George W. Bush for President
(written by Lancelot Finn, Halloween 2004)
"Transformational" is the word for George W. Bush. His has been a transformational presidency—transformational for the economy, transformational for foreign affairs and the world order, and transformational of George W. Bush himself. I disagree strongly with the claim that Bush is incompetent. A competent person is one who can accomplish things. Well, Bush has accomplished plenty, if anything, too much. After a landmark tax cut, a new prescription drug bill, an important education reform, and two wars to overturn totalitarian regimes, the public is gasping for breath.
The transformations which Bush set in motion are not complete. To judge them now is like judging a sculpture which has been only partially chiseled from its block of marble: here one sees a fine muscular arm or a bold, brave face, but about the completed sculpture we can only guess. Will the tax cuts, trade agreements, and fiscal stimulus feed into a prolonged boom which generates enough revenue to resolve the deficit? Can the administration embed America's newly proven strength and lofty ideals in a post-Hobbesian world order, where tyrants who live by force and fear are no longer safe? Will the No Child Left Behind Act increase pressure on the public schools until they start to crack, and let market solutions in? Will Bush deliver on his immigration proposal, and help immigrants without status to begin emerging from the shadows of illegality? Will he reform Social Security, grounding retirement in property rights rather than politicians' promises? I do not know. Bush's principles—freedom, opportunity and accountability—are simple, yet their consistent application is so revolutionary that even after four years of Bush a vote for him is a venture into the unknown.
I support Bush on the economy narrowly, and mostly because Kerry is so bad. But I support Bush strongly on foreign policy. Re-elect Bush.
The economy
Bush started off his presidency with a huge tax cut. He's also increased domestic spending a lot faster than Bill Clinton. This has caused a huge deficit, vindicating those who accused Bush of "fuzzy math" in the 2000 campaign. Why did he do that?
Well, there's a Keynesian rationale for it. Keynes argued that when the economy hits a recession, the government should cut taxes and/or increase government spending as a "fiscal stimulus" to the economy. John F. Kennedy, like George W. Bush, cut taxes on all income levels and increased spending to strengthen the economy in the early 1960s. Personally, I'm not a Keynesian. Keynes's theory is based on an assumption of "sticky prices," particularly wages, but I think the economy may have become more flexible so that this assumption no longer holds. But since Keynesian principles have guided US macroeconomic policy to some extent for six decades, it would be odd to fault Bush specifically for continuing the practice.
However, while Bush's cut-taxes-and-spend policies may have had the effect of a Keynesian fiscal stimulus, they were meant as a long-term structural transformation of the economy. That's why they had the odd feature of being spread out over ten years, so that they would be completed after Bush left office. Bush wanted tax cuts before the signs of recession appeared; then, his rationale was that surpluses simply demonstrated that the government was taking too much of people's money. That that's a bad argument I won't hold against him too strongly; politicians have to dumb it down for public consumption, because ordinary people don't grasp fancy Greek-letter economics. I think there's a smarter rationale out there, but I haven't entirely figured out what it is yet. Some of Bush's tax changes seem smart, such as reducing the double taxation of dividends, which encourages capital formation, and reducing the perverse marriage tax penalty. Reducing taxes on the rich means reducing marginal tax rates, and thus increases the incentive to work. Fine, but if you want to spend, you have to get the money somewhere. I am of the opinion (though there's little evidence to support it) that debts and deficits raise interest rates (or slow their fall, in a recession) and thus crowd out business investment.
Bush's increased spending is a big weak spot and undermines his claim to be a conservative. Now, the increased domestic spending is usually called "pork," which (by implication) "metastasizes" (as Andrew Sullivan puts it) into lard (waste). Well, I don't want to jump to conclusions. I haven't studied what the Republican Congress has been doing with the money. Not all public spending is alike, and this could be high-return public investment, for all I know, even if it is also investment in political capital. But I don't like the deficit, particularly with the Social Security crisis looming.
One sign that Bush's changes might deliver faster economic growth is that productivity has grown faster under the Bush administration than it has for decades. If productivity keeps growing that fast and unemployment falls to its all-time 1990s lows, the deficit will melt like butter and we'll have a bright future ahead. Was that what's supposed to happen? But the bottom line is: I don't get it, Bush. What are you trying to do with this economy?
