January 16, 2004
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January 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Masters of Deception
By BOB HERBERT
t was snowing and the temperature was headed toward single digits when I left the hotel on Park Avenue Wednesday night. A doorman flagged a cab and I climbed in. I'd just finished an interview with Al Gore and it was hard to shake the melancholy feeling that the man who should be president was spending a stormy night in Midtown Manhattan while the momentous world events he should be shaping were careering in all sorts of dangerous directions.
The former vice president was in town to give a speech on the Bush administration's environmental policies, which he basically described as an exercise in wholesale environmental destruction. Instead of caving in to such special interests as the coal, oil and chemical industries (as the administration has done), Mr. Gore said that the U.S. should be leading the effort to rein in pollution and get control of the potentially devastating problem of global warming.
During the interview, he spoke passionately about the environment and opened his laptop computer to give what amounted to a spontaneous seminar on global warming. He noted that most of the glaciers in the world are melting at an alarming rate and added wryly, "Glaciers don't give a damn about politics. They just reflect reality."
The environmental speech, which he delivered at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side yesterday afternoon, is the latest in a series of formal critiques of the administration that Mr. Gore has delivered in recent months. Previous subjects have been national security, economic policy and civil liberties.
The theater, including the balcony, was packed. People had waited in a long line in the cold and snow to pass through metal detectors and be allowed in. The crowd, enthusiastic from the very beginning, included families with small children, elderly men and women and students. When Mr. Gore strode onto the stage he was greeted with a long standing ovation.
At one point, he told his audience: "In preparing this series of speeches, I have noticed a troubling pattern that characterizes the Bush-Cheney administration's approach to almost all issues. In almost every policy area, the administration's consistent goal has been to eliminate any constraints on their exercise of raw power, whether by law, regulation, alliance or treaty. And in the process, they have in each case caused America to be seen by the other nations of the world as showing disdain for the international community."
Amid cheers, he made it clear that the broad interests of the American public are consistently betrayed by the policies and practices of
President Bush and his administration. "They devise their policies with as much secrecy as possible," he said, "and in close cooperation with the most powerful special interests that have a monetary stake in what happens. In each case, the public interest is not only ignored, but actively undermined. In each case, they devote considerable attention to a clever strategy of deception that appears designed to prevent the American people from discerning what it is they are actually doing.
"Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative."
Our history has shown that we can and should be better than this. Mr. Gore leaned forward during Wednesday night's interview and ticked off some of the nation's greatest successes — the simultaneous victories in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, the Marshall Plan, the eradication of polio, the civil rights movement, the space program and the victory over Communism in the cold war. There is no reason to expect less, he said, as the country faces its biggest challenges today.
The fates dealt Mr. Gore and the United States a weird hand in 2000. He got the most votes but the other guy became president. And the country, its Treasury looted and its most pressing needs deliberately ignored, has been rolling backward ever since.
"This is insanity," said Mr. Gore, referring to the administration's handling of the environment. But his speech made it clear that he could just as easily have applied that sentiment to the full range of Bush-Cheney policies. History will not be kind to the chicanery that passes for governing in the Bush II administration.
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January 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who Gets It?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
arlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."
In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and
Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.
Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of
John Kerry's hair.
But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.
The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.
What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness — shared, we now know, by General Clark — to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" — as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents — a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.)
But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.
One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration — a much larger group than you might think — are afraid to give money to Democrats.
Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.
Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.
So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.
That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical — which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.
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