The 47th District Chair's viewpoints

The following are excerpted by permission of Tyler Page, the 47th District chair. The first is a response he wrote to a young man who withdrew from consideration as a PCO because he'd decided Bush would make a better leader. The second is a wrap-up of the debate between Congressman Adam Smith and professional scold Michael Medved. I'm including them here because I thought Tyler's views were worth reading:

"This election challenges the voters to choose between two very different approaches to our nation's future. We must do this in the context of a violent, dangerous and unstable world, it's true. This makes it all the more important that we choose leadership that can make the most of all of America's inherent strengths. We need a government based on honesty and inclusiveness. We must have a President capable of seeing things as they really are and approaching his task with an open mind and a creative spirit.

John Kerry will be that kind of President. George W. Bush is not and would not be in a second term.

This is the thing. We do not have to speculate about how George Bush would do the job -- the record is there to see.

After actually coming in second in his election, he promised to be a "uniter" and "reduce the partisan tone" in Washington. Instead he and his party have relentlessly pursued an extremist agenda and used every trick in the book to consolidate power.

He promised to be a friend of education and "leave no child behind." Instead he imposes massive new burdens on our public schools and refuses to pay for them. His Secretary of Education refers to the largest teacher's organization in America as a "terrorist organization." He piously endorses "affirmatively taking action" to deal with racial inequity but fights even the most moderate affirmative action programs all the way to the Supreme Court.

When the policies of the Clinton Administration presented him with a projected five trillion dollar surplus, he devised a huge tax cut skewed heavily toward the very rich and pronounced it "exactly right." When the economic situation changed dramatically and the surplus changed into multi-trillion dollar deficit, he continued to push even more tax cuts for the wealthy few and warns that we can't raise taxes on the rich because "they have accountants."

And of course, when confronted with a new era of terrorist violence against our country, he committed hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of American troops to invade and occupy Iraq rather than concentrate on the clear and present danger elsewhere. To sell this course of action, he created a powerful myth of an Iraq armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction, in league with every terrorist and poised to strike at any moment -- every bit of which has proven in the aftermath to be exaggerated or just untrue.

Even worse, having chosen war, he failed to heed the expertise of his own Pentagon and State Department about the reality of occupation. He has admitted that he "miscalculated" the intensity of the insurgent resistance, but not that he was seduced by the triumphalist fantasies of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest. This "miscalculation" has cost the lives of hundreds of American troops as they scramble to improvise armor for their vehicles and hunker down against a population which was supposed to welcome them with "flowers and sweets."

Even worse, he sent to rule the conquered Iraq a succession of bumbling bureaucrats who made a succession of lousy choices, from disbanding the Iraqi Army and banning tens of thousands of workers for political reasons, to issuing enormous non-bid contracts to Cheney's old company. Every one of these steps has led the very people we are supposed to be winning over that America is just there to steal their country, and helped recruit thousands of new insurgents in country and across the Islamic world. We have fertilized the very movement we desperately need to stifle, and Americans are paying the price every day.

George W. Bush styles himself as a strong leader. In this he has the incomparable asset of the most powerful economy and military, which he inherited whole from Bill Clinton. With such power at hand and the outrage and fear of the American people it is not hard to be "strong."

But he was not confident enough in that strength to be self-restrained, to work with the world instead of battling with it to break a stale standoff with Saddam Hussein in the way that his own father did a decade earlier. Instead he found excuses to abandon restraint. He was not strong enough to challenge those who promised him a shiny new American empire based in standoff weapons and a hair trigger.

And he has not been strong with his own party. He pledged to support the renewal of the assault weapons ban but has sat passively as his fellow Republicans in the House let it die. He has acquiesced in enormous deficit spending as, under Republican rule, the federal government is growing again even as they cut the legs out from revenues with reckless tax cuts.

George W. Bush styles himself as decisive. It is easy to be decisive when you are surrounded by sycophants who dismiss their critics as "appeasers" or worse, when your view of the real word is filtered through "news summaries" and eager-to-please CIA directors.

But he has not been decisive when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Soon after his election he expressed his opinion that there wasn't much for America to do there, and his Administration has lived up to this low standard every since.

He has not been decisive with North Korea, where he seems to be content to trade insults with what really is perhaps the most dangerous regime in the world. He has not been decisive in dealing with genocide in Sudan, in part because, thanks to the continuing occupation in Iraq, we are both overextended and as unwelcome as we are needed.