The results to date are a wash. That the recession, normal after a ten-year boom and exacerbated by the accounting scandals and September 11th, turned out to be so mild, does credit to Bush's fiscal stimulus policy; and the economy is growing fast now. But on the other hand, the first few quarters of the recovery showed jerky and uneven growth. Our unemployment rate is among the lowest in a large industrialized country, lower than the average of the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Inflation is low. To claim this economy is a disaster, as the Democrats keep doing, is nonsense. But Bush doesn't have anything to brag about either. If the economy grows 4-5% a year for the next four years, if he shows some fiscal restraint and tax revenues are catching up with spending, I'll consider the Bush tax cut vindicated, but not so far.
All the same, there's no doubt how to vote on the economy. First, Bush's proposals for his second term are more conservative than those in 2000. His Social Security reform is a particularly great idea; if that's what he does with the political capital he got from pork spending in his first term, it will have been worth it. Bush's plan for rural health clinics sounds relatively cheap to me, and its virtuous help-the-poor stuff, in contrast to Kerry, who panders to the middle class instead. Second, Kerry's plans are wretched. To raise taxes on the rich while passing a huge health care plan would be a major drag on the economy. Conservative and libertarian Kerry supporters have only one decent argument in his defense: gridlock. That seems like very swampy ground to base one's vote on. Bush is good on trade, too. His flip-flop on steel tariffs not only got him fast-track authority, which he used to negotiate a number of new free-trade deals; it also set the excellent precedent of US tariffs being overturned by the WTO! Kerry's mindless know-nothingism about "outsourcing" is sickening.
But foreign policy is much more important than the economy in this election. And if Bush's economic policy transformation has me unconvinced, I'm a fervent believer in his foreign policy transformation.
Foreign Policy.
Let me start by defining some terms.
First, the ancien regime: the international order that prevailed before 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Its chief institution was the UN; its chief doctrine, sanctity of borders. Bush I hailed it as a "new world order," but this was a misnomer. Rather, it was a perfection of the world order envisioned by the founders of the UN, which, being a reaction to World War II, put its (over-)emphasis on preventing international war, in which task it was quite successful. The corollary of this emphasis was that, within each country's "sacred" borders, sovereignty had a Hobbesian character. There were failed states, where all warred against all and life was nasty, brutish and short. And there were totalitarian Leviathan states where the sovereign (golpistas, ayatollahs, revolutionary heroes and kleptocrats) could dispose of his subjects' lives, properties, speech and belief as he pleased. In either case, outsiders could only look. Actually, there were official limits on the rights of rulers to kill their subjects, and genocide was considered a justification for international intervention. In practice, the cumbersome procedures of multilateralism ensured that sovereigns who felt the urge to adjust the demographic makeup of their populations would meet only tardy and token resistance, while the democratic powers got a fig leaf of plausible deniability.
Second, the neocon revolution. I first encountered neocon thought in the revisionist histories of Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson, whose work is infused with a brave reassertion of truths which had become unfashionable, such as the superiority of market capitalism, the unique virtue of Western civilization and its traditions, the moral necessity of particular civic freedoms, and that the lethal horrors of the 20th century not only must be condemned, but also discredited the various communist and national socialist ideologies which had caused them, in Europe and in the post-colonial Third World. The original neocons were ex-Trotskyist Jews, and the radical roots of neoconservatism merit new emphasis now that neocons have taken to going abroad in search of Bastiles to destroy. The neoconservative movement is a bit like the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that believes in liberty and individualism, checks and balances in government, popular sovereignty, free inquiry and market economics. Yet neocons also consciously reject the legacy of the Enlightenment inasmuch as it planted the seeds of so many murderous revolutions. So they respect tradition, cultural conservatism, and religious faith—they are their heirs both of Thomas Paine and of Edmund Burke. An immersion in the Machiavellian lessons of Israel's existential struggle taught some neocons to adulate military power, condone the pre-emptive use of force, acquiesce in sordid realpolitik alliances with dictators, and to be fiercely suspicious of the UN. But commentators like Matthew Yglesias who point out that the neocon agenda is contradictory—for example, that their enthusiasm for (consultative, law-based) democracy jars with their cynicism about the (consultative, law-based) UN—or impractical—for example, that we can't afford to overturn every dictator—miss the point. First, because even mature systems are generally characterized by internal tensions and contradictions, e.g. in the American republic, between democratic popular sovereignty and precedential, judge-made common law. Second, because neoconservatism is a critique, of socialism, of post-colonialism, of the UN, in short, of the ancien regime. As a critique, it contains intimations of a transformed world order, not a comprehensive program.
