2004 Redux?

He is a U.S. Senator with a record of accomplishment, and when he runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, his party rallies around him to defeat an intensely disliked Republican President who got in without winning the popular vote and bungled his reaction to a national crisis.  Unfortunately, but the Democratic presidential nominee's awkwardness and paper trail of controversial Senate votes hamper him, as do rumors about his past.  Although early polls show him in a strong position against the incumbent President, many fear that he will still lose in November.

No, he isn't Joe Biden; I'm talking about John Kerry in 2004.  But the resemblance between the two is striking.  Biden, like Kerry, seeks to defeat an incumbent Republican President who has all of the advantages of incumbency and an ability to influence the voters that no challenger can match.  And the fear of another outcome like 2004 - Kerry lost - is justified.  George Walker Bush made the argument that you don't change leaders in the middle of a war, and Donald Trump is trying to position himself as a steady leader in the middle of a pandemic . . . while ignoring scientific and medical guidelines.  Polls show that, though Biden has an overall edge over Trump, Trump is solidly beating - yes, beating - Biden on the economy despite its free-fall in the past nine weeks.  Trump knows this, which is why he's pushing the insane, inane idea that the economy will regain a good deal of its mojo by autumn if we reopen immediately - science be damned! This would suggest that enough people in swing states can be taken in to give Trump the necessary swing states to give him the necessary 270 votes  in the Electoral College.

Biden backers have every reason to be worried - especially when people who should be in his column (*cough cough*, Bernie bros, *cough cough*) aren't ready to support him yet and maybe won't be ready at all . . . and he also has to deal with campaigning with only one resource to him - virtual outreach - that is also his greatest weakness.  But there are differences between 2004 and 2020.  The economy was going relatively smoothly in 2004, and Kerry was a less a known quantity than Biden, hence the "Swift Boat" charges against him stuck to him more firmly than sex-assault allegations against Biden have.  Trump can talk up the economy all he wants, but whether states reopen sooner or whether they reopen later, the growth he projects will likely not happen and the economy is likely to  get worse between now and November and erode his standing.  His campaign merrily pledges to destroy Biden, but Biden sees what's coming and is slowly but diligently preparing for that inevitability.  (If he could only get his Internet connections to work flawlessly.)   Biden beats Trump in polling on who would handle the pandemic better; this pandemic could be going on for years, at least until 2023.  And if more states open up, it could give Biden the opportunity to have public events that allow him to engage in retail politics - with previously screened and tested groups of voters, of course - which is is biggest strength.

I am not saying Biden will win in November.  After all, despite the reality of a worsening economy, Trump's effort at exploiting his better polling numbers on the issue over Biden might just work.  I am only saying that the circumstances facing Biden are different from the circumstances failing Kerry in 2004, and they allow more room for Biden to gain an edge on Election Day.  One thing is for certain - even if Trump wins, he will not win a majority of the popular vote.  The election of 2004 is one of only two instances in which the Republican presidential candidate won a popular majority since Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election landslide; the other instance was the election of 1988.

Both of the winners, for the record, were named George Bush.  And unlike Trump, both Bushes took national-security crises seriously.  (The younger Bush started the initiative to have the United States plan for dealing with . . . a pandemic.)

Hart Versus Bush - It Finally Happened!

Gary Hart's withdrawal from the 1988 presidential campaign eighteen months to the day before the general election over a sex scandal cheated the nation out of what was expected to be the classic presidential-election match-up everyone was hoping for and expected - Gary Hart versus George Bush.  The fall of Hart, whom Bush respected and had predicted would be a worthy opponent, paved the way for Michael Dukakis, whom Bush had less regard for, to oppose the Vice President.  Well, we finally got the contest Washington insiders had hoped for - Hart versus Bush, in the form of the media attention both men have gotten in the past couple of weeks.  Hart, whose unraveling in May 1987 is the subject of the currently running theatrical movie The Front Runner (starring Hugh Jackman as Hart), has been looked at anew, while George Bush, who died recently at the age of 94, has undergone a reappraisal.

It's over - Bush won.

George Bush was heralded this past week as a decent man even by his onetime Democratic opponents, and he was credited for leading the nation with integrity and dignity and for putting country over party.  He helped revive the domestic economy by, after vowing to oppose new taxes, agreeing to raise the old ones.  He masterfully led a decisive military campaign in the Middle East to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty.  His modesty allowed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to allow the Communist bloc nations of Eastern Europe to break free from Soviet domination and open the Berlin Wall, leading to the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the Cold War (though I still give Pope John Paul II the most credit for ending it).  A lot of people who refused to support him back in the day - even I - acknowledge that was the right leader at the right time.

