I recently got an email from a friend who was being flown out 
to Pennsylvania to "register Democrats for Kerry".  He asked 
me about my vote.  The following was my response.


I'm afraid I'm voting against Kerry.

It's not that I think Bush is such a sharp guy.  He clearly got into Iraq 
without thinking things through.  However - unlike many administrations - 
his team has shown an interesting ability to learn from their mistakes, 
rather than just repeating them over and over again.  Once they figured 
out that a stable friendly government wouldn't just pop up out of nowhere, 
They came up with a patch - Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority 
- pretty quick.  And they managed to figure out that Chalabi was a 
slimeball and cut ties with him..  Allawi really handled the Al-Sadr 
situation pretty well, and it looks like he might be handling Fallujah 
the right way, after it was botched the first time in the spring.

I was on the fence about the war for a long time.  Normally I think that 
foreign interference is not the way to fix bad rulership; popular uprisings 
are.  What tipped my opinion there was that the U.S. encouraged a premature 
popular uprising in the first war - which I, unlike most Americans, think 
was a bad idea - then refrained from giving it the support we had implicitly 
promised (enforcing the no-fly zone), which gave Saddam the excuse and 
ability to brutally suppress it.  That, plus the misguided sanctions, 
allowed Saddam to tighten his grip from what was before merely a somewhat 
repressive dictatorship to a reign of terror in the 1990s.  The resulting 
misery of millions of normal Iraqis was ultimately our fault, and 
ultimately I'm glad we're doing something to fix the problem.

I also think that, intentionally or not, Bush did very well on the 
economic front.  Given how far the internet bubble had ballooned, a fairly 
severe downturn was inevitable when it burst; sharp cuts in taxes just when 
it was bursting was exactly the right thing to do to keep the downturn from 
being far worse than it was.  I was personally expecting a repeat of the 
Great Depression, given that the economy is going through as big a 
transition (from crafts to assembly line manufacturing then, from local to 
internet commerce now) - and obviously it hasn't been that bad, at least 
not yet.

My biggest concern with Kerry is what will happen with the war in Iraq if 
he's elected.  The last time we had a president with a war that he didn't 
start, but with a congress that wouldn't let him leave, it was Lyndon 
Johnson; the result in Vietnam was that Johnson, who didn't believe in the 
war, couldn't win it and end it, but he did end up increasing U.S. forces 
there from less than 100,000 when he took office to over 500,000 at the 
peak, reinstituting the draft in the process.  I'm quite concerned that 
the same thing might well happen under Kerry, especially as he often goes 
with what's politically popular and easy.  In contrast, Rumsfeld and 
the Bush administration are quite committed to the smaller, higher quality 
military that one gets from an all volunteer force, so I think there's a 
much better chance that they can bring things to a successful end, and at 
any rate a much better chance that they won't bring back the draft 
(provided they keep Rummy at the defense department, which I admit is not 
a complete given).

But I think all of these issues are things on which reasonable people can 
disagree.  I'd just like to see a little more willingness on the part of 
both sides to allow people to agree to disagree, rather than demonizing 
the opposition as seems more popular.


In unrelated discussions on news groups, I was asked about a 
two other issues:  civil liberties and the environment:


On the issue of civil liberties, I have to say that I can discern little 
difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.  The "Intercept and 
Obstruct" act - also called the "Patriot" act, a name I can't bring myself to 
use for it - was passed on a 98-1 vote in the Senate, which obviously included 
most senators on both sides of the aisle, and specifically included John Kerry.  
In fact, it seems likely to me that a Democratic administration that is 
pledging to provide more funding for "homeland security" would actually make 
the situation worse by providing more enforcement funding for the act.

Our primary defense against the Intercept & Obstruct act is that large portions
of it are clearly unconstitutional, and recognized as such by the Supreme
Court.  For example, in Hamdi v Rumsfeld, only one justice - Thomas - upheld
the government's view that he could be held without charges; four voted to
vacate and remand, and four would have preferred to require the government to
either immediately free Hamdi or immediately charge him with a crime and give
him access to legal representation.  I found Scalia's opinion, in which Stevens
concurred, arguing that Hamdi should be freed or charged, particularly eloquent
in this case.  If Scalia and Stevens can agree on this stuff, I think we're in
pretty good shape.  And if you're worried about new justices, keep in mind that
Scalia is exactly the kind of justice Bush says he'd appoint.

  or on its anti-environmental record, which might have added 
  a bit of balance.

On the environment, while I don't think the Bush administration has done much, 
I don't think Kerry would do better.  Bush at least raised the fuel efficiency
requirements on light trucks a bit.  This slightly reduces the
counterproductive incentive for automakers to promote gas guzzling SUVs over
more fuel efficient automobiles; it's not as much as I'd like to see, but it's
more than Clinton did.  What we really need is an increase of a dollar or two
per gallon in the gasoline tax, but no one since Anderson has had the guts to
propose that.


The bottom line is that Kerry is no better than Bush on issues like 
civil liberties and the environment, and is worse on the economy - 
where he proposes a system of partially socialized medicine without 
having done the math that shows it would cost thousands of dollars 
more per year for every American - and on the war.

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