Wow.

From The Atlantic:

"A Miserable Failure"
byline: Jack Beatty
With one phrase Dick Gephardt has defined the issue to be decided next
November. Can a "miserable failure" of a president win re-election?
Bush's victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the
American future than any policies implemented or continued during a
second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic
accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still
be re-elected president. You can preside over the most catastrophic
failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no
one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic
buck-passing. Can
oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure
from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically
toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the
independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an
unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000
Iraqi civilians�adjusted for the difference in population, the
equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to
restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers
targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and
planters of remote-control bombs�and taunt the murderers of our young
men to "bring it on." Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on
nation building�and pass the bill to America's children. (Asked to
consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers
for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from
Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said
no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other
President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and
Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to
millionaires. You can wreck the nation's finances, running up the
largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to
increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower
the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your
unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile "you're either with us
or against us" rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war
and your lies can be exposed�and, if a majority prefers ignorance to
civic responsibility, you can still be reelected. Even Republicans must
be capable of applying a cost-benefit analysis to this record of
miserable failure. Their tax cuts on one side, the burden of
Bush-begotten debt on their children on the other. And surely even
Republicans breathe the air befouled by those power plants. I have it
on good authority that the conservatives in the party do as well.
Surely they must question the judgment of a President who proposes to
turn Iraq into what James Fallows calls "the fifty-first state" in
order to bring democracy to the Middle East�the kind of do-gooder
fantasy conservatives have long ridiculed in liberals. But the election
won't be decided by Republicans and conservatives. Most will sacrifice
independent judgment to ideology or party and vote for Bush. No, swing
voters will pick the next President. They vote the man not the party,
character not ideology. Many voted for Bush in 2000 because they liked
him better than Al Gore�applying the standards of product
acceptability to a job that entrusts its holder with the power to blow
up the planet. Well, do they still "like" Bush? I fear many do. After
all, he has spared them the embarrassment of having to discuss sex with
their children. Swing voters like Bush's "image" as a strong leader, a
CNN pundit claims. Are they incapable of looking behind that image and
seeing the weak President who stayed away from the White House on
September 11 because his Vice President said it was not safe for him to
be there and whose PR people lied to cover up his failure of
leadership? John F. Kennedy, as R. W. Apple wrote on the front page of
The New York Times on September 12, remained in the White House
throughout the Cuban missile crisis knowing that it would be hit in any
nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. The Founders feared that the
republic would succumb to corruption without republican
citizenship�without citizens who could transcend privatism and hold
elected officials to account, demanding probity and competence, and
judging their performance against both the clamorous necessities of the
time and the mute claims of posterity. They made property a criterion
for voting because it secured a measure of economic independence.
Property-less wage laborers, they feared, would vote as their employers
instructed them to. The extension of democracy to those who could not
rise to the responsibilities of republican freedom would corrupt the
republic�hasten its decay into oligarchy or mob rule. For all their
worldliness the Founders were na�ve to regard property as a shield of
incorruptibility or the property-less as inherently corruptible. Their
core insight, however, remains valid. A republic can be corrupted at
the top and bottom, by leaders and led. The re-election of George W.
Bush would signal that a kind of corruption had set in among the led.
Our miserable failure as republican citizens would match his as
President.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 13, 2003 at 10:12 PM | Permalink