Big Loss For Bush
Gene Lyons
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If last week’s presidential debate had been a prizefight, they’d have stopped it on a fourth-round TKO. If it had been a Little League game, they’d have invoked the 10-run "mercy" rule. If it had been a college football game, sportswriters would have chided John Kerry for scheduling a pushover like George W. Bush.
Anybody who thinks Bush "won" his first encounter with Kerry is probably still in the market for Chicago Cubs playoff tickets. It wasn’t simply that Bush lost the argument. He made the most fundamental political mistake of all: He believed his own—well, "propaganda" is a word I can get into the newspaper. Unprepared for an opponent of Kerry’s ability, Bush let his inner punk show: smirking, sneering, rolling his eyes and slumping over the lectern like a petulant teen.
At times, the president appeared visibly angered that anybody, much less the Massachusetts senator he’d mocked as a "flip-flopper" to invitation-only crowds of GOP activists, was allowed to contradict him. At times, he looked visibly confused. I’m not much on psychodrama, but given Bush’s personal history, the most telling moment may have come early in the debate, when Kerry, a tall, aristocratic New Englander, Ivy League scholar, athlete and war hero, paraphrased the words of a former U.S. president with a biography much like his own. "You know the president’s father," Kerry said, "did not go into Iraq into Baghdad beyond Basra. And the reason he didn’t is, he said, he wrote in his book: because there was no viable exit strategy. And he said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile land. That’s exactly where we find ourselves today. There’s a sense of American occupation."
Kerry accurately summarized President George H. W. Bush’s book, "A World Transformed." Invading Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, he wrote, "would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.... The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see.... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barrenoutcome."
It was a telling blow. A better description of the catastrophe caused by President Junior’s rash stampede to war, what Kerry called his "colossal error of judgment," would be hard to imagine. A shrewd debater would have seen it coming. Of course, hardly anybody imagines that this President Bush has read his father’s book. As Junior has scornfully told us, he doesn’t do "nuance." Besides, Kerry’s the kind of person he has openly resented all his life—born to privilege like him, but with many of the virtues of his class, intellectual achievement and physical courage among them.
Bush never really recovered. He spent most of the debate praising his own determination and repeatedly condemning "mixed messages," like a parrot with a stunted vocabulary. The effect was to magnify his worst faults: his inability to admit error or change his mind in altered circumstances. Kerry skewered him there, too. "Maybe someone would call it a character trait, maybe somebody wouldn’t," he observed. "But this issue of certainty: It’s one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong."
Kerry gave a list of poll-tested examples, from foreign policy to global warming and stem-cell research, on which Bush is both dead certain and dead wrong. Since the debate, Bush’s response has been equally characteristic. Back inside the warm cocoon of invitation-only campaign events, he seized upon a phrase from the debate and twisted its meaning. "Senator Kerry last night said that America has to pass some sort of global test," he told a jeering audience in Allentown, Pa., "before we can use American troops to defend ourselves.... Listen, I’ll continue to work with our allies and the international community. But I will never submit America’s national security to an international test. The use of troops to defend America must never be subject to a veto by countries like France."
Almost needless to say, Kerry said almost the opposite. He affirmed that "the president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike." He said he would never compromise that, but would act in a way that "passes the global test where your countrymen, your people, understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons." In short, Kerry thinks the president should act like the leader of a democracy, with what the Declaration of Independence called "a decent respect for the opinions of Man-kind."
It’s no surprise that a callow impostor like Bush pretends to misunderstand him.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Link: http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg
Link
If last week’s presidential debate had been a prizefight, they’d have stopped it on a fourth-round TKO. If it had been a Little League game, they’d have invoked the 10-run "mercy" rule. If it had been a college football game, sportswriters would have chided John Kerry for scheduling a pushover like George W. Bush.
Anybody who thinks Bush "won" his first encounter with Kerry is probably still in the market for Chicago Cubs playoff tickets. It wasn’t simply that Bush lost the argument. He made the most fundamental political mistake of all: He believed his own—well, "propaganda" is a word I can get into the newspaper. Unprepared for an opponent of Kerry’s ability, Bush let his inner punk show: smirking, sneering, rolling his eyes and slumping over the lectern like a petulant teen.
At times, the president appeared visibly angered that anybody, much less the Massachusetts senator he’d mocked as a "flip-flopper" to invitation-only crowds of GOP activists, was allowed to contradict him. At times, he looked visibly confused. I’m not much on psychodrama, but given Bush’s personal history, the most telling moment may have come early in the debate, when Kerry, a tall, aristocratic New Englander, Ivy League scholar, athlete and war hero, paraphrased the words of a former U.S. president with a biography much like his own. "You know the president’s father," Kerry said, "did not go into Iraq into Baghdad beyond Basra. And the reason he didn’t is, he said, he wrote in his book: because there was no viable exit strategy. And he said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile land. That’s exactly where we find ourselves today. There’s a sense of American occupation."
Kerry accurately summarized President George H. W. Bush’s book, "A World Transformed." Invading Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, he wrote, "would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.... The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see.... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barrenoutcome."
It was a telling blow. A better description of the catastrophe caused by President Junior’s rash stampede to war, what Kerry called his "colossal error of judgment," would be hard to imagine. A shrewd debater would have seen it coming. Of course, hardly anybody imagines that this President Bush has read his father’s book. As Junior has scornfully told us, he doesn’t do "nuance." Besides, Kerry’s the kind of person he has openly resented all his life—born to privilege like him, but with many of the virtues of his class, intellectual achievement and physical courage among them.
Bush never really recovered. He spent most of the debate praising his own determination and repeatedly condemning "mixed messages," like a parrot with a stunted vocabulary. The effect was to magnify his worst faults: his inability to admit error or change his mind in altered circumstances. Kerry skewered him there, too. "Maybe someone would call it a character trait, maybe somebody wouldn’t," he observed. "But this issue of certainty: It’s one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong."
Kerry gave a list of poll-tested examples, from foreign policy to global warming and stem-cell research, on which Bush is both dead certain and dead wrong. Since the debate, Bush’s response has been equally characteristic. Back inside the warm cocoon of invitation-only campaign events, he seized upon a phrase from the debate and twisted its meaning. "Senator Kerry last night said that America has to pass some sort of global test," he told a jeering audience in Allentown, Pa., "before we can use American troops to defend ourselves.... Listen, I’ll continue to work with our allies and the international community. But I will never submit America’s national security to an international test. The use of troops to defend America must never be subject to a veto by countries like France."
Almost needless to say, Kerry said almost the opposite. He affirmed that "the president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike." He said he would never compromise that, but would act in a way that "passes the global test where your countrymen, your people, understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons." In short, Kerry thinks the president should act like the leader of a democracy, with what the Declaration of Independence called "a decent respect for the opinions of Man-kind."
It’s no surprise that a callow impostor like Bush pretends to misunderstand him.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Link: http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 13:26
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