November 4, 2004
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November 4, 2004
EDITORIAL
The Next President Bush
resident George W. Bush has put to rest all the ghosts of his father's one-term administration. He won a solid re-election victory on Tuesday night. The country remains, of course, divided. It is the point of a national election to illuminate divisions - these days in stark blue and red. The 49 percent of the voting public who wanted a different outcome are disappointed, and in some cases crushed and frightened about the future of the country. Their first job is to accept the will of the majority. Then it will be time for everyone - Mr. Bush, the victorious Republicans and the people who opposed them - to decide what to do next.
Mr. Bush can either try for four years of the same, or look to his place in history. Yesterday, he offered at least some hope that he was choosing the higher road. "A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," he told the Kerry voters. Experience suggests that these conversions are short-lived. Four years ago, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, when Mr. Bush lost the popular vote and seemed to be in a position where consensus-seeking was a given, White House officials thought about taking a compromise centrist route for "about 30 seconds" before grabbing their old partisan agenda and running with it. In his speech yesterday, Mr. Cheney stressed the president's mandate. Given the way Mr. Cheney behaved during the first term, it's unnerving to imagine what he may have in mind now.
Obviously, the losers in this election are going to be far more eager to see Mr. Bush take a different, more moderate route this time than the winners - especially the triumphalist Congressional Republican leaders. But there's a yearning out there, in red states as well as blue, for a government that works better and with less partisanship. Many of the voters who support Mr. Bush are just as unhappy about economic uncertainties, lost jobs and the number of people who have no health insurance as the people who voted for Mr. Kerry. Vast majorities of Americans want to keep the federal deficit under control, make Social Security financially sound, protect benefits like Medicare and Medicaid, and be sure that there's adequate spending on homeland security.
Mr. Bush can address that national yearning - and leave a magnificent legacy to the country - but such an effort will require bipartisan action. Except for his education initiative, the president's domestic agenda thus far has been the product of the Republicans alone, and it has been a mess that has made nobody very happy. Tax cuts are easy to pass, even irresponsible ones. But spending cuts are not, and the president's own party refused to make them happen. Instead, Republican leaders bought the passage of the bills they needed by piling on masses of unnecessary, irresponsible pork. A truly heavy political lift, like fixing Medicare or restraining the deficit, requires national attention and the kind of political support that can come only if both parties feel they have something to gain from success.
For Mr. Bush's opponents, one of the great disappointments of this election was the fact that the war in Iraq had little impact on the outcome. The nation is worried about whether the Iraq conflict is going well, but many of the people who wonder whether the president made the wrong choices on that had other interests when they went to the polls: a preference for the president's personality, memories of 9/11 and concern over social issues like gay marriage. While Iraq did not in the end hurt the president's re-election campaign, it has not gone away. Although members of his team campaigned as if Iraq was going very well indeed, they know better. Finding a way out of the morass in Iraq must be the work of all Americans, and on this issue, the president has a real obligation to reach out to the other party. While Democrats may be quietly hoping that Mr. Bush runs into so many problems in the new term that the country will turn back to them in the next election, no partisans are so eager for political gain that they want to see Iraq plunged into an inferno of civil war and terrorism.
Tuesday's vote came as a particular shock in places like Europe, where much of the population simply couldn't conceive that people would want to keep Mr. Bush in power. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair made two important points to America's angry allies when he spoke about the results. One was that this is the right time for Mr. Bush to reach out to America's traditional allies - and time for the rest of the world to accept that he will be around for the next four years and must be dealt with as the American people's choice. The other is that the critical goal of stability in the Arab world will never be achieved unless the United States throws itself back into the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr. Blair is one Bush supporter who deserves all the election rewards he can get, and this is the one he's desperate for.
For many anti-Bush voters, the wounds of this rancorous campaign will be raw for a long time, and the idea of joining hands with the president will be a nonstarter. And 49 percent of the public expects those in the loyal opposition to continue taking principled stands against the administration. The challenge for them will be to pick their fights wisely.
To us, the central domestic issue of the next term will be the Supreme Court, and Mr. Bush's nomination to replace the seriously ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The president could pick a respected jurist of centrist temperament with a genuine belief in judicial restraint, or he could pick someone in the ultra-extreme school of Justice Antonin Scalia. Mr. Bush's social conservative base will be pressing in one direction, and will no doubt remind him that the election turned heavily on social issues, particularly opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
The evidence in the polling data that these social issues were crucial to Mr. Bush's win - and that the bulk of those infrequent voters who stood in line for hours to vote were evangelicals, not people against the war - is pretty inescapable. But we were struck by the broad majority of voters who told pollsters that they favored a middle approach on these issues: providing gay couples with the right to have some kind of civil unions, and guaranteeing women the right to legal abortions in most, if not all, cases. This page will never give up our commitment to women's right to reproductive choice, as well as full civil rights for people of all sexual orientations. But a leader who was prepared to make political sacrifices in order to stake a claim to that middle ground could be laying the foundation for a new national consensus that might finally bring the nation's social wars to an end.
