The Case for Electing John Kerry (guest post by Bob McElvaine)

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John Kerry’s record is far better than the Bush campaign has led voters to believe.  He has a real chance to be a very good President.  George W. Bush has already proven himself to be a failure as president.  Much as the man elected in 1980 was not Ronald Reagan but someone named “Not Jimmy Carter,” the winner this time will not be John Kerry, but it may very well be “Not George W. Bush.”

The Case for Electing John Kerry

By Robert S. McElvaine

There is no question that the foremost reason to vote for John Kerry is that he is Not George W. Bush.  This year we have a clear case of the reverse of an old maxim.  This time the devil we know is SOOO bad that even a devil we don’t know has to be an improvement.  But, Republican propaganda notwithstanding, John Kerry is no devil.

Will John Kerry be a great president?  I have no idea.  What we can say with certainty is that he has a much better chance of being a great president than George W. Bush does, since Mr. Bush’s chance of being a great president approaches zero, inasmuch as he has already proven himself to be a disastrous failure as president.

Some critics say Kerry does not have a distinguished record in the Senate and so is not qualified to be president.  We’ll talk about his actual Senate record in a moment.  But what was George W. Bush’s record before he became president?  He avoided service in Vietnam, used family influence to get a variety of positions, headed a failed oil exploration company that mainly served as a tax loss for investors, bought a baseball team and traded Sammy Sosa, and, as governor of Texas, led the “civilized” world in executions.  Admittedly, his pre-presidential record was much better than his record as president, but it was hardly anything to suggest that he was qualified to be president—which we now know all too well he is not.

In the Senate, Kerry broke with the Democrats to become a co-sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction and Balanced Budget Act.  As Chairman of the Small Business Committee, Sen. Kerry pushed legislation that assisted small businesses in many ways.  He wrote the Healthy Children, Family Assistance Health Insurance Program, which later became the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing coverage to some five million children.  He led, with John McCain, the investigation of the issue of POW/MIAs in Vietnam.  He was a leader in the Senate on environmental, healthcare, children’s, and housing issues.  The list goes on.

In any case, the fact is that senators don’t usually have especially memorable achievements.  Each senator, after all, is only 1/100 of one of the two bodies of the Congress.  With the exception of Lyndon Johnson, what senator who went on to the presidency in the last hundred years had a more impressive record than John Kerry?

Certainly not John F. Kennedy, whose record in the Senate on civil rights was referred to by biographer James MacGregor Burns as “a profile in cowardice.”  JFK’s Senate record when he ran for president in 1960 was, in fact, far less distinguished than is John F. Kerry’s today.  Yet most Americans still see John F. Kennedy as having been a very good president.

Let us look at where Senator Kerry stands on the issues and what he has committed to do if he is elected president:

Iraq:  The mess into which George W. Bush has taken us in Iraq is going to be difficult to fix.  The basic question of the election is whether a majority of Americans is willing to believe that the people who made the mess are capable of cleaning it up.  Kerry is in a better position to do so simply because he is not Bush.  He has a significantly better chance of restoring international cooperation, because he did not thumb his nose at the rest of the world as Bush did.

Terrorism:  One of the most contemptible things the Bush campaign has done (and there are many candidates for that dishonor) is the repeated statements to the American people that if John Kerry is elected we’ll all be likely to be hit by terrorists.  By rebuilding the alliances that Bush has trashed, by providing funding for inspection of containers coming into the United States, by implementing the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, and by refocusing our military attention on the real terrorists instead of Iraq, John Kerry will reduce the threat we face in ways that George Bush cannot.

The Economy:  Kerry is committed to ending tax subsidies for sending American jobs overseas.  He will provide tax cuts for the middle class and for businesses to stimulate the economy.  He will rescind the huge tax cuts for the richest Americans that Bush put through and move toward balancing the budget that Bush so quickly and spectacularly pushed from surplus to record deficit.

Health Care:  Kerry’s plan will allow all Americans access to the health insurance that members of Congress have.  It will reduce insurance premiums by covering catastrophic illnesses and it will provide coverage for all children.  It will reduce the cost of prescription drugs in a variety of ways, including allowing the importation of medicines from Canada.

Social Security:  Unlike President Bush, John Kerry is absolutely committed to preserving Social Security.  He will not privatize Social Security, draining from the system the money on which retirees depend.

