed $9 trillion by the year 2010. Social Security has not been shored up but is about to be undermined by a Bush-sponsored plan to use $600 billion already committed to Social Security to pay for private Social Security retirement accounts. The No Child Left Behind Act has raised standards and the reliance on standardized testing in schools without providing adequate funding to improve schools to meet the new standards. What happened?

Of course 9/11 and the subsequent war on terrorism changed the calculus for our country. But post-9/11 spending on disaster relief and homeland security and the cost of fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq account for 14.6 percent of the country’s fiscal nosedive, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Even adding in the economic downturn precipitated by the 9/11 attacks, which accounts for about 7.7 percent of the decline, more than 75 percent of the deficits are unrelated to 9/11 and our country’s response to it. The insistence of the administration and the Republican Congress in continuing with large tax cuts, mostly benefiting the country’s wealthiest citizens, in a time of war is responsible for 60 percent of the budget deterioration, according to the CBO.

It used to be that the Republican Party was known as America’s “responsible” party, limiting the size of government, requiring it to live within its means. In the past four years, a Republican administration and a largely Republican Congress have cut taxes without curbing spending, turning a $5.6 trillion surplus into a $3.3 trillion deficit. President Bush has yet to veto a single appropriations bill. This is not responsible.

Responsibility should also extend to foreign affairs, yet somehow the surplus of respect and support for the United States in the days following 9/11 has also been squandered. At a time when the world community was on its way to discovering that Saddam Hussein had been totally disarmed of weapons of mass destruction through a successful program of UN economic sanctions and weapons inspections, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration lost patience, declared Saddam armed and dangerous to US interests, and took the country to war. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said at the time, “It’s all about weapons of mass destruction.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld elaborated: “No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” Now, of course, we know none of that was true.

This month, a report by the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq concluded that Saddam Hussein did not possess or even have concrete plans to develop weapons of mass destruction, and the 9/11 Commission found that the dictator had no collaborative relationship with Al Qaeda terrorists whatsoever. So the administration that has trouble identifying any mistakes in its prosecution of the Iraq war was once again in semantic retreat, from “weapons of mass destruction,” to “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities,” to “the intent to resume weapons of mass destruction efforts.” The Bush administration’s original justifications for war are no longer credible, and no one really believed its rosy predictions of a quick transition to a stable democracy in Iraq.

Beyond all the rhetoric, we are left with this reality: more than 1,000 American soldiers and 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in Iraq, and last week the most dangerous of the newly imported terrorists in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile the legitimate efforts to root out terrorists and their sponsors in Afghanistan undertaken in the aftermath of 9/11 have become the poor stepsister of the greater war in Iraq.

I am so disturbed by President Bush’s retreat from traditional Republican responsibility that I cannot support his presidential bid this year. In a reversal of roles, the Democratic Party and its candidate, John Kerry, have been the ones sounding the alarms about the ballooning deficits and need to restore realpolitik to a foreign policy that papers over chaos with wishful thinking. Whether Mr Kerry can deliver on his many promises remains to be seen. But I agree with most Americans who now believe that our country is on the wrong track. I am convinced that four more years of George W. Bush will only take us farther down that wrong track.

This year I will be voting for John Kerry.