Mr. Bush could be that leader. He could be the uniter he promised to be, then failed to become, four years ago. He could put an end to a period in national history when too many people go to the polls on Election Day convinced that victory for the other side would mean disaster for the nation. A lot of voters felt that way on Tuesday, and now Mr. Bush has the chance to show them they were wrong.
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November 4, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Day the Enlightenment Went Out
By GARRY WILLS
vanston, Ill.
This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.
This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting
President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).
The results bring to mind a visit the Dalai Lama made to Chicago not long ago. I was one of the people deputized to ask him questions on the stage at the Field Museum. He met with the interrogators beforehand and asked us to give him challenging questions, since he is too often greeted with deference or flattery.
The only one I could think of was: "If you could return to your country, what would you do to change it?" He said that he would disestablish his religion, since "America is the proper model." I later asked him if a pluralist society were possible without the Enlightenment. "Ah," he said. "That's the problem." He seemed to envy America its Enlightenment heritage.
Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?
America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed "a candid world," as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.
The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.
Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.
It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.
President Bush promised in 2000 that he would lead a humble country, be a uniter not a divider, that he would make conservatism compassionate. He did not need to make such false promises this time. He was re-elected precisely by being a divider, pitting the reddest aspects of the red states against the blue nearly half of the nation. In this, he is very far from Ronald Reagan, who was amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect.
In his victory speech yesterday, President Bush indicated that he would "reach out to the whole nation," including those who voted for
John Kerry. But even if he wanted to be more conciliatory now, the constituency to which he owes his victory is not a yielding one. He must give them what they want on things like judicial appointments. His helpers are also his keepers.
The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment.
Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author of "St. Augustine's Conversion."
November 4, 2004
ALLIES
Hungary Joins Others in Pulling Troops From Iraq
By JUDY DEMPSEY,
International Herald Tribune
nternational Herald Tribune
BERLIN, Nov. 3 - Hungary announced Wednesday that it would withdraw its 300 troops from Iraq, becoming the latest country in United States-led coalition to bow to public pressure and prepare to bring its soldiers home.
Speaking at a ceremony for the end of military conscription, the newly appointed prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, said Hungary was obliged to stay until the Iraqi elections scheduled for January, but would withdraw the troops by March.
"To stay longer is an impossibility," said Mr. Gyurcsany (pronounced JOR-chahn-ee).
The United States had persuaded 32 countries to provide 22,000 soldiers as part of the multinational force established to stabilize postwar Iraq. But over the last few months, a number of countries have withdrawn, some citing the cost but others concerned about security, and many governments face increasing public opposition to the war.
Spain's Socialist government withdrew its 1,300 troops after it swept into power last March, reversing the commitment of the prior center-right government of Prime Minister José María Aznar. The Dominican Republic withdrew 302 soldiers, Nicaragua 115 and Honduras 370. The Philippines withdrew its 51 in July, a month early, after insurgents took hostage a Filipino truck driver working for a Saudi company. Norway withdrew 155 military engineers, keeping only 15 staff members to help NATO train and equip the Iraqi security forces.
Two large contributors to the international force - Britain, with 12,000 troops, and Italy, with more than 3,100 - have insisted they will not withdraw. But Poland, the fourth-largest contributor, with 2,400 troops, says it intends to withdraw by the end of next year, and the Netherlands, with 1,400 troops, said this week that the latest rotation of troops would be its last contribution to Iraq.
New Zealand is withdrawing its 60 engineers and Thailand said it wanted to bring home its 450 troops. Singapore has reduced its contingent to 33, from 191; Moldova has trimmed its force to 12, from 42. On Wednesday Bulgaria's Defense Ministry said it would reduce its 483 troops to 430 next month, Reuters reported.
Iraq's interim government had asked Hungary to keep its troops in the country for another year. But Peter Matyuc, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, said in a statement that the government would ask Parliament on Monday to extend the troops' mandate by only three months.
"By March 31, 2005, we will bring our troops back from Iraq," Mr. Gyurcsany said. "From then on, the existence of a stable democratic and safe Iraq has to be created by different means, above all political means.''
In a letter signed in January 2003, Hungary joined ranks with Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Britain in endorsing the Bush administration's willingness to use force to disarm Iraq, a move that deepened Europe's divisions over Iraq. A ninth country, Slovakia, signed the letter later. That first letter was followed by another signed by 10 more countries.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld added to the divisions by describing those governments that opposed military intervention - notably France and Germany - as Old Europe and those who supported Washington as New Europe.
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