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This election is about leadership

    By Jack Grant

Pennywit has two posts that partially describe my dilemma on deciding how to vote this year. Despite the extensive quotes below, I suggest you read both posts in full.

The first post is on the leadership of President George W. Bush. I don't agree with everything in this post, but it does outline the difference in the leadership we saw in the days following September 11, 2001, and what has been displayed in the subsequent War on Terror which has been far less inspiring.

I've read some coverage of last night's speeches by Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Their message, hammered home by their bipartisan credentials, is that President Bush should be re-elected because he is a solid leader in the war on terror.

They have a solid point. If this year's election were a choice between John Kerry and the President Bush who emerged shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then there would be no contest.

The President Bush I saw in the weeks after 9/11 was a vision of what a president should be. Decisive. Bipartisan. Optimistic. Forceful.

However, I'm not voting for that president on November 2. Rather, I'm voting on the man that President Bush has been for the rest of his term, and I find that man wanting.

Speakers last night touted President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. That invasion has caused the United States to suffer from an overextended military. The tactics used resulted in what Bush has termed a "catastrophic victory," and deficiencies in the days following that victory continue to bedevil us in Iraq.

In conducting the war on terror, President Bush has chosen to press at the boundaries of constitutional law. In Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, prisoners have been held without regard for rights guaranteed in the Constitution (for Gitmo detainees) or in the Geneva conventions (for prisoners held abroad).

He was ready to invade Iraq without a hint of congressional approval -- a situation that would have caused the Founders to roll in their graves as the president waged an illegal war.

The second post discusses how Senator John Kerry has not shown a positive reason regarding how his leadership is any better than that of Bush. Pennywit describes well how this is not something we should have to search for:

I haven't seen evidence of leadership in Kerry's time in the Senate. Maybe there is an example of leadership there, buried in the sands of time that are two decades in a legislature. But I haven't seen Kerry highlight it.

And, in fact, it's not my job to dig for it. I'm a blogger, not a political hack. If Kerry's going to show that he's a leader, it's his damn job to do it. Not mine to go through forty years of Kerry memorabilia.

And I'm waiting for this particular element of the Kerry persona to come to the fore.

Pennywit also writes something I was planning to post about:

On the flip side, I have gained at least some sense of the person the Kerry is during this election. In terms of leadership style, Kerry strikes me as an individual who is far more thoughtful than President Bush is when it comes to matters of policy.

While this is often characterized as "flip-flopping," I believe that this quality -- the ability to consider multiple approaches to a problem, as well as multiple stands, before reaching a decision and acting on it -- will better serve this country's purposes than Bush's model, which relies on damning torpedoes and moving full speed ahead.

The willingness to consider multiple points of view, rather than focus on one course of action and follow it no matter what, will allow U.S. policy to more quickly adapt to the changing circumstances in the war on terror.

This neatly encapsulates my largest concern about how this war is being waged and my fundamental issue with the current President. There is an inflexibility in the Bush administration that I find troubling. It appears as if President Bush confuses the words "resolution" and "inflexible", "determined" and "stubborn". The recent apparent admissions of the failure to adequately plan for and resource the aftermath of the Iraq invasion illustrate the point. Instead of admitting that the planning was inadequate, the spin-inducing phrase "catastrophic success" is now the new talking point (and note that link showing the use of this phase in association with Iraq is dated March of 2003). Even the use of the mealy-mouthed "mistakes were made" would be better than the spinning that is going on now. If you never admit mistakes, you never learn from them.

Please note, I am not saying that the invasion itself was mistaken. That question can only truly be answered with the perspective of history. What I am saying is that the failure to plan for all foreseeable contingencies of the aftermath of a war that you start voluntarily borders on the unforgivable, and the members of the Bush administration who were supposed to take care of this are not being held responsible in any meaningful way. My definition of leadership and loyalty does not include defending what is not defensible, just as it does not include being so inflexible that you are incapable of learning from mistakes.

Unfortunately, Kerry approaches the opposite extreme, and I question his ability to show true firmness and resolve in the face of opposition. You must have the ability to consider all sides of an issue, but once you have decided upon the proper course, you cannot temporize and try to completely avoid confrontation.

So, we either have rigidity that alienates allies and does not learn from mistakes, or we have broken reeds that turn whichever way the wind blows. Unless either candidate shows some sign that they understand firmness with flexibility, again I will have to decide who is the least dangerous to our nation and not who is best equipped to lead because both major party candidates are inadequate.

Posted by Jack Grant at 09:18 on 1 September 2004