Having been distracted for ten days from the mundane world, I return with fresh eyes and a sense of how true it is that a week is a long time in politics. The last time that I looked, the Presidential election was supposed to be John Kerry’s to lose. While I wasn’t looking closely, he seems to have lost it, in quite a few senses of that phrase.
In the airport waiting area this afternoon, I heard the candidate rumble, in a voice that sounded 80 years old and terminally misanthropic, “George Bush is raiding the Social Security trust fund”, that last shibboleth of the desperate Democratic demagogue. Senator Kerry isn’t an ignoramus. He knows as well as I that the “trust fund” is a ledger of IOU’s that accumulate at precisely the same rate, regardless of the size of the federal deficit, and serve merely as an accounting device, not a store of value (a point that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere).
Moaning about this illusory fund is the classic dodge to avoid confronting the fact that changing demographics have upset the assumptions on which the present Social Security system was founded. It was easy to maintain a defined benefit, pay-as-you-go scheme when the average worker stayed in the labor force for 40 years and lived in retirement for 15. The combination of earlier retirement and longer life spans makes the arrangement increasingly burdensome. We haven’t reached the state of affairs in old Europe, where taxes to pay for public pensions run as high as 40 percent of payroll in some countries, but that is the direction in which we are heading. The only preventatives are economic expansion, which makes Social Security more affordable, or transition to a system that relies on saving rather than income transfers, so that retirees don’t need to draw on taxes paid by their children and grandchildren. A perpetually booming economy would be ideal, but we can’t count on it. President Bush has proposed, under his Chestertonian “ownership society” rubric, the first steps toward the surer alternative. It tells us a lot that his opponent has responded not with reasoned analysis and solutions of his own, but with an effort to “scare the seniors”.
Looking more broadly at the campaign, Democrats seem to be divided into two groups. There are those who want to fan Bush Hatred and anti-war sentiment in the hope that some allegation or event – rumors about George W. Bush’s youthful irresponsibility, bad news from Iraq, new terrorist attacks – will decisively swing public sentiment. Susan Estrich has been the most prominently shrill, but far from the only, advocate of that strategy.
Others prefer to hunker down, take no risks and lose gracefully. They will be content if John Kerry winds up like Bob Dole, fearing that, if he adopts the Estrich route, he will be more like George McGovern. An unexciting election, focused on domestic issues that don’t really concern voters in the midst of a war, will limit the Democrats’ loss of Congressional seats and governorships while laying the groundwork for a comeback after the terrorist threat recedes. Bill Clinton, who urged that course from his hospital bed (and deserves credit for caring about the future of his party at a moment when his own was in doubt), knows that the aftermath of a victorious war is the most likely time for democracies to change their political course. Liberalism in general and the Democratic Party in particular had a splendid opportunity after the end of the Cold War. Mr. Clinton presumably realizes that it was bungled, largely owing to his own indecisiveness and egotism. He sees a second chance after the War on Terror and doubtless wants to preserve it for another Clinton.
John Kerry, characteristically, takes both sides of the argument. With “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time”, he recruits for the Angry Left. Simultaneously, he devotes sound bites to outsourcing, budget deficits, tax policy and other issues that lower the temperature of the national debate. I make no claims to high ability as a political strategist, but isn’t he following the path to assured defeat? He isn’t flailing vigorously enough to convince 50-plus percent of the electorate that George W. Bush is an evil compared to which all others are lesser. Nor is he letting national security fade from the public’s consciousness in order to enhance the prospect that domestic concerns will dominate the voting. Rather, he reminds us all that his own “plan” for the war amounts to hoping that France, Russia and Germany will bail America out – hardly a promising approach when recent events have illuminated their incapacity to protect their own interests. He also highlights a fatal question: If John Kerry doesn’t know, even in hindsight, how he would have fought the war so far, how can we trust him to conduct it in the unknown future?
There remains the remote, but not unreal possibility that eight weeks of attritional warfare in the Democratic candidate’s behalf by a nearly unanimous media establishment will push him to victory. Today we see a reprise of stories about young George Bush’s laxness in meeting his commitments during his last year of Air National Guard duty, at a time when the decreasing American presence in Vietnam left the Guard with a surplus of pilots and no particular interest in men near the end of their terms. Whether Lieutenant Bush slacked when the slacking was easy is of no significance – he has never insisted that we should vote for him as a reward for this military service – but reporters can always hope to stir up embers of hostility with a lukewarm version of an AWOL smear. I’m confident that we will also hear more about how much George drank, whether he ever used cocaine, what went wrong with his early business
If a week is a long time, eight are more like a millennium. Perhaps the race will alter so vastly between now and November that these reflections will be shown up as naïve and ridiculous. For today, though, I have no hesitation about saying that the man whose actions will not decide the outcome of this election is John Forbes Kerry.
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