When the ancien regime came under attack, Bush, instead of defending it, let the rebels within the palace gates, and the neocon revolution began to play itself out. They shook the world order to its foundations, which you might resent unless you believe (as I do) that those foundations were cracked, and the structure needed refounding.
A band of religious fanatics attacked the symbolic capital of a world order which they saw as satanic, wreaking havoc and bloodshed upon a country that had hitherto been inviolable. This country, this world order had long drained their lands of treasure to fund its wicked and sinful lifestyle, and its artwork full of nudity and irreligion. The attack sent a shock wave through the world, and created a climate of fear and struggle, which soon drowned out the easy, eloquent triumphalism that had characterized the years before it. September 11th? Yes, but I am also describing the sack of Rome in 1527, carried out by a German army, nominally serving the Catholic emperor Charles V but including many Lutheran mercenaries, who acted beyond their orders and wrought vengeance upon the "Antichrist." The sack of Rome was the beginning of the end of the Italian Renaissance. In its place came the cultural chill of the Counter-Reformation, austere, pious and repressive; and, on the other side, the fanatical enthusiasms of the Reformation. A long cold war ensued, reaching its bloodiest point in the Thirty Years' War, and ultimately the dream of the spiritual unity of Christendom had to be abandoned. After September 11th, a strange shadow of self-censorship spread through the media and the punditocracy. It became, to use a phrase that frightens us much less than it should, politically incorrect to make certain obvious observations. Such as, that the terrorists, far from being "cowardly," as everyone for some reason kept saying, had shown, whatever one may think of their cause, great courage. Or, that bin Laden had some pretty good reasons to attack us. It was unseemly for our troops to be acting as bodyguards for the House of Saud. What we were doing to the children of Iraq with our sanctions was atrocious. And the Palestinians were getting a raw deal (though I'm more sympathetic than bin Laden to Israel's need for self-defense). In those days, writers hinted at those thoughts, but rarely dared to express them openly; sympathy for bin Laden (who is really a rather dashing figure, after all; if the intelligentsia has been infatuated with Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky, why not bin Laden?) was never spoken. The sense of national unity and the international good will that America enjoyed after September 11th (which people complain that Bush squandered) could have been the beginning of a Counter-Reformation, a reactionary defense of the ancien regime. The "war on terror," a concept with ominous totalitarian overtones, implying a more efficient police state and the monitoring of radical ideologies, was a ready-made theme for such a Counter-Reformation. The doors of dialog were closing, until Bush slammed them open again with his revolutionary and controversial adventurism.
When bin Laden nailed his nineteen theses on Wall Street's and Washington's doorsteps, he was hoping to ignite an Islamic Reformation through "propaganda of the deed." He hoped to exposed what he described in his recent tape as America's "most prominent point of weakness, which is the fear, cowardliness, and the absence of combat spirit among US soldiers." If the Americans were frightened into withdrawing their support from the "the non-Islamic regimes in all Arab countries," that would help true believers to overcome the "hypocrites" and "to establish the rule of God on earth." This frightened a lot of former American critics into solidarity with the Western superpower. The left-wing French newspaper Le Monde published a famous headline "We are all Americans." France, for all its flirtation with the left and irritation at American power, is a rich, secular, capitalist country. But rich-secular-capitalist solidarity could not provide a basis for lasting global (as opposed to European-American) unity. Throughout the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Africa, radical Islamists welcomed 9/11. Mainstream Muslims were more hesitant, but most mainstream Muslims and even many non-Muslims admire another terrorist mastermind, Yasir Arafat, and bin Laden would presumably, in due course, have achieved comparable popularity if his action had been successful in provoking American retreat. Radical Islamism would never have had much appeal outside the historically Muslim countries, but bin Laden was ready for tactical alliances. "There will be no harm if the interests of Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists in the fight against the crusaders, despite our belief in the infidelity of socialists," bin Laden remarks. When bin Laden adds that "[US soldiers] also lack a fair cause to defend[; t]hey only fight for capitalists, usury takers, and the merchants of arms and oil, including the gang of crime at the White House," it's not hard to imagine how the jihadi movement could flow into a more generalized, revolutionary Third Worldism, given the chance. Rich-secular-capitalist solidarity on the one hand; revolutionary Third Worldism on the other; it would have been Reformation vs. Counter-Reformation all over again, with thirty-years' wars on the horizon.
