"[He is] decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent." Does anyone come to mind? Those were actually Winston Churchill's words describing the Hitler appeasers leading the British government prior to World War II. But it is an uncannily evocative description of John F. Kerry on the matter of Iraq in 2004.
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One of this year's candidates for president has a long history of policy reversals and rhetorical about-faces -- a zigzag trail that proves his willingness to massage positions and even switch sides when politically convenient.
The flip-flopper is President Bush. Over the past four years, he abandoned positions on issues such as how to regulate air pollution or whether states should be allowed to sanction same-sex marriage. He changed his mind about the merits of creating the Homeland Security Department, and made a major exception to his stance on free trade by agreeing to tariffs on steel. After resisting, the president yielded to pressure in supporting an independent commission to study policy failures preceding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush did the same with questions about whether he would allow his national security adviser to testify, or whether he would answer commissioners' questions for only an hour, or for as long they needed.
In 2000, Bush said he would include carbon dioxide on a list of air pollutants requiring federal oversight, a stand he abandoned within weeks of taking office. A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's spokesman said the president believed a homeland security department that Democrats proposed was "just not necessary." A year after that, Bush had switched course and was lashing some Democrats for not moving quickly enough to approve the agency.
While Bush professes himself a strong free-trader, most other free-trade proponents said he bent on principle in March 2002 when he ordered tariffs on imported steel -- a move that resonated politically in electorally important industrial states such as Pennsylvania. Facing an escalating global trade dispute, he lifted the tariffs at the end of last year.
Bush's position stays the same even as his reasons flip. The most famous examples involve taxes and Iraq. He supported tax cuts in 2000 because he said they were affordable in a time of large government surpluses, and once in power he supported them amid rising deficits because he said the economy needed stimulation. The president's principal rationale for the Iraq invasion was to end Baghdad's suspected mass-weapons program and links to international terrorism. In the absence of compelling evidence of these, the main post-invasion rationale has been to rescue Iraq from a tyrant and support democracy in the greater Middle East.
Not only does Dubya flip-flop, he makes really really bad decisions.
Among the clear-cut policy differences between President Bush and Senator John Kerry is each man's take on Social Security. In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Mr. Bush said, "We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account." Mr. Kerry, in his acceptance speech, said, "I will not privatize Social Security."
Mr. Kerry is right, and Mr. Bush is wrong. The president's plan would do the opposite of what Mr. Bush claims. It would weaken Social Security, hurt the economy and endanger many workers' retirements by pushing them into unreasonable risks in the stock market. If Mr. Bush were a broker peddling stocks to low-income, uninsured, indebted individuals like many of the Americans who would be included in his plan, he would be violating rules that require brokers to recommend only suitable investments.
When responsible politicians talk about "fixing" Social Security, what they generally mean is finding a way to guarantee a basic level of financial security for the elderly while closing the gap that will develop over time in the system's finances if nothing is done. Social Security's trustees plan for solvency over 75 years. Currently, the program is projected to come up short in 2042, when it will be able to pay about 70 percent of the promised benefits. That's a lot of money, but the gap can be bridged over the next 38 years with a package of modest reforms.
What Mr. Bush proposes - allowing workers to divert some of their Social Security taxes into personal investment accounts in exchange for agreeing in advance to receive a much-reduced guaranteed government benefit when they retire - would neither provide retirement security, nor take care of the solvency of the Social Security system. And it would wreak havoc with the overall federal budget.
So, like in with his foreign policy, his domestic policy isn't so hot, to say the least.
However Social Security is reformed, when younger workers retire, their benefits are likely to be smaller than the benefits promised to current retirees. But a partly privatized system would produce a cut that's likely to be bigger and an income that would be far less reliable. That's because the government benefit is cut more deeply under privatization, and how much you can actually accumulate in a personal account would depend on the stock market. Anyone who lived through the 1990's knows that investing in stocks can leave you with less than you started with.
The personal account idea also does nothing about another big reason that Social Security needs reforming: people are living longer. Unless the government mandates that people convert their personal accounts into private annuities, retirees are in danger of outliving their money, leaving them to survive on the meager government benefit. And they would lose the inflation protection built into government benefits, which is increasingly important the longer you live. Those most at risk of impoverishment are old women, who live three years longer than men on average and are far less likely to have private pensions.
By taking the financial risk out of growing old, Social Security has had remarkable results for society at large. Poverty among the elderly is now 10 percent, down from 30 percent in 1960. Like any sound insurance system, Social Security works by broadly pooling risks. It protects everyone because it includes everyone. Personal accounts move Social Security away from a comprehensive system to one in which it's increasingly every man for himself.
None of these arguments deter Mr. Bush and other advocates of personal accounts. For them, Social Security is primarily an ideological struggle. Social Security supports retirees by shifting income from the young to the old via taxes, and from the rich to the poor via the formula for calculating benefits. To Mr. Bush and his supporters, taxation and redistribution are anathema, and Social Security is an anticapitalist ploy to squelch initiative and growth. Those same arguments were leveled against Social Security when President Franklin Roosevelt established it in 1935, and when its constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937.
I would say that Dubya, and Republicans that support his Social Security position, are idiots. But I won't.
Dubya was a supporter of the war in Vietnam. For a while.
As he explained in his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House":
"My inclination was to support the government and the war until proven wrong, and that only came later, as I realized we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win."
How is it that he ultimately came to see the fiasco in Vietnam so clearly but remains so blind to the frighteningly similar realities of his own war in Iraq? Mr. Bush cannot explain our mission in Iraq and has nothing resembling an exit strategy, and his troops - hobbled by shortages of personnel and by potentially fatal American and Iraqi political considerations - are certainly not fighting to win.
As the situation in Iraq moves from bad to worse, the president, based on his public comments, seems to be edging further and further from reality.
The war effort has deteriorated so drastically that the administration is planning to take more than $3 billion earmarked for crucial reconstruction projects and shift them to security programs designed to ward off the increasingly deadly insurgency. A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the president contained no really good prospects for Iraq. The best-case scenario was a country with only tenuous stability. The worst potential outcome was civil war.
Even Republicans are starting to voice their concerns about the unfolding disaster. When asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" whether the U.S. was winning the war in Iraq, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said, "No, I don't think we're winning." He said the U.S. was "in deep trouble in Iraq" and that some "recalibration of policy" would be necessary to turn things around.
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said on "Fox News Sunday": "The situation has obviously been somewhat deteriorating, to say the least." He said "serious mistakes" have been made and that most of them "can be traced back to not having sufficient numbers of troops there."
The president said he is personally optimistic and he delivered an upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. Iraq, he said, is well on its way to being "secure, democratic, federal and free."
If you spend more than a little time immersed in the world according to Karl Rove, you'll find that words lose even the remotest connection to reality. They become nothing more than tools designed to achieve political ends. So it's not easy to decipher what the president believes about Iraq.
This is scary. With Americans, Iraqis and others dying horribly in the long dark night of this American-led war, the world needs more from the president of the United States than the fool's gold of his empty utterances.
At the moment there is no evidence the president understands anything about the war. He led the nation into it with false pretenses. He never mobilized sufficient numbers of troops. He seemed to believe the war was over in May 2003. And he seems not to know how to proceed now.
The tragic lesson of Vietnam is staring the president in the face. But he'll have to become better acquainted with the real world before he can even begin to learn from it.
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