Politics 101, Part 2

There's a new batch of polls out that show two different faces of the election. Most have Bush with a lead of about 5 point, including leads in major swing states such as Florida and Ohio. Several other polls have the race closer. I still lean to the idea that the election is up for grabs, though Bush seems a great deal stronger than he did two months ago. This week's question- Laura asks "What did you think of this memo that CBS got ahold of, purporting to be about Bush missing a medical exam, etc., etc.? Fake or not?" My gut feeling is that the memos, at least in the form received by CBS are not original documents. This of course is very bad for CBS News and, though association, bad for the Kerry campaign in a way. With that said, I found some of the statements from the Bush camp rather intriguing in that there were no REAL denials, only conditional ones. First Lady Laura Bush herself, in her first public statements on the issue, made an equivocation in her 'denials'. She stated that the documents were "more than likely forgeries". This statements is a far cry from "I know for sure none of what is stated in the purported documents is true". The latter would be a firm denial, the former makes it seem like while these documents 'could' be forgeries, there's enough of a possibility that these issues happened. This isn't the first time Bush has made statements of equivocation. In the 2000 campaign, when questions arose whether Bush had used cocaine, Bush gave extremely legalistic answers about the time frame in question. Here is an excerpt from Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right"- At first during the campaign Bush refused on principle to answer questions about cocaine. Then, because he was applying for a federal job (president) he had to fill out a form that asked if had [sic] used illegal drugs in the past seven years. Bush voluntarily told the press he was able to answer no. A clever reporter asked whether he could have given the same answer when his father was president and federal forms asked about drug use for the prior fifteen years. "Uh, let's see here...Yes, I could have," Bush said after a pause. Then, when asked again if he had ever used cocaine, Bush refused to give an answer". Now, I don't know about you, but to me, if one boils this exchange down to the bottom line, Bush is actually answering that whether he used cocaine depends on 'when' you ask him...in other words, I guess, it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. So did Bush use his father's influence to get into the National Guard and therefore get out of going to Vietnam? Most probably. Did he then disappear for a time while assigned to an Alabama base? Maybe What is clear is that he lost his flying status because he failed to take the required physical. Why? Well to me there's only three possible reasons. 1) He forgot. 2) He ignored it. 3) He didn't want to. None of these answers is a good one. But then again none of these to me are of vital importance. When answers go far afield, perhaps it is up to us, the electorate, to ask the proper questions. David Broder had a great piece in the Washington Post about this very subject. Here's an excerpt that really hits home. Broder asks us to ponder the situation in the spring of 2005, a few months after the new president is inaugurated, and where we may have wasted our time in Swift Boats and Alabama National Guard Units in the early 70s: What remains of real importance? Foremost is Iraq. Americans will still be fighting and dying there. Whether or not some approximation of an Iraqi election has been held, Americans will still be the only real security force facing an insurgency that condemns us as occupiers. That is what preoccupies the president the day after his inauguration. And in retrospect we realize that when we were choosing between George Bush and John Kerry, they should have been pressed much harder to explain what they will do now that we are stuck in an expanding guerrilla war in Iraq. They both had checkered histories on Iraq. Bush had taken the country to war on what turned out to be false premises and appeared oblivious for far too long to the challenges of a lengthy aftermath. Kerry's history was too incoherent for ready explanation -- an on-again, off-again endorsement and criticism of Bush policy that gave almost no clue to his convictions. We should have insisted that they clarify what they would do now -- not what they wish they had done back then. Iraq and its attendant problems should have been the only subject of the first televised debate. And we should not have let them shift to airy generalizations about being tough on terrorism. Terrorism is a real threat, but the argument about who is "tougher on terrorism" is a mug's game -- and it's not answered by pictures of a guy standing in the pit of what was once the World Trade Center or carrying a rifle in Vietnam. The second thing that remains important is Vladimir Putin -- and he is a powerful symbol. Because of Iraq, the United States' relationships with other countries around the world have been bent out of shape or suffered from neglect. If it is true, as is manifestly the case, that the United States has a vital interest in nurturing democracy in Russia, both capitalism and democracy in China, and cooperative relations with Europe -- and open trade with all of them -- then those relations need work. We should have asked Bush more about why he thought so many of them had gone sour, and we should have asked both Bush and Kerry how they planned to set them right. And the jump in Medicare premiums is important -- not only in its immediate impact on seniors' budgets, but as a reminder of our head-in-the-sand attitude toward the oncoming fiscal collision between the health care and retirement costs of the baby boomers, on one side, and our staggering budget deficits on the other. We let both Kerry and Bush dangle a string of new domestic goodies before our eyes, plus tax cuts for everybody (Bush) or almost everybody (Kerry), and never got a straight answer from either one on how to pay for the boomers' massively expensive retirement years. That would have been a good subject for a second debate. Then maybe we'd have known what we were doing with our votes.