The invasion of Iraq short-circuited both processes, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, at the same time. We refuted bin Laden's theses with our own stunning counter-thesis; and we showed the French that we were not interested in the kind of solidarity they were offering.
It still amazes me that the war in Iraq actually happened. April 9, 2003 was the day I became an American patriot. The scenes of Iraqis in the streets chanting "America always" were unimaginably full of promise. Wordsworth's words about the French Revolution—"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!-- Oh! times, / In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways / Of custom, law, and statute, took at once / The attraction of a country in romance!" capture what I felt then. And the polls kept saying that 70%, even 85% at one point, of the American public supported the war! Why? Throughout the 1990s I had assumed that Clinton's refusal to countenance any American casualties reflected the will of the American people, who valued an American life more than thousands of foreign lives, who were not willing to make any sacrifice for other peoples' liberty or welfare. Was Clinton wrong after all? Were there untapped reserves of generosity in the American people that I had never guessed at?
Yes and no. We are a flawed country—narcissistic, spoiled, easily frightened, naïve, but also capable, creative, optimistic, generous, idealistic, and brave when called upon (or at least, our military is). Bin Laden had good grounds for calling us cowards in 2000, but no longer. We have matched the jihadists for courage, but more importantly, we have overmatched them in offering the world something to believe in. To quote bin Laden once again, he says: "I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar in human life and that free men do not forfeit their security contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom…. No, we fight because we are free men who do not sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our Nation and just as you lay waste to our Nation so shall we lay waste to yours." (italics mine) When America was the ally of dictators in the Middle East, when we were imposing sanctions on Saddam and leaving his people to suffer, those words might have rung true. But now they don't make any sense. What kind of freedom is he talking about? Iraq is now the only country in the Middle East where speech is free, where democratic institutions are beginning to form. An Iraq government is seeking to build democracy there, with American aid. Clerics are calling for elections and telling their people to vote. Our soldiers are trying to restore security. It is they who are robbing the Iraqi people of their security through their "martyrdom operations." It is they who are undermining the realization of freedom through representative institutions. And Iraqis know it. We have turned the tables. We have comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. We rejected the ancien regime and opted for a coalition of the willing, first the US, Britain and Australia, then the central and eastern Europe post-communist countries, now the vast majority of Iraqis who want security and democracy. Because most of this world's people believe in our cause, which is freedom and democracy, that coalition of the willing will continue to grow.
But, oh yes, there's the "incompetence" of the Bush administration in Iraq. Mustn't forget that! Libertarian-hawkish sources like Andrew Sullivan and The Economist have even been endorsing John Kerry, citing the Bush administration's incompetence. It's interesting that the frequency of the incompetence charge tends to be inversely proportional to the expertise of the person expressing it: journalistic armchair generals cry incompetence, soldiers (occasionally admit to mistakes which Sullivan latches onto with absurdly disproportionate eagerness but generally) praise Bush. But in a way, of course, it's true. The Coalition Provisional Authority zig-zagged and changed course, made mistakes and absurd mistakes, nothing went according to plan, and so forth. I expected that. To ask a crew of US soldiers, lawyers and contractors to govern a Third World country is like asking a jazz saxophonist to tune a piano—you shouldn't do it except in unusual circumstances, and if you do, don't expect very good results. That's why it's not generally a good idea for us to go around invading and governing other people's countries. But we won't stay long, and Iraq had nowhere to go but up. And anyway, an incompetent but well-intentioned US occupation can work wonders for putting a country on the right path, as it did in Japan and Germany. That's happening in Iraq today. Most of the country is stable and secure. The economy is booming. Public opinion is strongly behind democracy, as are religious leaders, and for this reason the insurgencies, though we regret the loss of life that they caused, provoked indignation and resistance from the Iraqi people. The elections will take place on time. What was once a dream—that Iraq will be the first Arab democracy—is on the verge of becoming a fact.
