I know you've all been waiting. Here it is, my official endorsement.
John Kerry for President.
There.
I know it's traditional to back up an endorsement with a lengthy essay explaining the reasons behind it, but mine will be relatively short. To wit:
George Bush is a terrible, dangerous, scary man who intends to dismantle everything good about this country. John Kerry has no such intentions.
Shouldn't that be enough?
For a much more thorough, though lengthy, but still worth reading, endorsement-- one that receives my full endorsement-- please see The Nation's endorsement.
In a bit under 4,000 words, the editors of The Nation lay out the progressive case for voting for Kerry. He's not perfect by any stretch, and there are many serious reasons for disagreeing with him, but no less than the future of American democracy may be at stake in this election.
Some excerpts:
On Kerry's qualifications
But while we have sharp differences with Kerry, we believe he has the qualities required for the presidency. He is more than "anybody but Bush." His instincts are decent. He is a man of high intelligence, deep knowledge and great resolve. At times in his life--notably, when he opposed the Vietnam War--he has shown exemplary courage. He respects the law. He believes in cooperation with other countries and has the inclination and ability to bring America out of its current isolation and back into the family of nations. As a senator, he demonstrated concern for social welfare and has backed this up with enlightened policy proposals. He has supported civil rights and labor rights and opposed racism. He has supported the rights of women, including the right to an abortion. He has been an advocate of nuclear arms control and opposed the almost incomprehensibly provocative nuclear policies of the Bush Administration. He would rescind the most unfair of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. He would be a friend of the environment and return the United States to the negotiations on global warming.
On the Danger of a True Bush Mandate
In 2000 candidate Bush, who lost the popular contest by half a million votes and was put into the presidency by a Supreme Court decision, failed to receive a popular mandate. However, he embarked on a radical, right-wing course anyway, compounding the insult to democracy. Yet it is so far only the government that has asserted global imperial ambition, waged aggressive war on false pretexts, condoned torture, strengthened corporate influence over politics, turned its back on the natural environment and spurned global public opinion. If Bush is now elected, then a national majority--a far weightier thing--will stand behind these things. The consequences would be profound. A crippled presidency would begin to walk on two legs. At home, public affirmation would turn the record of the first term, now having been inspected and approved by the people, into the starting point for an accelerated movement in the same general direction. Bush has already put through a new round of federal budget-wrecking corporate tax cuts, called for new repressive legislation in a Patriot II act and clearly announced his desire to "democratize" not just Iraq but the entire Middle East. Abroad, such a vote would deepen and confirm the United States' separation from the rest of the world, enclosing it in an eccentric and dangerous mini-climate of ignorance and lies.
On the other hand, if Bush is defeated, his entire presidency will acquire the aspect of an aberration, a mistake that has been corrected, and the American people will be able to say: We never accepted Bushism. We rejected the brutality, the propaganda, the misbegotten wars, the imperial arrogance. And we never, ever chose George W. Bush to be President of the United States.
On What's At Stake
The overthrow of law by legal-sounding phrases penned in secret; the laws of the Republic falling before the demands of empire; nullification of any check or balance on the President; suspension of fundamental human rights; a tangle of contradictory bureaucratic memos; blind imperial ambition leading to catastrophic war; mayhem and failure in that war unfolding behind a shimmering screen of high-sounding phrases extolling the spread of democracy; panicked resort to criminal emergency measures; torture and other outrages against human dignity hidden behind a battery of euphemisms ("sleep adjustment," "setting the conditions" for interrogation); the pre-organized rejection of any accountability, including that imposed by the articles of the US criminal code: Are these not the main features we might expect to see writ large if a full-scale collapse of the Constitution of the United States were to come?
On Why Electing Kerry is The Most Important Thing We Can Do
Yet it remains true that of all the things Americans can now do to support democracy, the election of John Kerry is the most important. A Kerry presidency would seriously disrupt the concentration of power at the heart of the present danger. He might still try to "win" the Iraq war but would be less likely to wage future wars. His appointments to the Supreme Court would stop the Court's slide into unchecked, one-sided partisanship. His control of the bully pulpit would be a powerful counterforce to the right-wing propaganda that now all but drowns out other voices in the news media. His control of the agencies of the executive branch would halt, or at least retard, their merger with corporate America. More important, the simple structural fact that the Democrats are the other party would create a counterbalance to the right-wing power that predominates elsewhere in the system. The Democrats, including Kerry, have been disappointing champions of their namesake, democracy, yet the culture of their party is still an improvement over that of the Republicans. The Democrats are reluctant imperialists; the Republicans are imperialists by avocation. The Democratic Party generally wants to defend civil liberties and does so when it dares; the Republicans, with honorable exceptions, apparently would sweep them aside. The Democrats prefer social justice, however weakly they fight for it; the Republicans would give every dollar they can find to the rich. The Democrats are inclined to limit corporate power; the Republicans are corporate power.
Full text of The Nation's endorsement of Kerry.
