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Tuesday, July 13 2004
WHAT IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO: You dont often find an entire election summarized in one or two sentences, and youre even less likely to find it on a Sunday morning political talk show. But here it is, from Meet the Press:
Tim Russert: Do you see Bush being re-elected?
William F. Buckley: I don't think that Bush has done anything disqualifying him. He had a lousy intelligence system, manifestly, but nobody thinks that he acted capriciously. I think if we all had been told exactly what he was told, it's pretty logical that we would have proceeded to do what he did.
Ron Brownstein: Look, I think that the Senate Intelligence Committee report does frame what I believe is the central issue in this campaign. And I differ a little with Bill Buckley because I don't think that all Americans agree that any president would have made this decision based on this information. I think that goes to the crux of the choice that they face.
Brownstein is exactly right, and contrary to what he and other liberals in the press might think, its the single biggest weakness in John Kerrys candidacy.
What Brownstein is saying, and what is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to politics over the last year is that no Democrat with only one or two exceptions in the entire elected party would have looked at the exact same intelligence Bush looked at with respect to Iraq after 9/11 and done much of anything - even though they agreed with Bush at the time that Hussein was a serious threat.
Indeed, far more damning than Bush acting on evidence almost everyone in the world believed to be true is to look at a hypothetical in reverse: What if all of the WMD intelligence on Iraq had been spot on and John Kerry were President at the time and chose not to act because of pressure from his party or the objections of allies? I think most Americans would find that prospect deeply disturbing.
As John Podhoretz ably points out this morning, Kerry let the cat out of the bag on '60 Minutes' Sunday night that the hypothetical I've just described might not be so hypothetical after all. Kerry believed Saddam had weapons, said so, voted in favor of taking action against him, and now thinks the whole thing was a big fat mistake.
Democrats know how terribly weak this makes their party and their candidate look, which is why they must now convince voters that the action Bush took in invading Iraq wasn't based on good faith and a desire to protect the country but on lies and deceit. Simply put, it's the only way Democrats can get the public to swallow the idea that after September 11, 2001 doing nothing with respect to Iraq (and thus leaving Saddam in power despite of our belief that he had WMD, supported terrorists, etc.) was the right thing to do.
And so the full court press is on to use the Senate Intelligence Committee report to paint Bush as a liar (here, here,and here) rather than a victim of bad intelligence. The media certainly seem to be doing their part, chipping in for the cause. Whether the public buys it or not is another matter.
But getting back to the original point, Ron Brownstein is absolutely on the mark: the basic question of this election is whether a majority of voters want to reelect a President who, based on the best information he had at the time, saw a threat and was willing to take action to deal with it, or not. Everything else is just noise. - T. Bevan 1:36 pm