He has not been decisive with the looming crisis in Medicare and Social Security. He continues to drag around old ideas about commissions and privatizing these funds, even as he heaps on expensive new subsidies for the drug companies and the prospects that younger people such as yourself will ever see their benefits continue to fade. Meanwhile in three and a half years he has done nothing whatever about the gather crisis in health insurance except to falsely blame those who go to court for justice against malpractice or insurance fraud.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Can John Kerry do better? Of course he can. It will not be easy, for these are difficult times made worse than they should be by the current Administration. But he will succeed on our behalf where George W. Bush has failed, because he will bring four key principles to the job:

* America's leadership in world security can and must be restored. Whether as a person or a nation we are not leading if others are not with us. Bribery, insults and bullying are not the foundation of a great nation's foreign policy and do not make us safer. Reaching out and bringing into the hard work of diplomacy all those who will benefit from a safer world is the key. This is no empty dream -- it was the bedrock of our foreign policy from before WWII until 2001, and we need it back. We are not at war with the rest of the world and we should be building lasting alliances, not shucking them to prove we don't have to listen to anyone.

* America's great entrepreneurial spirit and wealth must be harnessed to meet the looming economic challenges of the coming years, and the regulatory, taxation and spending priorities of the federal government can help. One example: we have reached the end of the era of cheap oil. What will replace it? Who will profit from the transition? Who will safeguard American families? This is a central question of government policy; we must not leave it to the next generation of Enrons.

* America's greatest resource is its people, but our investment in them has stumbled. Even as globalization and outsourcing disrupts families and communities, soaring health care and educational costs are leaving millions of our people worse off. The median living standard for Americans has actually started to drop as income and wealth becomes more concentrated. We can and must reinforce and reform the systems which give average Americans the opportunity to better themselves.

* Finally, we must accept our responsibility to manage our money and pay for what we need. Never before has our nation struggled with war while simultaneously telling the rich they are off the hook. Bill Clinton showed that with a combination of stable taxes and restraint on spending we could have broadbased prosperity and balanced budgets, and we can do it again.

Throughout his life John Kerry has shown himself to be a man of reason and principle, of courage and patience. He will bring the decades of experience with Washington DC and the world that the incumbent so sorely lacks, and will bring a respect for science, diversity and openness back to the White House.

John Kerry is not a perfect man or a perfect candidate, and we don't need him to be. A President who is in alignment with the best of America -- our ideals, our optimism, our uniquely open society -- will find in himself and in us the strength and resolve to restore the American dream, not just for our own people but our friends around the world who desperately want us back.

John Kerry will be that President. I hope you will reconsider and support him."

and here's the wrap-up of the debate:

"Thursday evening. Radio station KTTH hosted a debate between Congressman Adam Smith and Sandeep Kaushik, political correspondent for The Stranger, and radio host Michael Medved and Mike McKay, state vice chairman of Bush-Cheney '04. It was rather strange in that Michael Medved acted as both moderator and participant which let him talk about twice as much as anyone else.

The highlights:
Adam was explaining that a cornerstone of John Kerry's plan is to rebuild our international relationships and get the rest of the world more on board with the important work of stabilizing Iraq and fighting international terrorism. He noted that this is a critical difference with George Bush, who seems to prefer to go it alone. Medved jumped all over Adam on this, claiming that it was not only defaming Bush but also shameful to disparage the "coalition of the willing." But he went on to repeat the canard that John Kerry wouldn't defend America without a "permission slip" from the UN and would allow our foreign policy to be "held hostage" by France and Germany. Adam responded that it was interesting that Medved first denies that Bush is a unilaterist and then defends unilateralism!

Medved (playing moderator) asked McKay why Bush had failed to be a "uniter, not a divider." McKay insisted that Buch has been surprised by the partisanship he found when he got to Washington but that he would do a better job "if the election sends more Republicans to Congress!" Sandeep noted that in the year following 9/11 Karl Rove counseled Republicans to use that event as a partisan battering ram, and they haven't stopped since.

* They took about six questions from the floor -- I got to ask one! Speaking to McKay, I noted that the Administration is demanding full reauthorization of the Patriot Act, despite the concerns of many civil libertarians and prominent conservatives such as Sen. Larry Craig and Bob Barr. I also observed that quite a few of John Ashcroft's prize terror prosecutions have gone south lately, with prosecutorial misconduct, stinging court rebukes on due process, abandoned prosecutions and the rest. As a former federal prosecutor, I asked, are you happy with this Administration's conduct of the legal fight on terrorism?

His answer, of course, was You Bet. He offered a blanket endorsement of every provision of the Patriot Act, and while he acknowledged some missteps said there were many, many more successes.

Adam rebutted first, noting that the Patriot Act was passed at a moment of crisis, but one thing they had done was to "sunset" some of the provisions so there would be a second look at a calmer time, and discussed some of the changes which should be made. Sandeep observed that efforts to deny American citizens any protection of the law are deeply troubling to say the least.

It was a useful experience to be among adamant Bush supporters. Clearly they draw strength and confidence from the self-delusion preached by their candidate. We need to deliver to undecided voters both our challenge to Bush's wrong choices and our own confidence in a better future with Kerry and Edwards at the helm."