Why O'Reilly Should Like Kerry

As I prepare to make the cross-continental trip to Reno, I'm trying to remember how I got here. Not here geographically; here politically. I've been on a journey that has taken me from support of George W. Bush's election in 2000, to amazement and wonderment at Bush's ability to make good on campaign promises to unite a divided Congress (hello, Ted Kennedy) while fulfilling major campaign promises like tax cuts, and his Churchillian (yes, Churchillian) reaction immediately after September 11. The successful invasion from Afghanistan was the high point in this administration, and would be the high point in most presidencies. But from there, it was all downhill, both for Bush and my estimation of him. Spending money like a drunken sailor. Total lack of accountability within the administration, with the excuse the lame and nebulous "loyalty" to protect the likes of Tenet after September 11, who presided over the two worst intelligence failures in American (world?) history -- 9/11 and, long after he should have been fired, the "slam dunk" WMDs. The outright denial of facts that are plain as day to any observer. As I posted previously, the statements that drove me over the edge -- and I suspect will be the keys to the election -- were Bush's failure when asked in the second debate to name a single mistake he has made, and in the third his outrage at the "exaggeration" that he ever claimed he wasn't concerned with finding bin Laden. Then the denial of civil liberties to American citizens, the suspension of habeas corpus under the guise of presidential privilege. Add to this the greatest curbing of media access of any White House since Nixon (and perhaps moreso), and the emblematically shameless prosecution of Judy Miller for a story she didn't even write about a scandalous "outing" of a CIA operative by the White House for political purposes... "Liberal" is a dirty word in American politics, like it or not. And I would classify myself as a moderate conservative, or as MacDuff might say, a Rockefeller Republican. But Bush's policies, for the reasons outlined above -- lack of accountability, fiscal irresponsibility, denial of individual rights, big, bloated, Big Brotherish government -- are a betrayal of the conservative vision, and are nearly diametrically opposed to the policies he espoused when running in 2000. His pursuit of a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was a device intended to pander to the Christian right -- it could be nothing else -- and represents a terrifying denial of human rights on a national level for token political purposes (again, diametrically opposed to Bush 2K who insisted that the states should manage their own business, not the beltway). I'm no peacenik, far from it. I supported the use of military force in Iraq, and I thought going through and eventually around the UN was defensible, even as a defence of the legitimacy of the weak-willed UN itself. Hindsight is, indeed, 20/20. I believe in Bush's vision overall -- having lived in Saudi Arabia, the lion's den, I understand that Iraq had a chance to be a game-changer. The regimes of the Middle East are almost comically corrupt, and unless something happened to break that cycle, the region would be producing suicide bombers for years to come. But Kerry has made the case persuasively that the proverbial eye has been taken off the ball (as he constantly reminds us), and common sense tells us that too many errors have been made in the prosecution of the war in Iraq and the subsequent peace. All this to the point where things may be worse now than they were before. I'm not sure whether Kerry would have had the courage to try such a game-changer, but I'm tempted to believe that if he did, he would have done so in a more competent matter. At any rate, a change of the guard will be a good thing at this point; as lame as Kerry's calls for "new alliances" are, they at least reflect the fact that the present administration's credibility could not be any lower, either at home or abroad. I also will not get into the way in which 9/11 changed everything -- it did, but the reaction has turned out to be the wrong one. (I couldn't say it any better than Tom Friedman, with whom I share many opinions on Iraq and the Middle East.) Robert A. George in The New Republic makes the conservative's case against Bush as well as anyone -- and there have been many disenchanted conservatives emerging in the recent past. George, and Andrew Sullivan, and I, and others, are on the same page, I think:

No, a Kerry administration would not be any conservative's ideal. But, on limited government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a Republican Congress to act like a Republican Congress. The last such combination produced some form of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to accountability, one could hardly do worse. Of course, a conservative can still cast a libertarian vote on principle.

As I've said of Sullivan's prose, I myself could have written those words. Many true conservatives are leaving Bush, and for exactly those reasons. But voting Libertarian this cycle is ridiculous, for obvious reasons. I have come to believe, sincerely, that the best case scenario in this cycle is a Democratic president with a Republican congress. On the balance, and rhetoric aside, it is difficult to tell who the conservative candidate is in this race. All cards on the table: I liked Howard Dean, because he represented not only a particular unequivocal stand on the war in Iraq (though I disagreed with his conclusions, I respected the sincerity), his record reflected conservative values even more than Bush's White House. I'm happy to get into that if you want, but let's leave it at fiscal responsibility, tax relief for the middle class and gun rights, to name a few. In 2004, Kerry espouses the closest thing to a true conservative candidate there is (aside from the libertarian). Can you IMAGINE saying that five years ago? I don't love Kerry, to be sure, but he is the alternative in a time of moral crisis -- and if you've read your Dante, you know for whom the darkest places in hell are reserved. I've never "hated" George Bush on a personal level the way some people have. I can't read the comments on Daily Kos because they're so ridiculously vitriolic, and sometimes hateful. I certainly don't think he's stupid. He's probably a great family man, he obviously has a strength of personal conviction that I and many others admire, and his common touch and obvious political strengths will make him a figure studied in poli sci textbooks for years to come. But I do politely and firmly disagree with him on far too many things to support him. And the debates have pushed me beyond the disagreement to the notion that the best possible outcome in November is the election of John Kerry. It's taken me a long time to come to that conclusion. But I've given Bush the chance, and he has failed time and time again. So why the title to this post? Because, to answer MacDuff's question, Kerry should visit the O'Reilly Factor and make the case that he is the candidate for conservatives. He risks losing nobody from his base, since they know what his policies are anyway and seem to be fine with them, to the tune of 47 percent of the electorate. To have the courage to show up on O'Reilly would be a start, but by outlining the points that I and others have made -- the conservative's case against Bush -- he might just sway a few tenths of a percent his way. It is the only way to reach out to a large number of voters who might otherwise have not considered him, and having gone toe-to-toe with the previously-undefeated-in-debates Bush (boy, does that seem like a long time ago), he can more than handle O'Reilly. And even in the worst-case scenario, and it's a disaster, and O'Reilly refuses to bend, who does he lose? Voters who aren't voting for him anyway? This is a no-brainer to me. Go on The Factor, Senator Kerry. Real conservatives have nothing to lose but their party-line shackles.