The real payoff for Iraq will come when the physical fact of a US-led regime change turns into the credible threat of future regime changes. If tyrants believe that we will invade unless they treat their people better and stop sponsoring terrorists and building lethal weapons, they'll change of their own accord to avoid ending up in a spider-hole, and we won't actually have to do it. Right now, we don't have a credible threat, because we're bogged down in Iraq, because the diplomatic, financial, personnel and domestic costs of the regime change have been high enough that we're not likely to venture another one in the near future, and because John Kerry might get elected. But when the military has come home, had time to recuperate, and internalized the lessons of the Iraq war; when the US system of alliances has been repaired (and rearranged, with Poland, Japan, Italy and Australia eclipsing France and Germany); when democratic consolidation and economic growth in Iraq turn the regime change there into an appealing precedent… then the dictators will get spooked and start to soften up. Iraq is indeed "Iraq the model," as the Iraqi blog of that name hypothesizes; it is the beginning of the passage to a post-Hobbesian social contract for the world.
The alternative
I could view this election with more equanimity if Bush's main challenger were Ralph Nader. Unfortunately it's John Kerry. I'm still trying to figre out what the Democrats were thinking when nominated John Kerry. They wanted someone "electable," and chosen the least appealing candidate in the Democratic field! Why? Here's my best guess:
We can't stand this Bush guy, the Democrats were thinking to themselves. How can anyone like him? He's arrogant. Politically, an under-achiever. He's an aristocrat, a Yalie from the Skull-and-Bones, and rich, but he didn't earn the money, but got it through family connections. He governs in manner that totally contradicts his professed political principles, spending the taxpayers' money with reckless abandon. He's got this repugnant tough-guy façade. He's incapable of admitting mistakes. He refuses to be straight with the American people. His fiscal plans are full of fuzzy math. And yet people seem to like him. Hmm. We've got to outgun this guy. Who can we nominate that's an arrogant under-achiever, an aristocrat bloated with family money that he never had to earn, with a repugnant tough-guy façade, who's even more unprincipled and spendthrift, even less straight with the American people, with even fuzzier math than Bush? Hey, hey—John Kerry's our man! We'll answer a millionaire with a billionaire. And he's even a Yalie, from the Skull-and-Bones!
It's a shame, because for all my enthusiasm for Bush I was thinking of voting Democrat this year. I was on the mailing list of the primary campaign of the Democrats' white knight, Joe Lieberman. The stench of Bush-hatred was becoming ubiquitous and reducing my quality of life. A good Democrat president could serve as a ventilation system, clearing the air. Also, much of the Bush legacy was already a fait accompli. And Bush wasn't getting his message through to the world very well. If the Democrats had produced a Tony Blair, or heck, even a Bill Clinton, they'd have had me. But no.
To detail all John Kerry's faults would require much more space than I want to use here, so I'll focus on one: in the long struggle between freedom and totalitarianism, John Kerry is not on the right side. Not that he's on the wrong side. He's on no side.
How do I know? Well, I don't, but I think I have pretty good evidence. A belief in moral equivalence is not the kind that demands to be articulated, and it would be disadvantageous for an American politician to admit to it. So a bit of detective work is needed.
Let's start with what John Kerry said in his Senate testimony in 1971. He told the Senate that the Vietnamese didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy." But that year in Philadelphia he remarked that "Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of Vietnam." He also "noted Ho Chi Minh's understanding of the United States Constitution and his efforts 'to install the same provisions into the government of Vietnam.'" Actually, George Washington presided over the foundation of a free, constitutional republic, whereas Ho Chi Minh established a repressive, communist dictatorship. It seems, then, that we have a case of projection here: it was John Kerry who didn't know the difference between democracy and communism.
