August 2, 2004
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August 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
All the Pretty Words
By BOB HERBERT
hey were able to sustain the eloquence for most of the week, which had to be a surprise. Bill Clinton told us that "strength and wisdom are not opposing values." Barack Obama called America "a magical place." John Kerry said, "The high road may be harder, but it leads to a better place."
There was no shortage of pretty words and promises at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last week. But there's a big difference between the rigidly crafted reality at the heart of a political campaign and the reality of the rest of the world.
"Practical politics," said Henry Adams, "consists in ignoring facts."
The facts facing the United States as
George W. Bush and John Kerry joust for the presidency are too grim to be honestly discussed on the stump. No one wants to tell cheering potential voters that the nation has sunk so deep into a hole that it will take decades to extricate it. So the candidates are trying to outdo one another in expressions of sunny optimism.
President Bush and Dick Cheney deride "the same old pessimism" of the Democrats. Mr. Kerry counters by saying to the president, "Let's be optimists, not just opponents."
The voters deserve better in an era of overwhelming problems. Consider Iraq. Neither the president nor Mr. Kerry knows what to do about this terrible misadventure that has cost more than 900 American and thousands of innocent Iraqi lives. The war is draining the U.S. Treasury and has made the Middle East more, not less, unstable. Dreams of democracy taking root in the garden of Baghdad and then spreading like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East have given way to the awful reality of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings.
You won't hear straight talk about this all-important matter from either camp. And you can forget the chatter about an exit strategy for American troops. There isn't one.
Or consider Afghanistan. Not long ago American officials were claiming a decisive victory and the Bush administration was trumpeting the liberation of Afghan women from the clutches of the Taliban. But the proclamations of success were premature. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar are nowhere to be found. Warlords and insurgents are in control of much of the country and the growth industry is the opium trade. The extraordinarily courageous group Doctors Without Borders is packing its bags and withdrawing from Afghanistan after 24 years because five of its staff members were murdered and the government will not bring the killers to justice. On Friday the U.S. government warned American citizens against traveling to Afghanistan because of the danger of being kidnapped or killed.
Some victory.
Employment here in America is another topic on which the presidential candidates will not tell the voters the cold, hard truth. There are not nearly enough jobs available for the millions upon millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans who want and desperately need gainful employment. The population in need of jobs is expanding daily and no one has a viable plan for accommodating it. Families are being squeezed like Florida oranges as good jobs with good benefits - health insurance, paid vacations and retirement security - are going the way of the afternoon newspaper and baseball double-headers.
These are incredibly difficult issues and an honest search for solutions can only come from a sustained effort by the broadest array of America's brightest and wisest men and women. What the U.S. really needs is leadership that could marshal that effort.
Unfortunately, we've become a society addicted to the fantasy of a quick fix. We want our solutions encompassed in a sound bite. We want our leaders to manipulate reality to our liking.
So there was President Bush in a hard-hit industrial region of Ohio over the weekend telling voters, "The economy is strong and it's getting stronger." And the Kerry-Edwards team is assuring one and all that "help is on the way."
The voters may deserve better, but there's a real question about whether they want better. It may well be that candidates can't tell voters the truth and still win. If that's so, then democracy American-style may be a lot more dysfunctional than even the last four years has indicated.
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August 2, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What Would Machiavelli Do?
By ROBERT WRIGHT
ohn Kerry, tough-talking war hero, cut an impressive figure at last week's convention, maybe impressive enough to threaten the Republicans' time-honored dominance of the manliness issue - that is, national security. But you can already hear the Republican reply taking shape: O.K., you've shown us your muscles, but where's the beef? What exactly is your strategy for the war on terrorism?
It's a tricky question. National security challenges rarely lend themselves to the programmatic laundry lists that are tossed at domestic problems, and global terrorism may be the most complex national security challenge ever. That's why the few specifics Mr. Kerry did offer on the terrorism front were underwhelming (he's against closing fire stations, for example). Still, there is a way for Mr. Kerry and
John Edwards to frame an antiterrorism strategy that, though not programmatic, would be genuinely illuminating and politically powerful, cutting to the core of President Bush's greatest national security failure. And they may be closer to this formula than they realize, for it fits naturally into the rhetorical framework the Democrats built at their convention.
