Jules Witcover on "Bush's Radical Agenda"

Jules Witcover isn't above indulging the press corps' conventional wisdom at times. But he's operating on a much more serious level, so far as I can see, than the average Big Pundit and the supercilious TV personalities who pass for political commentators these days.

In Bush's Radical Agenda (03/10/04),  he produces the kind of analysis that is becoming increasingly rare among the lazy practitioners of political journalism who show up on the talk shows:

The Democrats and their presumptive nominee, Sen. John Kerry, have yet to drive home, however, the one reality that the American public seems not yet to have recognized: that Mr. Bush is pursuing not a conservative agenda, but a radical one, abroad as well as at home.

Despite the failure of the administration to find the alleged weapons of mass destruction cited to justify the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, the Democrats appear incapable of making this unnecessary war the centerpiece of their case against Mr. Bush's re-election.

The truly radical Bush Doctrine, expanded since the invasion to a grand scheme to turn the whole Middle East into an oasis of democracy, has rolled over a compliant Congress that backed Mr. Bush's war resolution in the fall of 2002.  ...

On the domestic front as well, radical is the applicable word for the Bush policy of advocating further tax cuts for the rich in the face of a mushrooming federal deficit and the administration's dismal failure to counter joblessness in an alleged economic recovery.

On this front, at least, the Democrats are aggressively noting the radical turnaround in the nation's fiscal health from the federal surpluses of the Clinton years (with, to be sure, the cooperation of the Republican Congress on spending limits) to today's massive deficits.

Witcover seems to have been genuinely appalled all along about Bush's conduct in the buildup to the war in Iraq. And despite the mouth-frothing patriotic frenzy the Republicans are already displaying, my impression is the same as Witcover's: Kerry has yet to challenge Bush as directly and effectively on the Iraq War as he can and should.