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2004 Presidential Endorsement

I have finally decided. This Gore-voter in 2000 and Republican-voter in 2002 is voting for George W. Bush 2004.

Clearly, since it took me over 7 months to make up my mind, I am not particularly enthusiastic about Bush. Moreover, I approach this decision with a good deal of humility, since my record over the past few years has been spotty, to say the least. I was wrong in predicting a positive outcome to the Taba peace talks, wrong in predicting that Israel would be unable to counteract the Intifada, and wrong in predicting that Kerry could never win the Democratic nomination, to name just a few of the many things I got wrong. And I can - without reservation - promise you that I will be wrong about many things in the next few years as well. My vote in two days may turn out to be one of them.

But, eventually, you must choose. For the record, this is how my vote was decided:

Gay Rights Gay rights is one of the very few issues where I see one side as plainly right and the other as plainly wrong. Homosexuals must have full rights in our society, for America to fulfill its ideals.

Every time that gay civil rights have advanced in this country, some foretell the poisoning of our manly values, the corruption of our children, and the corrosion of our social foundations. Every time they have been wrong. Today, they are making their last stand, now against gay marriage. Once again, they are wrong. Gay marriage is no threat to heterosexual marriage. We should embrace public commitments of love, not disown them.

That being said, gay rights will not impact my vote this year, because I do not believe that anyone can stand in the way of gay rights. The issue has already been decided. Generation X is 20% more supportive of gay rights than Baby Boomers, and the next generation will be more supportive still. Gay rights are inevitable, no matter who we elect.

Candidate Preference: Strong Kerry
Vote Impact: None


Marijuana Legalization Like gay rights, I care about marijuana legalization not because it impacts me personally (I am not, nor have I ever been, a smoker), but because I consider it to be one of the few issues where there is such an obvious right answer. Why do we spend money arresting and even jailing marijuana smokers, when we could increase our tax revenues by legalizing and regulating it? Marijuana is no worse than alcohol or cigarettes, and if it is a gateway to harder drugs, that is only because users quickly discover just how exaggerated the arguments against pot are, and then regrettably assume that the charges against cocaine or ecstasy are also trumped up. In other words, if we stop lying about marijuana, we will have more credibility when we warn against heroine.

I have no idea whether John Kerry or George W. Bush is more likely to support marijuana legalization. I assume Kerry, but have no evidence to this effect. Sadly, it doesn't matter. Where the forward march of gay rights are unstoppable, marijuana legalization is dead in the water. We could elect Cheech Marin or Dave Chappelle as President and still make no headway on this issue. Therefore, again, this issue will not impact my vote in this election.

Candidate Preference: None
Vote Impact: None


Health Care The United States spends more on health care than any other country, but gets worse results. In a country of tremendous wealth, more than 45 million people are without any health insurance. I am far from a blind believer in wealth redistribution, and the human rights industry drives me up a wall, but we should do something. The most horrible thing that I can imagine is not terrorism and it's not crime - it's seeing a loved one get sick and not being able to do anything about it, or getting sick and not being able to save your own life without sacrificing everything that actually makes it worth living.

Kerry will do more to extend health insurance to poor Americans, and so on that issue I am with him.

But there is another health care issue that also matters very much to me, which is that we continue to develop new life-saving drugs. Unfortunately, Kerry's underhanded plan to introduce price controls on the pharmeceutical industry - by reimporting drugs from Canada - would stunt the development of new drugs.

Yes, I realize that drug companies spend much of their revenues on marketing rather than drug development, and yes, much basic drug research is funded by the government. But profit-making companies are the best way to bring new products to market. The 18.5% profit margins in the drug industry draws venture capital to flow to new pharmaceutical startups, and makes the drug companies push billions into drug development. We should not turn off the spigot that funds drug research.

Besides, the complaints about the cost of prescription drugs have been wildly exaggerated. Yes, the cost of prescription drugs is a huge burden to many families. But prescription drugs are expensive while they are under patent protection and, guess what, patents expire! In fact, the system works exactly as we would want it to: Rich consumers repay the cost of drug development when a drug is first released, and then, when the patent expires, the price drops and the everyone benefits from the drug. A cursory search on the Internet found that from 2002-2007, "dozens of drugs with annual sales of over $35bn will come off patent." Price controls attacks a problem that does not really exist.

