John Kerry for President: The CleverBlog endorsement

(Geneva, Switz.) - Long timers readers of this page know that we of the CleverBlog^(R) editorial staff have no qualms expressing our political views in writing on matters of dire importance and great human impact (see for instance N.P. Armitage et al. Superconducting Gap Anisotropy in Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4: Results from Photoemission). That's why we here at the CleverBlog^(R) editorial board are happy to strongly and emphatically endorse John Kerry for President.

We have been impressed with John Kerry ever since we first saw him interviewed on Charlie Rose last fall and thought to ourselves "what a thoughtful interesting guy, too bad that screaming Dean fellow is going to get the Dem nod." Fortunately, that didn't happen and after getting to know him better over the last year we are still impressed with John Kerry both as a individual and his potential to be a great president.

He hasn't been perfect. And sure he's made us crazy at times ... like that day at the Grand Canyon when he took Bush's obvious political bait and said he would have voted to invade Iraq even if he knew then what he knows now about WMDs. (He wouldn't have, because noone would have. The votes only happened because the case had been made that Iraq was an immediate and overt threat). Despite these blips, nevertheless, we have been impressed with his willingness to look at changing circumstances and access to new information and not be afraid to change course. His detrators call this flip-flopping. We feel that this is an adult and mature reality-based approach to public policy and life in general.

However .... In the interest of full-disclosure we here at the CleverBlog^(R) will freely admit that the thing we find most attactive about John Kerry is that he is "not-George-Bush".

The Bush 43 presidency has been a disaster. He came into office, after questionable elections goings-on in Florida, pledging to be uniter not a divider. Although offended by his affected faux-country Texas slang, ties to corporate crookery, self-professed anti-intellectualism, and his "soak-the-poor-while-I-clear-brush-in-Crawford-and-pretend-to-be-a- regular-guy"-attitude we at the CleverBlog^(R) really thought 'how bad it could it be?' Bad.

Although suffering from the lack of a strong public mandate, we had clues early on that the Bushies had an extreme agenda somewhat at odds with mainstream attitudes of foreign policy (remember that downed recon plane in China... those were cute times) and fiscal responsibility. This agenda though was somewhat stymied by moderation in their own party and overall public opinion. 9/11 changed all of that. He took his new effective mandate from 9/11 and the sympathy of the world and ran with it. As our collegues at the NY Times have written, he found himself with the"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."

What has been most amazing about the Bush presidency is not the explicit disasters of policy themselves, but instead the recalcitrance to changing course even in the face of overwhelming evidence that what is being done is not working. There has been a continueing obsession with various solutions as cure alls for all problems no matter the changing circumstances.

-Economy doing well. "Taxpayer, you've been overcharged. You get a tax cut."

-Economy not doing well. "Economy needs a boost. You get a tax cut."

-Iraq has WMD. "We need to invade Iraq".

-Oops. No WMD, but we had to take action after we were attacked. "It was right to invade Iraq".

-Ooops. No connections to Al-Queda, but a secular democracy in Iraq will be an freedom beacon to the rest of the Middle East. "It was right to invade Iraq"

-Iraq is a slow-motion disaster and the second we look away the country is going to rip apart into a civil war. "It was good to invade Iraq"

-"Ummm ... there world is better off without Saddam and uhhh... It was right to invade Iraq?"

It may be just the bubble he lives in and Bush may be seeing the world through rose-garden colored glasses for those reasons. The rest of us though live in a reality-based world. One size fits all solutions to complex nuanced problems don't work. Calls to "stay the course" should not be heeded if the course is taking you off a cliff.

So... so far not so good. What would a second term Bush presidency look like? Bush's refusal to admit to any mistakes doesn't bode well to pulling ourselves up out of the current muck. But what else? Adam Cohen recently waxed philosphic on a coming storm in a Bush 2nd term:

"Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear."

Lest you think he's being hyberbolic read on....

"It hardly sounds like a winning platform, and of course President Bush isn't openly espousing these positions. But he did say in his last campaign that his favorite Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and the nominations he has made to the lower courts bear that out. Justices Scalia and Thomas are often called "conservative," but that does not begin to capture their philosophies. Both vehemently reject many of the core tenets of modern constitutional law.

When the court struck down Texas' "Homosexual Conduct" law last year, holding that the police violated John Lawrence's right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and Thomas sided with the police.

A Louisiana inmate sued after he was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison guards while a supervisor looked on. The court ruled that the beating, which left the inmate with a swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate, violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But Justices Scalia and Thomas insisted that the Eighth Amendment was not violated by the "insignificant" harm the inmate suffered.

A Scalia-Thomas court would dismantle the wall between church and state. Justice Thomas gave an indication of just how much in his opinion in a case upholding Ohio's school voucher program. He suggested, despite many Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, that the First Amendment prohibition on establishing a religion may not apply to the states. If it doesn't, the states could adopt particular religions, and use tax money to proselytize for them."

It goes on. Any conservative of a libertarian bent (less government is better, which is at least a consistent world view IMHO) should be in horror at world presided over by Bush judicial apointees and John "I have a major terrorist arrest to announce" Ashcroft. I don't think many people who are planning to vote for 43 this 1st Tuesday in Nov. have really thought through exactly how reactionary this junta is and what their ideal world looks like.

So on to John Kerry. First and foremost, we feel that this is a good and moral man who seeks out opinions that don't necessarily rubberstamp his own. He is commited to international cooperation, is strong on the environment, and not extremely vested with corporate lobbies. We have impressed with his large knowledge base and wide and varied interests. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction and social services reform. He favors protecting social security. And although the press and the Bush campaign have pilloried him for it, we agree with his opinion that one can't win a "War on Terror" as it -"Terror" - is a tactic not the enemy itself. As such, the fight against such tactics is better recast as a criminal matter. We also don't forget that he owns and rides a Serrotta.

So with 4 days to go, we are confident. The Bush campaign claims the wind is at their backs and they'll be victorious. There may be something on Bush's back, but it is not the wind. The polls show a statistical dead heat, but we think the aggressive get out the vote efforts by Dems will carry the day. Fingers crossed.

We like John Kerry and enthusiastically endorse him for president of the United States of America... Here's to hoping for a presidency built on more than a tinfoil-hat foreign and domestic policies.

-your CleverBlog^(R) editorial staff