Since this is the last piece I’ll do before the election, and since this is an endorsement, I thought it only fair to start off with a short list of disagreements I have with the president. Drilling in Alaska will not bring with it freedom from dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The Federal Marriage Amendment does not protect marriage but actually would embed discrimination into our Constitution for purely political reasons. The president’s spin on the number of stem-cell lines and his non-support of research thrusts the issue over abortion where it need not be. Tort reform would not cure ever rising health care costs; it would simply hack away at trial lawyers, traditionally supporters of the Democratic Party, and that is the point.
There are many more things that trouble me about the current president. His willingness to allow 12 increases in the debt ceiling is one. A 43 percent increase in discretional spending, topped off by making many programs non-discretional, is another. On so many issues, the president has failed miserably to live up to his own pre-election rhetoric, much less meet the bare minimum of competence required of the leader of the free world. Indeed, political junkies everywhere grew weary quite some time ago of all this administration’s spin and its need to defend one mistake or another.
So why Bush? This is not a simple anybody-but-Kerry vote, although the case certainly could be made. After all, Kerry’s only proposal to deal with Iranian proliferation is to give Iran nuclear fuel. Iran coldly declined. Kerry talks about bringing the international community into Iraq, yet the only two nations that are feasible, France and Germany, have flatly said none of their boys will go to Iraq to die. Kerry also would have us shirk decades of policy and let China off the hook by ditching multilateral talks with North Korea. In short, Kerry has no plan, and that is understandably enough to not vote for him.
However, there are solid reasons why I would rather vote for Bush than not vote at all out of disgust. I believe allowing personal accounts will possibly stave off the collapse of Social Security, while Kerry would maintain the status quo and has, so far, used scare tactics to encourage the elderly to vote in that direction. School vouchers seem a viable option, and Bush, unlike Kerry, is willing to push them despite the strong and expected backlash from teachers’ unions. That these unions don’t even want federal testing standards, which Bush proposed, is telling. Judging from the enemies Bush has made in this area, as well as with No Child Left Behind, I think he is on the right track.
The most important reason, though, is Bush’s determination in the area of foreign policy. When we elect presidents, there are only a select number of areas where they truly change the political culture: trade is one, tax another, and foreign policy is as well. Here Bush is clearly superior. Under Bush, the Pakistani nuclear black market was shut down. Libya’s relatively advanced nuclear program was abandoned. North Korea lost a trading partner in Iraq and has had to face unrelenting pressure from the U.S. Many al-Qaeda leaders have been detained while the U.S. concurrently removed, judging by the mass graves alone, the most murderous killer in the Middle East.
In Africa, Bush has lent troops to Liberia, which stemmed the violence and made way for African Union troops to finish off and force out Charles Taylor. Bush has disrupted the Iranian mullah’s, as well as al-Qaeda’s (think back to Somalia), avowed plan to convert the continent to radical Islam. Lastly, Bush has proposed to create new, more efficient groups to directly help in the fight against AIDS where it is needed most with a $15 billion grant. How this means almost nothing to the black vote is beyond me.
I am voting for Bush for a variety of reasons, some of which are not listed here. I believe that, for all his faults, this man, who is willing to be hated by the world for calling the U.N. obsolete and corrupt (because it is) in the pursuit of American security (and, with it, world-wide prosperity), is not the threat of fascism that the left says he is, but rather the leader we very much need to invigorate the political process at home and change political culture for the better abroad. So my choice is easy: Bush/Cheney ’04.