Education:  Kerry will fund the No Child Left Behind program, which Bush has not.  He will establish a national Education Trust Fund, restore the cuts in after-school programs that the Bush administration made and expand after-school programs.  He plans to offer a College Opportunity Tax credit on up to $4,000 of tuition for every year of college.

Environment:  John Kerry has been a consistent champion of wise stewardship of our environment.  He will reverse the many environmentally dangerous actions of the Bush Administration.

Energy:  Kerry will move, though more rapid development of new technology and alternative energy sources to end American dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Science:  John Kerry will support stem-cell research that holds the promise of finding cures for many diseases.

Supreme Court:  John Kerry will appoint justices who are not the sort of right-wing ideologues (similar to Scalia and Thomas) that George W. Bush has said are the kinds of appointees he would choose.  If John Kerry chooses new justices, women will also have a choice.  If George W. Bush chooses new justices, women will lose their right to choose.

One Candidate in this Election is an Extremist, and It’s Not Kerry

The Bush campaign labels John Kerry as an extreme liberal.  The truth is that there is only one extremist in this election and his name is George W. Bush.

One candidate is slightly to one side of center; the other is the most extreme to one side that any American president has been since Coolidge.  The election is a choice between a moderate who is slightly to the left of the American center and an extremist who is far to the right of mainstream America, but has managed to keep the fact fairly well hidden from a majority of voters.

Why vote for John Kerry?  Here are a few very good reasons:

1) He doesn’t confuse himself with God

2) He is willing to take evidence into account and change course if things aren’t going well.

3) The world doesn’t despise and have no respect for him, as it does for Bush.

4) He isn’t the guy who messed everything up, so he has a much better chance of turning things around and getting us out of the mess into which Bush has gotten us.

5) He doesn’t use fear to try to get elected.

6) He is concerned about the well-being of the middle-class and the poor.

Two Questions to Ask Yourself before You Cast Your Vote

In the end, voters should ask themselves two questions before they cast their ballots on Tuesday.  Both were asked in past elections by Republican challengers.  In 1952, in the midst of a war that was going badly and a host of other problems, GOP vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon said to voters, “You wouldn’t trust the man who made the mess to clean up the mess, would you?”  (He was talking about Harry Truman and arguing that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson was “the man who was picked by the man who made the mess” and so couldn’t be trusted to clean it up, either.)  Unless we conclude that we would trust the man who made the mess we’re in today to clean it up, we will vote for Kerry.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan told voters to ask themselves whether they were better off than they were four years ago.  They weren’t, and voted accordingly, removing Jimmy Carter from office.  It is crystal clear that most of us are worse off today than we were four years ago.  Anyone who actually wants to keep things the way they are should vote for Bush and more of the same.  All of us who want a change have one option: John Kerry and a fresh start.

How will it turn out on Tuesday night, or whenever the winner is finally determined?  Who knows, but my analysis (as well as my heart) says that Kerry will win.  I think the most appropriate analogy is 1980.  An incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, was in deep trouble on many fronts, including a major crisis in the Middle East, a weak economy, and very high fuel prices.  The public definitely thought the country was moving in the wrong direction and that the incumbent should be defeated.  Yet on the weekend before the election, its outcome remained uncertain.  The reason was that many voters had doubts about the challenger.  In 1980, there was real fear that Ronald Reagan might get us involved in a major, even nuclear, war.  Those fears of Reagan were substantially greater than are the fears some people have of Kerry.  Yet, over the last weekend, large numbers of voters decided that they so much wanted to get rid of Carter that they were willing to take a big risk with Reagan, and the challenger won by a substantial margin.

The winner in 1980 was not Ronald Reagan; it was a man named “Not Jimmy Carter.”  Similarly, the winner in 2004 will not be John Kerry, but there’s a good chance it will be “Not George W. Bush.”

*  *  *

Now the job we all have is to contact every possible Kerry voter in person or by phone and be sure that they vote on or before Tuesday.  I’m off to Arkansas to help that effort there, so this will probably be my last pre-election message.

Let’s make America America Again!

{ Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, is the author of Eve’s Seed: Biology,the Sexes, and the Course of History, and is currently completing his first novel and screenplay, What It Feels Like . . . . Websites: http://home.millsaps.edu/~mcelvrs and http://evesseed.net/}

Contact information:

Robert S. McElvaine
Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters
Chair, Department of History
Millsaps College
Jackson, MS  39210

e-mail:  mcelvrs@hotmail.com
Web:     http://home.millsaps.edu/~mcelvrs

              http://evesseed.net/