Sunday, October 24, 2004
Kerry's record earns a failing grade
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Hall is a professor of aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech.
John Kerry wants to be president of the United States of America. He insists he will do a better job than President Bush, and insists Bush has done everything wrong. Everything.
Consider two presumably important examples: international diplomacy and intelligence-community reform.
Kerry says he will be a better statesman than Bush and will restore America's prestige within the international community. Just by taking office, he will be able to change the attitudes in, say, France and Germany, so that these two former allies will once again support the United States, and will shoulder a significant fraction of the burden in Iraq.
Is Kerry really that good at wooing the leaders of other nations? Setting aside the fact that Kerry hasn't been able to woo some 90 percent of his former fellows in the U.S. Navy, how has he done at foreign relations regarding Iraq?
For one, he deployed his sister, Diana Kerry, to Australia to explain to the citizens of that nation how their support of the United States endangers its citizens. This message complements Kerry's statesmanlike branding of our ally as a member of a "trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted."
I find it difficult to imagine how this strategy contributes to the strengthening of our alliances, but perhaps Kerry is pursuing some nuance that is beyond my reckoning.
More recently, Ayad Allawi, the leader of Iraq, gave an important speech before Congress, thanking the United States for its liberation and support of Iraq, describing the progress that has been made in that country, questioning the almost exclusive focus on negative events in the Western media and outlining the steps under way to secure the nation and carry forward with democratic elections in January 2005.
Allawi's speech was interrupted nearly 20 times by applause from our country's legislators, most of whom voted for and supported the liberation and reconstruction of Iraq. Missing from the audience were two well-known senators: Kerry and John Edwards. Where were they? Kerry was at a firehouse in Ohio and Edwards was stumping in South Carolina, a state the Kerry-Edwards campaign has evidently conceded. Shortly after Allawi finished his speech before Congress, Kerry made a statement essentially calling Allawi a liar. More nuance? Or more arrogance?
Why wasn't Kerry at the Capitol? As a man who wants to be president and wants us to want him to be president, why isn't he acting presidential? He should have been in that audience, should have followed up with his own meeting with Allawi and should have given a speech explaining how his leadership would contribute to all the goals that Allawi and most of the Iraqi people have for the future of their country.
In the intelligence arena, Kerry has for eight years been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and has attended some 22 percent of its public meetings. He has publicly stated that he would immediately implement all the recommendations of the 9/11 commission. The latter amounts to a wholesale submission to leadership by committee, rather than leadership by leadership.
But what about that Intelligence Committee business? He's missed the vast majority of the committee's meetings and has held no leadership position within the committee.
More important, the Senate has just completed the important business of confirming the next director of central intelligence. When the roll was called, six senators were missing, and two of them were, you guessed it, Kerry and Edwards. Why wasn't Kerry, the man who wants to be president, there for that vote? Why didn't he use this vote as a platform for making an important address regarding his own vision for the future of intelligence reform in this country?
All we know for certain is that he did not. He missed this vote, just as he missed 64 percent of Senate votes in 2003 and 87 percent of Senate votes so far in 2004. In fact, his performance in the Senate has been so abysmal that the the governor of Massachusetts has called for him to step down.
Admittedly, Gov. Mitt Romney is a Republican, so this cannot be viewed as a nonpartisan complaint; however, one would expect a bit more for the $158,000 per year that we pay Kerry as a senator.
Kerry wants us to believe that President Bush has done everything wrong, and that he will do everything right. He has been a U.S. senator for nearly two decades and has not exhibited any leadership skills of any kind. He has been running a presidential election campaign for several months and has still not exhibited any leadership skills.
Kerry may be the anti-Bush, and there are people who will vote for him for exactly that reason. But it's difficult to see how anyone could believe that he has anything to offer as president of the United States.