Now I don't really want to hold against John Kerry something he said thirty years ago. It was a fashionable idea at the time, and the heat of the moment, and the passion of youth, and so on. Also, Kerry was a privileged youth, and privilege prevents youths from being trained in the deep link between work and property that is the bedrock of free societies; absent that understanding, sympathies with socialism and communism are often the mark of a generous nature. I might even commend Kerry's lack of chauvinism. But Kerry has had thirty years to watch what kind of state Vietnam has become. He has had thirty years to mull over what part the US withdrawal played in the chain of events leading to the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Where's the introspection? Where's the remorse? Better men than Kerry have gotten contemporary history badly wrong. But better men than Kerry have recognized and repented of their mistakes.
Fast-forward to 1984. The Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua by overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship; they nationalized many industries and were moving to the left, becoming increasingly Marxist-Leninist. Reagan, pursuing a policy of containment and of preventing communism from establishing a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, funded the contras who were fighting against the Sandinistas. Kerry negotiated with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, thus undermining US policy. It didn't seem to bother Kerry that the Sandinistas were getting aid and advice from the Cubans and the Soviets, though Soviet advisors had earlier done much to convert Cuba into a totalitarian state. Eventually a truce was arranged between the contras and the Sandinistas, which led to an election, which the liberal opposition won. Fortunately, unlike in Vietnam, we don't get to see what Nicaragua would be like if Kerry had had his way, but his behavior fits into a worrisome pattern.
But most disturbing is Kerry's failure to express any approval of or enthusiasm for democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is particularly striking because it would probably help Kerry politically to sound supportive of democracy in Iraq. And Kerry is generally willing to flip-flop and re-position himself quite a bit for the sake of political advantage. Yet about democracy in Iraq he is silent. This makes sense, though, when you consider that Kerry's career began with a protest against the use of US force to spread democracy abroad. To oppose the spreading of democracy, the imposition of our values on other cultures, may be considered the premise of Kerry's whole political career.
I puzzled a bit over the following statement from Kerry's 1971 testimony. "In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart." It's a nonsequitur. There's no threat to the US here, says Kerry. Fair enough. But why is it "hypocrisy," of all things, to sacrifice American lives to preserve the freedom of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Laotians? Well, moral reasoning is not John Kerry's forte, but he seems to have some notion—a notion he takes for granted—that each country should mind its own business, that freedom means, not civic or economic freedom, but independence, freedom from the meddling of foreigners.
Bush's articulation of a "forward strategy of freedom," and of a belief that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person," in response to bin Laden's physical and verbal attacks, may be compared to Wilson's publishing of the Fourteen Points in response to Lenin's Bolshevik revolution. Lenin, having seized power in Russia in 1917, called for a new basis for international relations, to replace the imperial rivalries which WWI had discredited. Wilson answered with a new, anti-imperialist framework for international relations: national self-determination, a League of Nations and collective security, peace, democracy, and free markets. Wilson was proven the prophet in the long run, as Michael Mandelbaum argues in his book Ideas That Conquered the World. Our world order today is dominated by the principles of national self-determination, peace, democracy and free markets. But while Wilson outbid Lenin in the long run, his vision was tragically delayed due to defeat at home. A combination of Wilson's intransigence and isolationists in Congress prevented America from joining the League of Nations, thus eviscerating it, and leaving the new order to gradually give way before the more ruthless principles of the fascists and communists.
I believe Bush, like Wilson, will prove the prophet, whatever happens this year. A house divided against itself cannot stand; the world cannot remain half rich and free, half subject to dictatorship and poverty. We must ultimately make the freedom and dignity of the whole human race our cause. We must transcend Hobbesian sovereignty. But a tragic and unnecessary setback for that cause is also possible today, as it was in 1914. If anyone can be judged by his political record, then Kerry's principles are moral equivalence, isolationism, and a refusal of responsibility, the diametric opposite of Bush's principles. If Bush is defeated, I fear the center will not be able to hold, and the nihilistic fantasies of bin Laden and many others like him will have their way with the world. Our choice is courage and conviction, or retreat and relativism.