Two more health care items, in brief: Although I can respect Bush's personal ethical beliefs on stem cells, I fully agree with Kerry's position. And while I am sure that frivolous lawsuits do increase health care costs, I suspect that Bush is greatly overstating this case, and so his position doesn't carry much water with me.

Candidate Preference: Medium Kerry
Vote Impact: Medium




Economic Policy In my opinion (and I hate to disagree with Swarthmore's newest Nobel Prize winner, especially since he seems to hate Swarthmore as much as I do), Bush's economic policy has been pure folly. The tax cuts should have been aimed at the working and middle class, not the rich. Government spending should have been restrained, not permitted to spiral out of control. We should have focused on multilateral trade agreements, rather than bilateral ones. The agricultural subsidies hold hundreds of millions of Americans (as well as millions of farmers around the globe) hostage to the protectionism of a few farm state Senators. Kerry has to be better.

Candidate Preference: Strong Kerry
Vote Impact: Medium


Environmental Policy I loath large swaths of the environmental movement, which is home to far too many zealots whose ideology has come to approximate faith. There are a disturbing number of radicals who think that humanity itself is a blight, while even many of the moderates manifest a naive contempt for industrialization, high living standards, and population growth. It is easy to be scared by environmentalists who actually believe that India was an agrarian paradise before the IT industry and foreign investment ruined it.

And how infuriating it is to read on the BBC that a coalition of 17 non-profits had called "for urgent action to avert the threat [of global warming]...[because it] threatens to make the Millennium Development Goals unattainable." Everything that is wrong with self-serving NGOs and irrelevant international institutions is encapsulated in this one environmental tale. The Millennium Development Goals themselves are nothing more than empty UN grandstanding about halving global poverty by 2015. Global warming or not, there was never any chance that these goals were met - which of course everyone involved knew from the get-go.

Besides, while it is certainly probable that global warming will end up impacting "human development achievements," it certainly won't make a significant difference within the next 11 years. The environment isn't going to suddenly break down in 2014. These things are a bit more gradual than that. These NGOs are simply peddling fear to further their own agendas. They tortured their data until it showed that the sky was falling on the Millennium Development Goals, when the Goals themselves had never seen the light of day.

But - and this is a huge but - for all the bullshit espoused by environmentalists, that doesn't mean that environmental degradation isn't a real issue. Unlike the Bush Administration, I will not ignore the findings of the mainstream scientific community. Yes, it's true that the scientific community was wrong about "global cooling" in the 1970s, but you do not throw away science just because some hypotheses have been proven wrong. Einstein was wrong about quantum physics, but that does not mean that we throw away General Relativity.

In 200 years, world population has sextupled. We have gone from steam engines to nuclear power plants, from horses to cars, and from open windows to air conditioning. If you don't believe that this has had some impact on the environment, you are a fool. Of course, we don't know the impact with perfect precision - the environment is a hugely complex system, and we are still learning it. And maybe it will turn out that our impact is less than thought, or that the standard technological progress will by itself create cleaner technologies that resolve our environmental problems. But we can't afford to wait until we find that out. This is not a game. We are talking about the survival of the earth here. We must protect the environment. It's the conservative thing to do.

Candidate Preference: Strong Kerry
Vote Impact: Medium


Anti-Terrorism I separate anti-terrorism from foreign policy because there is a large amount of domestic policy involved in it, a fact that many on the right often seem to forget. I also do not like that all foreign policy seems to have been forced into the rubric of terrorism. There is more to the world than terrorism.

I believe that Kerry would do a better job of anti-terrorism. Bush opposed the Department of Homeland Security and then, when he finally consented to it, gave us color-coded terror warnings and security guards searching for tweezers. This is a joke. Anti-terrorism requires an attention to detail, a strong grasp of policy, and the ability to create working relationships between agencies, levels of government, and countries. Bush doesn't appear to have the focus, temperament, or intelligence to do this right. For all we can mock Kerry's irresolution and overthinking, his years in the Senate have clearly prepared him to handle the frustrating, but ultimately necessary, task of rationalizing and ordering our anti-terrorism efforts.

