LET US pretend, for a moment, that there are certain qualities necessary for an effective president upon which you may neutrally base your vote this Nov. 2, irrespective of party affiliation. While this idea is probably too much to swallow for most, it can illuminate some truths about this campaign of which we should not lose sight. What might some of these neutral qualities be? One of the most basic qualities necessary for an effective presidency is a skill for effective communication. The presidency is, after all, at its heart, a dialogue between the people, the president and Congress and America and the world.
Another quality, and this may be more controversial, is a certain pragmatism, a capacity for admitting mistakes, a willingness to look toward the national interest above the interests of ideology or interest groups when the situation so requires it. Upon an examination of the current contenders for the presidency against this frame of reference, our current president falls far short of what should be expected of the person holding his office, and there are objective reasons as to why President Bush should be voted out of office.
The distinction between the candidates may be best illustrated by the first principle I have laid out: The president should be an effective communicator. Anyone who watched the presidential debates should be able to see that the performance of President Bush fell far short of what we should expect of someone entrusted with an office that requires communication to such a high degree.
Bush, in short, was terrible.
We all know Bush's proclivity for stumbling over words, as it seemingly requires great effort for Bush to pronounce many words a 58-year old, Ivy League-educated man should have no trouble with. Bush recognizes this, as he must, but has attempted to turn it into an object of humor -- a quality of endearment. For example, Bush joked during the last presidential debate that his wife "speaks English a lot better than I do." We are supposed to say, "How adorable it is that our president speaks in this painfully inarticulate manner," as if he were America's lovable, if slightly slow, uncle. This is an embarrassing image for our president to have to assume.
We are also told to reflect on Bush's supposed improvement over the course of the debates. However, Bush's tendency to garble words carries over, it is clear, to a general awkwardness and often an inability to express ideas coherently. During the presidential debates, Bush laughed at inappropriate times and often gave rambling, incoherent responses to questions. Bush, to be sure, is occasionally capable of overcoming these tendencies and even achieving eloquence. But Bush not only failed his party with his painful performance during the debates, but his entire debate performance reflects poorly on his office. Kerry, by contrast, was ready with a sharp, coherent response to every question asked of him. Is that not a neutral principle upon which to base your vote?
Additionally, it is clear that on many issues Bush's devotion to his ideology and to his own past pronouncements on issues outweigh any sort of rational assessment of public policy questions. Emerson famously said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and so it is with the president's Iraq policy. Having been thoroughly discredited on his claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Bush has developed a new argument as to why U.S. military intervention in Iraq was necessary for American security: Saddam's mere desire to lift the sanctions on Iraq, and his ability to bribe European leaders to support this, constituted a sufficient basis for war. Now, there certainly were some soft-brained liberals in the late 1990s who wished to lift the sanctions on Iraq. But the possibility that the United States would have been somehow coerced (by Europe!) into lifting the sanctions on Iraq is an utterly remote one, and that this should have been a basis for a war shows a lack of touch with reality. Yet Bush blithely brushes aside all criticism, without a care in the world.
I am frank to say that I am deeply troubled by the prospect of a Kerry presidency. I fear he will value international approval of the United States as an end in itself, as opposed to taking a pragmatic view of international relations. I fear Kerry's judicial appointments. And I fear many aspects of his health care plan which, contrary to his repeated assertions, will be a government program. But I believe that we can do better than Bush's inarticulateness and bizarre distance from reality, and that there are neutral principles upon which to cast an anti-Bush ballot on Election Day.
Noah Peters is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.
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