Betting on the people

Educated people I speak with often express a profound distrust of the American electorate. Citizens don't read newspapers anymore. They are too easily influenced by sound bites. And most distressingly, they don't vote. That the United States has serious problems right now is clear to most. That the population will choose the right man to lead us through them is less clear.

From a historical perspective, this distrust is unwarranted. Each time America has faced a serious crisis, internal or external, the electorate has responded by elevating great leaders to the presidency.

When the original colonies confronted the prospect of a war for independence, they chose George Washington to lead them. When the South threatened to break up the union over slavery during the 1860 election campaign, the voters sent Abraham Lincoln to Washington. Herbert Hoover's inept handling of the Depression led the country to replace him with FDR. Finally, as the United States struggled to create a new international order in the wake of World War II, the citizens chose to reelect President Harry Truman, whose policy choices set the country on the road to winning the Cold War.

Most people would agree that, in the face of these dire threats, the electorate picked the right man. We can argue about the extent to which circumstances dictate policy, but Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Truman safely guided the republic through existential crises.

I believe that Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of another existential crisis. The old patterns that guided American foreign policy during the Cold War will not suffice to counter the threat of Islamic terrorism. Our government must forge new alliances and recast old ones, craft new legislation balancing civil liberties and security, and somehow lance the poisonous boils of hatred in the Middle East. These challenges cry out for enlightened, determined leadership in the same way our previous crises did.

The difference between the current crisis and its predecessors lies in the timing of the elections.

Whatever you think of President Bush, he was elected before the nature of the current crisis was visible to the majority of the electorate. Like Herbert Hoover, he was not chosen as a crisis president — the crisis hit after he was elected.

Viewed from this perspective, the upcoming election, the first since Sept. 11, takes on added urgency. The differences between President Bush and Senator John Kerry on the important issues should be obvious to anyone who takes the time to read a decent newspaper.