That being said, terrorism is far from my number one issue. It must be combatted, of course, but we must keep it in perspective. It has killed many, but not nearly as many as AIDS, famine, malaria, or war. It has hurt Israel, America, Spain, Indonesia, and Turkey, but it has not come close to destroying those countries. I am not trying to minimize terrorism - terrorism is evil, and terrorists are evil. But there have had no attacks on American soil since 9/11, and Israel has halted the suicide bombers. We cannot pursue anti-terrorism to the exclusion of everything else.

Candidate Preference: Strong Kerry
Vote Impact: Small


Foreign Policy It is hard now to see the good in Bush's foreign policy. Daily disasters in Iraq crowd out any other news. But I believe that with the perspective of distance, the history books may come to regard Bush as an extremely successful statesman.

Let me start, however, with Bush's negatives. His approach to terrorism is overly focused on state sponsors of terrorism, when Al Qaeda has shown us that modern terrorism is decentralized. For a man who invaded Iraq on the grounds of preventing the proliferation of WMDs, he seems strangely unconcerned about Russia's poorly secured nuclear weapons. Finally, Bush's tone-deaf and sometimes arrogant approach to foreign relations has seriously damaged the Atlantic alliance and hurt America's standing in the world.

These are failures. But they do not merit the hyperventilation that precedes them. Bush may underestimate the degree to which terrorism can exist independently of government support, but he understands the deeper truth, which is that, ultimately, terrorism springs from poisoned societies. He has not done enough to prevent nuclear proliferation, but he did stop Libya's nuclear program and uncover a massive nuclear technology trading network, two important successes.

Our international standing should concern us. America's declining prestige and the breakdown of the Atlantic alliance prevent us from leading the world. Since America does better when it is respected abroad, and the world does better with American leadership, everyone would be better served if Bush had Clinton's deft touch. Many of us feel this very personally. We want to be known for freedom, not for Abu Ghraib. We want to be welcomed as tourists and guests when abroad, rather than feel embarrassed when our foreign friends lambaste Bush's ignorance.

But we must be hard-headed, because we are not engaged in a popularity contest. Our goal is to make the world a better place, not to trade in appealing-sounding platitudes. Yes, the Atlantic alliance was critical to winning the Cold War, but the Soviet Union no longer exists. In the 13 years since, the alliance has rarely taken determined action. More often than not, it has been a house divided against itself, maintaining the pretense of unity by failing to rise above the lowest common denominator.

I identify five areas in which Bush's foreign policy has been successful. First, he has helped Israel to leave Gaza. No, Bush is not solely responsible - Hamas has done a lot to force Israel's departure. But without Bush's promise that Israel could keep settlement blocs in the West Bank and his guarantee against the right of return, Sharon would never have taken the risk on leaving Gaza. Bush's policy was essential, by allowing Sharon portray unilateral disengagement as a victory for Israel

For three decades, America has been trying to get Israel to dismantle its settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. Even 8 years of peacemaking under Clinton did not remove a single settlement. Bush is the first American president to make it happen. And weren't his actions the soul of diplomacy? He did not brandish arms or sanctions, but used suasion to bring Israel to take action that benefits America, Israel, and the Palestinians. The prospects for peace are better for this accomplishment.

And let me point out that it would have been very difficult for Europe to have brought Israel around to this conclusion. One of Israel's greatest fears - particularly since the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon - is that the Palestinians will interpret unilateral disengagements by Israel as a sign of weakness. European pressure on Israel to leave Gaza actually serves only to stiffen Israel's resolve not to show weakness by being bullied out of the region. That's why Bush's sweetened approach was absolutely necessary to Israel leaving Gaza.

Bush's North Korea policy is also far from the failure that it is often portrayed as. Yes, North Korea has continued its development of nuclear weapons. Sadly, neither Bush nor Clinton were able to stop this program, but I don't blame either of them - Kim Il Jong is the paranoid head of a Stalinist regime, and dissuading him from acquiring nuclear weapons is an essentially impossible task. Let's not forget that Kim Il Jong's father also pursued nuclear weapons, even during the Cold War when he had the Soviet Union's nuclear umbrella over him. North Korea's nuclear program has a long history and deep roots in the North Korean government.

And, of course, we can not invade North Korea. The repercussions would be horrible, both during the war, when Seoul would be levelled, and in its aftermath, when North Korean society would collapse, creating a humanitarian disaster of truly epic proportions.

