Flash player is required to view weather conditions. Download

EDITORIAL

Bush failed; Kerry offers new start

The nation confronts a failed presidency.

George W. Bush has done serious harm with his most important foreign and domestic thrusts, and he has managed this democracy all wrong.

John Kerry offers the fresh beginning the nation needs. He is greatly different in his view of the presidency. He has an incomparably more impressive biography, full of commitment, sacrifice and seriousness of purpose. By virtue of experience and ability, he is ready for this job.

President Bush has launched an optional, ill-conceived, ill-planned war. If the reasons for it were that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and important ties to al-Qaida, then the reasons have been discredited.

If the reason was that 9/11 showed that the Mideast must be transformed to stem terrorism, then President Bush has not made the commitment needed to achieve such a monumental goal. For the first time in history, we are fighting a major war while cutting taxes and without a draft. The president has ignored the views of military leaders with Mideast experience about how difficult the aftermath of war would be.

History will marvel that anybody undertook to change the world so cheaply.

Mr. Bush brought the nation together and led it well immediately after 9/11. Then he frittered away our unity.

The president has been so wrong about so much that's so important: wrong about whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; wrong in seeing meaningful ties between al-Qaida and Iraq; wrong about expecting Americans to be welcomed as liberators; wrong in saying long ago that "in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Today nobody knows whether Iraq is salvageable. And nobody has any reason to believe the president on the subject.

He talks about the need for decisiveness, consistency and resolve, to the exclusion of wisdom, insight, sophistication, adaptability and realism.

He has left the nation more isolated, bogged down in war and no safer as a result.

Bush invites cynicism

His failings in the domestic realm are just as stark. In 2000, the government faced unprecedented budget surpluses of $100 billion. Now it has unprecedented deficits, at least in dollar amounts, about $400 billion.

It's not entirely the president's fault. Responding after 9/11 was going to be expensive. The downturn in the economy was going to eat into the surpluses. But he proceeded as if he were trying to make the deficits as big as possible: He cut taxes as much as he could get Congress to agree to; he went to war without our allies sharing the cost; he expanded Medicare while doing nothing serious to cut spending.

Mr. Bush has invited cynicism about his motives. He campaigned in 2000 for a tax cut, saying that the economy was doing so well that the government had too much money. Then, when the economy turned, he enacted a tax cut on the grounds that it was doing so poorly he had to spur it. Then he consciously aimed most of the cuts at the wealthy. Then he did it again.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that about two-thirds of the Bush cuts go to households in the top fifth of earners, with average incomes of about $200,000. Indeed, one-third goes to the top 1 percent.

To put the government so much in hock to aid people who are so little in need is scandalous.

Set aside specific issues. From the beginning, President Bush has had a wrongheaded approach to national leadership. In 2001, he behaved as if he had a great mandate for change, notwithstanding that he had lost the popular vote and that the nation's political fabric was strained by the Florida debacle. He was intensely combative, rigidly conservative and partisan. When the nation needed a healer, George W. Bush was not there for it. He didn't even know what was needed. Now the nation is far more divided than it should be.

Kerry can lead

The presidential debates have suggested something that John Kerry's military colleagues have been attesting to: that he is at his best when under the gun.

He is impressively intelligent and knowledgeable. He has served soberly in the Senate for two decades. He's not the wild-eyed liberal that the Bush campaign has invented. The fact that he has much support from top retired generals and admirals belies the charge that he is weak on defense.

Having focused on foreign policy since his service in Vietnam, he knows more about the world than George W. Bush. He rightly favored U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Kosovo. He knows the Iraq war has been a diversion from the war on terror, and he has always known it could be.

He is too optimistic about bringing in support from other countries. But, surely, giving the outside world a new president to deal with could only help.

Yes, his record is blemished by some "flip-flops." Only political expediency can explain his vote against spending the $87 billion necessary for the immediate post-war effort in Iraq. He bowed to the pressure of the Democratic primaries, where any sign of support for the war might have proved fatal.

But in casting that vote, he certainly did not endanger the troops. The troops were going to get their stuff.

Moreover, John Kerry did not invent political flip-flops. They are part of politics, part of George W. Bush, too. The president has gone back and forth on whether the war on terrorism can be won. He opposed "nation-building," then moved it from the edge of American policy to the center.

Kerry right on issues

In trying to sell the notion that his challenger habitually supports tax increases, the president employs the cheap trick of counting some bills many times (using various procedural votes and amendments against him).

But, yes, Sen. Kerry has been leery of net tax cuts in times of high deficits. And he did support President Bill Clinton's inclusion of a tax increase (mainly on the wealthy) in a broader attack on the deficit. That is to his credit. Nobody who supported the successful Clinton economic and fiscal policies should be on the defensive against attacks by the far less successful Bush administration.

Sen. Kerry thinks the country needs domestic policies that are more focused on the needs of those who have the biggest problems. He wants to repeal the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $200,000, without touching those for the middle class. On that, he is right (though his promise of still other middle-class cuts is ill-advised).

He wants to achieve universal health care for children, and he is right.

John Kerry is a credible, prepared, likely choice for a nation that should expect more sophistication, more skill, less failure and more focus on the problems of the American mainstream than George W. Bush has offered.