So where does that leave Hart?  Pretty much nowhere.  Speculation on what might have been had Hart been elected President in 1988 focuses on how he proved to be right about so many things - the rise of a post-industrial economy, the destabilization of the Middle East and the rise of stateless terrorism - and we've been told how, had Hart defeated Bush, there would have been no George W. Bush Presidency, no Iraq War, no deterioration of the middle class thanks to Hart's domestic "strategic investments," and possibly no Clintons.  Maybe we would have even had a renewable-energy grid.  This speculation has been fanned not just by The Front Runner and by interviews with Hart himself but by a recent article by James Fallows of The Atlantic reporting that Bush campaign henchman Lee Atwater - who died in 1991 - revealed on his deathbed that he helped set up Hart's boat trip to Bimini to get Hart in a compromising position with a woman not his wife. And the argument for the Hart Presidency that never was is tempting to ponder.

Unfortunately, no one's buying it.

Hart is viewed as more of a curiosity than as a relevant politician, and the arguments in favor of how we would have been better off with Hart as President don't hold water.  Appraising him anew only reminds us of what we didn't like about him - his arrogance, his aloofness, and his cockiness.  Those traits all came out when he tried to deal with the allegations of infidelity that resulted from the Bimini affair.  We can't imagine him dealing with Congress with that sort of temperament.

Even his foreign-policy credentials have to be called into question.  What many people have forgotten is that Hart was actually friends with Gorbachev and planned to work with him closely once he was elected - not inaugurated, elected - President.  Hart had planned to negotiate a drastic arms reduction agreement with Gorbachev between his election and his inauguration, the agreement likely to be sent to the Senate on Day One of a Hart administration, and Hart even planned to invite Gorbachev to his inauguration.  And Gorbachev likely would have accepted.  I can just imagine the heads of all the Republicans exploding over that - ironic in light of the all-too-cozy relationship between Trump and Putin today.  But may I play devil's advocate here?  What if President Hart's friendship with Gorbachev had so annoyed the Kremlin hardliners that it led them to attempt at purging Gorbachev earlier than they actually did, in August 1991 - and what if, had it been attempted earlier, the purge had succeeded? And what if the U.S.S.R. had survived and canceled the arms agreements? Or what if the agreements the Soviets had made with President Hart had given Gorbachev the opportunity to keep the Soviet Union together? This all could have delayed the fall of the Eastern bloc and a unified Germany in NATO and completely prevented the independence of the Baltic States.

And  The Front Runner?  I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but I did read the Matt Bai from 2014 that it's based on, "All The Truth Is Out," which argued that the tabloid-like media attention on the Bimini affair diverted the press from focusing on policy in covering politics and toward covering personalities and intimate details of politicians' personal lives - and how Hart's tabloid-driven fall led to the Bushes, the Clintons, and a President who was elected more on star power than policies (Obama).  As I wrote in my review of this book in December 2015, I acknowledged that the media went too far pursuing the Bimini affair but I added that Bai failed to convince me that Hart could have been a great President.  It appears that the movie hasn't made a persuasive argument in favor of Hart either; not only have critics been unmoved, no one has gone to see it.  Hart's efforts in the 1988 Iowa caucuses following his re-entry in the presidential campaign - where he finished last with a pathetic 0.4 percent of the vote - probably attracted more Hart supporters to precinct meetings than this movie has attracted audiences to theaters.  Chuck Todd did interview Bai and The Front Runner director Jason Reitman about the movie, but not on "Meet The Press" - he had them on his much less prestigious MSNBC show.  And while you would expected the PBS NewsHour to have a story on The Front Runner, the NewsHour's arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown went to the Toronto Film Festival, where it was screened, and did stories on several movies shown there.  Tellingly however,  The Front Runner was not one of them.

(Aside: I probably won't be impressed by this movie - which I said back in December 2017 was supposed to be a comedy, as I had read somewhere, but that turned out to be erroneous - when I do see it, as it not only makes an argument for Hart that I already rejected, but it also uses fictionalized composite characters.  That's an artistic device common in BOATS, or "Based On A True Story," movies, and it's a device I have always hated.  Hart protégé Martin O'Malley is not a character in this movie, despite having been featured in Bai's book; that may turn out to be a good thing.)

Was Bush a great President?  No - Clarence Thomas will forever be a blot on his legacy.  But was he at least a good President?  Overall, yes; he had the right temperament for the job at a critical time in American history.  And truth be told, even if Hart, who had had episodes of womanizing in his past, had avoided a sex scandal and had kept his arrogance in check, he might still have lost, given the rightward drift in American politics at the time, though whether or not there was ever a chance to prevent Ronald Reagan's legacy to be locked in by a Republican successor is still subject to debate.  But I think the debate over what might have been is over.  The American people just looked at Bush and Hart and clearly made their choice. Bush was a leader and the once iconic Hart was and is, as Gail Sheehy called him, a joke.

And Hart will forever be seen as a joke.  That is never going to end, is it?  Go home, Gary.  Go home. 

41

I remember being frustrated and despondent during the presidential administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, as he consistently opposed or lacked interest in any of the policies I supported, and at one point before the invasion of Iraq to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty after Saddam Hussein took over  Kuwait, I thought what we now call the Persian Gulf War could become World War III.  And I was always annoyed how he got elected to succeed Ronald Reagan, using all sorts of dirty tricks and irrelevant issues against his 1988 Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.  (The Bush mud-slinging campaign and its fixation with the Pledge of Allegiance and furloughed Massachusetts inmate Willie Horton even infuriated Barry Goldwater.)  But Bush, who died yesterday, looks better in retrospect, at least partially.