What Bush has done is to wisely force North Korea into multilateral talks. Again, they have not, and will not, end North Korea's nuclear program. But what they have done is prevented war and encouraged a slight thaw in North Korea. Some will scoff at the argument that Bush "the warmonger" should be credited for any postive changes in North Korea's behavior, but these people forget that successful negotiations require both the carrot and the stick. During the bilateral negotiations during Clinton presidency, we offered the carrot, but forgot the stick. In Bush's multilateral negotiations, on the other hand, America brings the stick, South Korea offers the carrots, and Russia, Japan, and China provide reinforcement where necessary.

And North Korea is thawing. It is very gradual, of course, and it will take years before we can even begin to think about North Korea as a normal country. But North Korea is beginning to experiment with free markets, allow tourism, and even accept foreign investment. In other words, North Korea looks like it is following the same path that China and Vietnam have been taking. In the past few years, we have seen that this type of economic thaw has led to much greater political maturity in China's foreign policy, which is good for America and the whole world. Even North Korea, for its unbelievable isolation, can travel down this path. It is, in fact, our only hope for peace in the region. Again, Bush's diplomacy , disproves the idea that he is nothing but a beligerrent.

Of course, Bush knows when and how to use force as well. The global troop redeployment that he has initiated will improve America's ability to project power against today's enemies. The left has engaged in its usual handwringing, apparently believing that it is more important to subsidize Europe's defense than it is to improve our own military capabilities. Well, I'm sorry, but I have no I have no interest in underwriting Europe's defense even as they slash their own military budgets, I have no interest in bribing Germany's unions with military bases to win their sham appreciation, and I have no interest in keeping American forces arrayed against a Soviet army that no longer exists. Happily, Bush has no interest in these things either.

Bush has prepared our military for the type of conflicts we are likely to face in the future, and he used them masterfully in Afghanistan. I will let Charles Krauthammer speak for me:

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.

President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

But if Afghanistan was masterfully handled, Bush's stewardship of Iraq is open to question. Putting aside the issues of whether it was right to go into Iraq (about which I made my views abundantly clear before the war) and whether Bush lied about the war (which, if you believe, is going to make you vote against Bush no matter what I say), our occupation of Iraq has certainly been harrowing. Like many others, I have come to believe that Bush did not put enough troops in Iraq to maintain order, and that his postwar planning was negligent.

But I do not think that we have lost Iraq, and I do believe that the Bush Administration is learning from its mistakes. Partially, I believe this because so much of the bad news we hear from Iraq sounds like the bad news we heard from Afghanistan last year. I remember discussing whether the good news or the bad news represented the true storyline from Afghanistan. It wasn't clear, because there were so many conflicting data points and news stories to look at. But with the success of the recent elections, Karzai's growing power against the warlords, and Kabul's growing economy, it is becoming ever more clear that Afghanistan is a success story.

But our Afghan pessimists did not go away, they simply refocused their attention on Iraq. Now, far be it from me to belittle pessimists - we need pessimists as much as we need idealists. My problem is with those whose pessimism reflects their own political biases more than the reality on the ground. Mark Steyn perfectly captured this biased pessimism that multiplies every failure in Iraq or Afghanistan but divides every failure anywhere else:

"The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell," thundered George Galloway last month. "Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour."

As usual, George was a little off. The gates of hell are on the périphérique and it's 100 degrees at midnight in the pissoir on the Metro. To date, two US soldiers are believed to have succumbed to the heat in Iraq, whereas over 10,000 people have succumbed to it in France.

That would make George's brutal Iraqi summer about one five-thousandth as lethal as the brutal Gallic summer, which has killed more people than the brutal Afghan winter (now 23 months behind schedule), the brutal Iraqi summer and the searing heat of the Guantanamo torture camps combined and multiplied by a thousand...

And where are the Red Cross and Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and all the other noisy humanitarians? If 10,000 Iraqis had died of dysentery on George W Bush's watch, you'd never hear the end of it. A few weeks back, with three fatal cases of cholera, the Humanitarian Lobby was already shrieking that we stood on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Hell, Steyn is so good, let me add another from him:

Whatever happened to the "brutal Afghan winter"? It was "fast approaching" back in late September, and apparently it's still "fast approaching" today. "Winter is fast, fast approaching," reported ABC's Nightline on September 26th.

