The Bush paradox

A few weeks ago, I participated in an unusual exchange in the Frist Center. Feeling slightly mischievous, I walked up to the Young Republicans tent on the main floor and tried to convince them that President Bush was an entirely unattractive choice for the upcoming election.

Surely this charge has been made dozens of times by Democrats at Princeton and in various places around the country. However, what was strange about this particular conversation about the merits of our president is that by the end, the Young Republicans at the table admitted that they entirely agreed with me: Bush is indeed not a good choice for the job.

I approached the table and greeted the young Republicans, first noting that I am a Republican myself. I went on to say that I was disaffected with our current political leadership, since Bush has systematically betrayed moderate libertarian voters on every issue that led them to support him in 2000. I proceeded to list the 2000 campaign promises that Bush has reneged on during his first term in office, starting with his professed commitment to federalism.

The fundamental tenet of federalism is state-level lawmaking, the idea that people should be able to make their own legislative decisions for their own states. Bush ran heavily on this principle in 2000, yet in every instance where he has had a chance to follow this doctrine, he has done just the opposite.

In late 2000 he ordered John Ashcroft to file a federal injunction to stop an assisted suicide bill in Oregon, and in 2003 Bush endorsed a Constitutional ban on gay marriage designed to trump state authority in a distinctly state matter.

Instead of really allowing people to made decisions about their own lives, Bush has endorsed a particular brand of morality as superior to all others, most likely because much of his core support lies in the religious right. This is not what I bargained for in 2000.

Bush also ran on a platform of small government and fiscal responsibility, which has also evaporated in practice. The war in Iraq has proved extraordinarily expensive, and has been accompanied by large tax breaks, all soon to be paid for with deficit spending.

As I have argued in my previous columns, the war in Iraq was ill-conceived because Saddam Hussein was not a threat to our nation, no matter what types of armaments he possessed. He had the ability to unleash chemical weapons on our troops in the first Gulf War, when his rule was in real jeopardy. However, he chose not to.

The first instinct of every dictator is to preserve his own control over the government, and Saddam knew that if he ever used weapons of mass destruction on American troops he would have no chance of surviving the retaliation. No one has given a good explanation regarding why the paradigm changed before the second Iraq War, or why we should have endeavored to absorb the problems of one of the world's most violent nations because of a national security threat that didn't exist.

After I presented this line of reasoning, the Young Republicans at the table looked just as gloomy as I did. They turned to me, and in low voice, admitted that "we don't like Bush either, but he is better than Kerry — so you have to vote for him anyway!"

Unfortunately, the Republican Party (and the rest of the nation) is entangled in a political paradox: we do not like our leaders, but we like the opposition even less. The close alliance between John Kerry and Ted Kennedy has led many disaffected moderate voters to genuinely fear a Kerry victory. Kennedy has publicly said that Iraq is our generation's "Vietnam," leading me to believe that a Kerry administration, heavily influenced by Kennedy's far left, will come under heavy pressure to abandon our responsibilities there. Although the Bush presidency has been bad, this would be far worse.

My hope is that somehow, the American people will recognize the very paradox we are living in, and make a responsible choice in the next election. Unfortunately, I do not know which choice, if any, is the responsible one. David Sillers is a politics major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at dsillers@princeton.edu.