On the one hand, the forty-first U.S. President locked in Reagan's supply-side approach to domestic policy, but he also compromised with congressional Democrats to get the budget deficit down and get the economy going again, even if it meant raising taxes.  On the one hand, he put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, but he also appointed David Souter.  And while Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II may have unraveled communism in Eastern Europe, Bush, who had succeeded as President the most hardened Cold War leader since John F. Kennedy, continued the relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev that Reagan had had with him, and he carefully avoided grandstanding when the Berlin Wall fell, paving the way for a united Germany within NATO.  He vowed not to rub in the fall of the communist bloc on Gorbachev by standing on the Wall and breaking out in song (which he left for Crosby, Stills and Nash), and he didn't gloat when the Baltic States seceded from the Soviet Union (the United States had never recognized Soviet annexation of the Baltics in the first place), paving the way for the remaining twelve Soviet republics to go their own separate ways peacefully.  And when he refused to have American troops march on to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait, it turned out to be the right decision - a decision vindicated, ironically, by his son.

So, on balance, Bush the Elder batted about five hundred.  That's better than popping up and claiming to have knocked the ball out of the park, something the current White House occupant is known for.

Iraq: It Started With a Bang

President Obama addressed a convention of disabled veterans in Atlanta today declaring that all American combat troops in Iraq - which, I believe is still trying to form a new government after the elections in March - and even though today is the twentieth invasion of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Mr. Obama did not mention the event.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was actually a watershed moment for the world, as it was the point where the Cold War began to end and a new era of geopolitics began to emerge. With greater instability in the Middle East and Iraq's sudden control of over 20 percent of the world's oil as a result of his occupation of Kuwait, Western focus shifted from the Soviet Union - a year and change away from dissolving - and eastern Europe to the rise of Arab and Islamic influence. President George Bush sent troops to Saudi Arabia to check the Iraqi army from going any further and then push Saddam's troops out of Kuwait when it became apparent that Saddam wouldn't give it up without a fight. This angered Osama bin Laden, who resented the presence of American troops in his homeland, which led him to form al-Qaeda from the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan, from which the Soviets had withdrawn and which the Americans forgot about. (Bin Laden wanted to use his commandos to defend Saudi territory, but King Fahd would have none of it.) Bin Laden himself took up residence in Afghanistan much later after living in Sudan, where he approved and oversaw the plotting of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks that took place in September 2001, which the second President Bush used as an excuse to invade . . . Iraq.

Before August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein was a thuggish dictator who persecuted his own people and had grand but unrealized ambitions of controlling more of the Middle East. His invasion of Kuwait upset the balance of power in the Persian Gulf region. In the eighties, the United States had supported his regime as a counterweight against the Islamic fundamentalists who ran Iran, and American support allowed Saddam to wage an eight-year war against Iran. When he forcibly annexed Kuwait, the elder Bush must have wondered who would provide a counterweight to Saddam.

I must admit this: The Persian Gulf War was the right war to prosecute, although I didn't think so at the time. Although I feared it would lead to World War III and last interminably, what happened was that the Iraqi army was decimated in six weeks, Kuwait regained its sovereignty, and a peace was quickly established in which Saddam was contained by the American and British air forces. War was never actually declared against Iraq - an official declaration of war, if I'm not mistaken was made in advance by Saddam's rubber-stamp Parliament recognizing a state of war if Kuwait was invaded by the Americans and their allies - but the resolution Congress gave to the senior to wage war was used judiciously. Bush could have allowed American troops to go deep into Iraq, march on Baghdad, and overthrow Saddam - but he merely wanted to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty, not remake Iraqi civilization. Besides, Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, and General Norman Schwarzkopf knew what would happen if they tried to invade and occupy Iraq. Exactly what happened when Bush's son did the same thing. The younger Bush's war didn't start a global conflict, but, boy, has it been interminable.

Was it about oil? Of course it was about oil, but bear in mind that in 1990, the U.S. only got twelve percent of its oil from the Gulf region, while Germany and Japan got much more of their oil from there. Japan actually paid for much of the military operation then called Desert Storm. Had Saddam been allowed to annex Kuwait, it would have amounted to appeasement and given carte blanche to starve the West of oil. The Saudis, who have more oil than they need, are happy to sell it to anyone, but Saddam would likely have used greater control of the world's oil as a weapon. It figures that American policymakers only realized that after it was too late, after having propped him up for eleven years.

If Albert Gore - who supported the Persian Gulf War but has never supported the current war in Iraq - had become President in 2001 instead of George Walker Bush, there likely wouldn't have been another war in Iraq, but we'd probably still be in Afghanistan and we would still be struggling against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And while our dealings with Iraq would have been different, they wouldn't necessarily have turned out better. It's only fair to say they would have been different.

The effects of the invasion of Kuwait twenty years ago today, despite shift in American policies based on who's in the White House, are likely to last for a long time.