Two weeks on, New York's Daily News announced that, "realistically, U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options...

Yesterday, it was 55 and clear in Kandahar and Herat. Ghurian checked in at 55, with 62 predicted for tomorrow. Fifty-seven and sunny in Bost and Laskar, with 64 expected on Thursday. In Kabul, it was 55, though with the windchill factored in it was only -- let me see now -- 54.

Just under four months ago, when the doommongers first started alerting us to the "fast approaching" "brutal Afghan winter," it was 70 degrees and I was sitting here in shorts and T-shirt. Today, in my corner of Quebec, the daytime high is 21, the predicted overnight low is 5 degrees, and tomorrow we'll be lucky to hit 14.

In Toronto it's 28, New York 38. Overseas? Belfast and Glasgow report 46, London 44, Birmingham and Manchester 42. If those Afghan refugees clogging up the French end of the Channel Tunnel ever make it through to Dover, they face a gruelling battle for survival against the horrors of the brutal British winter.

Oh, and I can't resist one more:

"The head of the World Food Programme has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster" (Australian, April 11). MBITRW: No such disaster will occur, any more than it did during the mythical "brutal Afghan winter" and its attendant humanitarian scaremongering. ("The UN Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger." They didn't.)

(Please note that I do not agree with Steyn on Iraq, where he has been a polyanna, outrageously comparing Iraq to suburban England. But I still believe that he is exactly right about the outrageous claims of humanitarian disaster and social breakdown made by the left.)

The pervasive partisan bias that led us off the scent in Afghanistan does not appear to have weakened. How else can you explain the recent Lancet article - explicitly written, according to its author, to influence the American election - claiming that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war? The study's findings were immediately debunked by liberals and conservatives alike as 500% off the mark.

Well, if such bias can infect scientific journals, then surely it seeps into the coverage of our political journalists - 95% of whom self-identify as liberals - as well. And if this bias made Afghanistan seem like a disaster right up to the day that elections were successfully held, then isn't it possible that biased coverage and an excessive focus on the negative is also causing us to needlessly panic in Iraq? I believe this to be the case, and that the situation in Iraq is improving:

I blame Bush for making the mistakes that we are now finally correcting. Of course, reconstruction of a shattered society could never be easy, and could never be without its problems, even with the most perfect management. But Bush's management has been far from perfect, and ultimately responsibility for this war and for the reconstruction of Iraq lies with him.

Our confrontation with Al-Sadr was unnecessary in the first place, the result of our decision to try to arrest him on murder charges and shutting down his newspaper. Our initial attempts at reconstruction were failures because we did not have enough troops on the ground - Bush's fault - and because we placed inexperienced political hacks into the Coalition Provisional Authority - again Bush's fault. Economic shock therapy was an incredibly naive and risky decision made by conservative ideologues.

So I am not excusing Bush for his mistakes. But I do believe that Bush is correcting those mistakes. I do believe that Iraq is starting to move onto the right track. And I do believe that Bush is committed to making Iraq work. I do not trust Kerry's resolution on this matter.

I could be wrong. The Bush Administration may ultimately prove too arrogant to examine and correct its mistakes. The doomsayers who were so wrong about Afghanistan may prove to be all too correct about Iraq. Kerry might prove to be far steadier and wiser hand to steer the reconstruction of Iraq.

But if I am correct, and Iraq is on the right track, then Bush will have amassed a truly stupendous record in four years. If I told you four years ago that, by 2004, we would have:

Well, you would have thought I was dreaming a fantasy. These are not minor victories. Ending fundamentalism, fascism, and colonialism, and planting seeds of democracy, economic growth, and peace in its place - isn't that precisely the role that we want America to play in the world?

It is exactly the role that I want America to play in the world. We can wait four years to tackle the deficit, we can wait four years to tackle the environment, and we can wait four years to improve our health care. But if we do not continue Bush's foreign policy, I believe that we will lose an opportunity to do great and lasting good in the world. We can put the final nails in the coffin of totalitarianism, and move the Arab world away from the twin dead ends of authoritarianism and fundamentalism, and towards democracy and tolerance.

We must seize this opportunity. That is why I am voting to give George W. Bush four more years in office.