Mr. Kerry rightly stressed how thoroughly Mr. Bush has lowered the world's opinion of the United States. In elaborating, he said that America can't fight a war on terrorism without allies. That's true, but it doesn't by itself underscore the penchant for complex thought that Mr. Kerry attributed to himself in his acceptance speech. Even Mr. Bush now seems to realize that antagonizing allies is a bad idea. In fact, since the dawn of recorded history, just about everyone has recognized this.
What is new, and uniquely challenging, about the war on terrorism is that hatred of America well beyond the bounds of its alliance now imperils national security. Fervent anti-Americanism among Muslims is the wellspring of terrorism, regardless of whether they live in countries whose governments cooperate with us. Yet this is a part of world opinion Mr. Kerry didn't talk about.
His reticence is understandable. Fretting about Muslim opinion sounds a little like worrying that your enemy may not like you (even though, of course, the Muslims you're worrying about are the ones who haven't signed on with the enemy but may be leaning that way). So when Democrats talk about Muslim hatred, they're just begging to be called wimps by all those right-wing bloggers who have Machiavelli's dictum - better to be feared than loved - tattooed across their chests.
But, however steep the rhetorical challenge posed by the fact that real men don't need love, the Democrats have already gone a ways toward meeting it, and they've done so on the strength of a single word: respect. As anyone who tuned into the convention for more than a few minutes is probably aware, the Democrats want an America that is "respected in the world." And even if Mr. Kerry's concrete elaborations on this theme were about the importance of allies, respect is the perfect entrée to the issue of Muslim hatred - a way to confront Machiavelli's dichotomy without winding up on the girlie-man side of it.
We don't need to be loved in the Muslim world, but we need to be respected. And even real men want respect. After all, strength can command respect. In fact, instilling fear can help instill respect. It's just that fear isn't enough. (This could be the epitaph of Mr. Bush's foreign policy: Apparently fear wasn't enough.)
For a nation to be thoroughly respected, the perception of its strength needs to be matched by a perception of its goodness. It helps to be thought of as just, generous, conscientious, mindful of the opinion of others, even a little humble. In lots of little ways, Mr. Bush has given the world the impression that we're not these things.
Mr. Kerry touched on some of this, noting that global leadership means inspiring more than fear. But he didn't carry the respect theme explicitly into the context of Muslim opinion.
Doing so wouldn't by itself amount to a strategy for the war on terrorism. But it would add a new dimension to the Democrats' emerging critique of the president's foreign policy - and a potent one. The plummeting regard for America in Muslim nations like Indonesia over the last few years is a well-documented fact. If voters can see the link between this and the security of their children - see that for every million Muslims who hate America, one will be willing to fly an airplane into a shopping mall - then President Bush will have a lot of explaining to do. And existing criticisms of his policies will acquire new force. (Given how unpopular the Iraq war was known to be in the Muslim world, wasn't the lack of postwar planning beyond inexcusable?)
The Kerry-Edwards ticket might also profit from the fact that much of this Muslim antipathy seems to be focused on President Bush personally. (His unfavorability ratings in Morocco and Jordan are 90 percent and 96 percent, respectively.) Changing administrations - "rebranding" America - could help give us a fresh start.
Thoroughly addressing the issue of Muslim hatred would pose some risks. Mr. Kerry would have to stress that he's willing to antagonize Muslims - or anyone else - when essential American principles or obligations are involved. And even that assurance wouldn't wholly buffer him from right-wing flak.
But the very difficulty of taking on this issue is part of its virtue. Mr. Kerry's biggest manhood problem has nothing to do with Vietnam or the war on terrorism. Rather, it's the sense that he never attacks an issue unflinchingly - that he waffles on the tough ones, that his only constancy lies in the wordiness of his bromides. Maybe what he needs is to take a sensitive, complicated problem, lay down a core conviction, and stick with it through thick and thin.
By the way, Machiavelli might approve. Though he favored fear over love, he said that being feared and loved is the best situation of all. And failing that, a leader at least "ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred." If George W. Bush is too macho for Machiavelli, then surely John Kerry can make the case that Mr. Bush is too macho for America.
Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny."
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