Out of Cheese

Now for the most important part of the ballot.

Congress: Mike Honda. I haven’t heard anything about him or his opponent, so I suppose this isn’t much of a race.

Senate: Barbara Boxer. Like many Californians I prefer Dianne Feinstein, but I like Boxer and I’d vastly prefer to have her in the Senate than Bill Jones. That said, I feel sorry for Jones, who expected to run a competitive campaign but has been so hamstrung financially that he won’t end up running a single TV ad. I read somewhere that when he decided to run he thought that he’d be able to fund a fair amount of his campaign with proceeds from the sale of a company he owns or had interest in. The sale hasn’t happened yet, so he never got the money, so he could never prove that he could compete with Boxer in fundraising early on, so he couldn’t raise enough money from other sources to make the race competitive. Competitive elections are a sign of a good democracy; it’s a shame we didn’t have one here.

President: John Kerry. Normally when I look at candidates for an office I have a reasonably good idea why people support the candidate I’m not voting for. I might not agree with their reasons or those reasons aren’t enough to sway me to their side, but I understand them. This time around it’s tough. I understand why certain single-issue voters will vote for George Bush — if you’re pro-life, for example, and use that as a litmus test over all else, you’re not going to vote for Kerry. But short of that, I just don’t get it. Bush is a Republican, but he’s ballooned the federal deficit, dramatically increased government spending, expanded federal control over education, and embarked on a nation-building quest far more ambitious than anything Bill Clinton ever contemplated. These are not Republican positions.

It’s clear that neither Bush nor Kerry has a great plan for getting the U.S. out of Iraq. That’s not because they’re idiots; rather, that’s because it’s a very hard problem to solve if you also want to keep Iraq from being a terrorist haven, breaking down into civil war, or becoming a stridently anti-U.S. nation. Having put ourselves into this mess, escaping from it with any one of those three still possible would be inexcusable. But given the relatively limited differences between the candidates on the topic, the question isn’t who can get us out of the mess the best. Instead, it’s a question of who got us into it in the first place. That’s easy to answer. It’s exactly the kind of thing Bush criticized the Clinton Administration for four years ago (about Somalia and Haiti), only far more expensive, much riskier, and at a much higher cost in both American and civilian lives.

Another way to look at this is a twist on a standard presidential-year question. Pundits like to say that presidential elections hinge on whether people think they’re better off now than they were four years ago. But with this election, the question perhaps should be rephrased as whether you think you’re safer now than you were four years ago. That’s not quite fair, of course, so let’s rephrase it yet again as whether you’re safer now than you were in the weeks after September 11th, 2001.

I was flying cross-country on that day. As we rushed towards the ground, landing as fast as we could, I thought there might be a bomb on the plane and feared for my life. When I got off the flight and saw the news, I thought seriously about joining the military to fight these people who believed they could threaten my country’s way of life. That’s why when we invaded Afghanistan, the world backed us. It was the right thing to do. But we’ve lost all of that support by invading Iraq, which neither had weapons of mass destruction nor connections to Al Qaeda. In the process, we’ve caused millions more people to hate us, created thousands of new terrorists, and harmed relationships with longtime allies. With the insurgency in Iraq resulting in staunch anti-American feelings around the world, I’m no longer solely worried about terrorism from Al Qaeda. As a result, though we’ve certainly made progress in the fight against Al Qaeda over the past three years, I don’t feel any safer now than I did then. In this changed world, it’s the president’s job to make Americans feel secure. George Bush has fallen short.

Those aren’t the only reasons why I’m voting for John Kerry, but they’re a good summary. I can’t guarantee that he’ll be a good president. It’s impossible to predict that one way or another for any candidate. I can be confident, though, that he could hardly be worse than what we’ve had for the past four years.