From a New York Times editorial, 10/17/04:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/opinion/17sun1.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position

John Kerry for President


Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built
more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own
candidacy.

But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than
just an alternative to the status quo.

We like what we've seen.

He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive,
not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear
thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in
by that two-minute debate light.

He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions
change.

And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and
then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public
service, from the war to a series of elected offices.

He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.

.

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's
disastrous tenure.

Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the
presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he
would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the
center.

Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a
history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general.

He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after
another.

He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda
including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on
embryonic stem cell research.

He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of
Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for
students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated
not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war
against taxing the wealthy.

As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social
Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for
programs the president himself had backed.

No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher
standards on local school systems without providing enough money to
meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans
and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the
environment.

Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the
Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition.

Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the
ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President *****
Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post.

The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards
across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to
wilderness protection.

.

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept.
11, 2001.

With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an
unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice.

The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation
was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his
inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered
circumstances.

Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for
his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill.

He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for
America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the
nation's ports still goes uninspected.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous
international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general
put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the
hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a
Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and
inept management.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to
lawyers or family members.

Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice
Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh"
conditions.

Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right
to challenge their confinement.

The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old
international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of
prisoners taken during wartime.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational
arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless
braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who,
while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means.

The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism
prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the
American people freely gave in 2001.

Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for
so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual
incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs
from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation
that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights
could behave that way.

.

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed
closer to zealotry than mere policy.

He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an
antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working
relationship with Al Qaeda.

His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to
getting nuclear weapons.

It was based on two pieces of evidence.

One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from
Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery.

The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the
administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted
by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by
administration investigators and international vetting.

Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on
anyway.

None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable
for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their
mismanagement of the war that followed.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by
a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort.

Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of
democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is
now radioactive in the Muslim world.

Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been
taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive
American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.

.

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term,
particularly regarding the Supreme Court.

The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry.

Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice
Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation
technique, is now a federal appeals court judge.

Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas,
has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and
compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped
Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects
he dislikes, like increased farm aid.

If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will
know the fiscal recklessness will continue.

Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a
financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and
higher long-term interest rates.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the
American right without any of the advantages.

We get the radical goals but not the efficient management.

The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act
has been heavily politicized and inept.

The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts
and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual
threats.

Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the
administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed
forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere
else in the world.

.

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better.

He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to
reach across the aisle.

We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he
would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that
he understands the concept of separation of church and state.

We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of
the people who currently do without.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of
ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil
dependency.

He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction.

In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations
between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the
way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the
laundering of drug and terror money.

He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world
affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in
my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both
for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually
wasted.

Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role,
and time and again he chose the wrong course.

We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do
better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith.

A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up
governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver.

A disaster can upend the best-laid plans.

All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the
candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their
general character.

It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John
Kerry for president.

__________________________________________________________

Harry

From a New York Times editorial, 10/17/04:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/opinion/17sun1.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position

John Kerry for President