Score to Cheney
Though I don't think the asymmetry was nearly so stark as in last week's debate, this evening's performance strikes me as a pretty decisive "victory" on Cheney's part.
1) Cheney was able to articulate Bush's policies in a way which imbued them with a coherence that Bush himself cannot express. Edwards, on the other hand, managed to make Kerry's platform sound mangled and inchoate in comparison.
2) Edwards came across as amazingly evasive. Cheney, for example, makes a pretty coherent argument for why Iraq should be considered a front in the "Global War on Terror" - Saddam was unlinked to 9/11, but his funding of Palestinian terrorism demonstrated a disturbing pattern of collusion with terrorists that was unacceptable in light of our grave concerns that he might possess weapons or weapon technologies that would be disastrous in terrorist hands. Edwards was left sputtering that there was no connection between Saddam and 9/11. Unfortunately, he was rebutting a charge that Cheney hadn't made and disregarding the argument the Vice President had in fact advanced.
3) In many ways, the candidates brought one another down though. They spent so much time accusing one another of dishonesty and deceitfulness, it was hard not to write them both off as liars and be done with it. Especially if one happens to be acquainted with the facts. For the life of me, I can't understand why Democrats don't hit the Republican myth of Afghani democracy with the incovenient facts that Karzai has defined multiple voting in the upcoming election as the epitome of democracy, rather than its antithesis, or observing that the vaunted 10 million registered voters outnumbers by several million any plausible estimate of the number of actual voters in the country. Edwards allowed Cheney to thrash him on the question of Iraqi casualties in the Iraqi conflict - insisting that it was a mark of disrespect to exclude them from the 90% American figure in their coalition casualty count - and missed the softball observation that several active Iraqi police and military divisions have had desertion rates as high as 70-80%. How hard could it have been to agree that many Iraqis have made many great sacrifices to aid the United States, but that we haven't done an adequate job of making sure that we're arming our allies and not our enemies? But hey, that's just me...
3) I thought the moderator sucked. Not just things like accidentally awarding Edwards an extra response ("did you figure out you were wrong?") Many of her questions seemed inapprorpiate. I really liked it when Cheney was reduced to asking, "you want me to speak for 90 seconds about his qualifications?" when prompted to rebut Edwards' response to the question about his qualifications. When she replied in the affirmative, it was hard to fault his brazen decision to spend his response praising Bush instead. Asking the candidates to contrast one another without reference to the top of the ticket was just plain silly and in many cases I felt the most vapid responses were a predictable outcome of vapid questions.
4) I thought Cheney had moderately more class. Asked to defend Bush's policy on the FDMA, he offered a really concise explanation for how he could square his position (a federalist) with his support for the Administration (the President sets policy, and I follow even when I disagree). Since the question was posed as one which specifically referenced Cheney's gay daughter, it put Edwards in an awkward response, and his kind of confused rambling praise of Cheney's private family life was embarrasing but again understandable. But Cheney's response was perfect. "Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds." "I want to thank Senator Edwards for his kind words about my family." "That's it?" "Yes." His refusal to advance the logic of Bush's proposals, which he had already noted his disagreement with (but support of) was both pointed and principled, and I thought his defusing of an awkward and potentially terrible situation was surprisingly graceful.
5) Both played better offense than defense. I'd never heard Cheney's charge that Edwards was a tax evader before, but in that context it made Edwards' response about his stewardship of Halliburton germaine. My guess, though, is that Cheney's wanted to draw Edwards out on Halliburton, because it's one of those issues that is critically important to a very marginal and off-putting segment of the Democratic base.
6) I found Edwards' class-bias really off-putting and somewhat distressing in the "Please, God, let Kerry win and survive a full term" sense. First of all, I think Democratic pandering to the middle class about all the goodies they deserve is morally wrong. In my opinion, Americans need to place more emphasis on shared burdens and responsibilities, especially in light of the challenges we face at the start of this century. Few Americans want a democracy that penalizes material success. I may be wrong, but trying to conjure up spectral bogey-men of "pool-sitting millionaires" as Edwards so unfortunately put it, is exactly the kind of class politics that almost all Americans, liberally inclined or conservatively so, rightly reject. The idea that there is an obligation which rises in proportion to the benefit one receives from it justifies the notion of progressive taxation. That is very different than an idea that one must penalize the rich for their success in order to shower undeserved subsidies upon the democratic majority (small d intentional). I thought Edwards' rhetoric was unabashedly forward about framing the tax issue as an attempt to simply swipe the benefits of wealth. Though I may agree with the policy, I find such a rationale for it to be morally repugnant, and I doubt many Americans are inclined to appreciate the argument when it's put in that way...
1 Comments:
Morally repugnant...?
I suppose, if I squint, I can see as morally repugnant the idea of "penalizing" the rich to shower "undeserved" benefits on the rest of society... I suppose that comes from my leanings being considerably closer to the "property is theft" end of the spectrum than the "rugged individualism" end. Not that I would maintain property is inherently theft, but you can see that I'm starting from a different place.
The thing is, well, the two things are:
A) I think there really *is* a class warfare going on in the US. It is not rightly put as the middle class versus the ultra-rich; the middle-class in the US are immensely well off in terms relative to the rest of the world. But rather,
B) our poor class, the class that practically doesn't vote and has seen very little income increases -- that is the class I think we have been waging war on. The US is one of (if not the) most unequal First World countries. We have an average availability of 3800 calories/capita/day or so, yet we still have hunger. The poorest neighborhoods are usually the most dangerous as well, making it unattractive for businesses and having, among many others, the side effect of making food, on average, more expensive in the poorest neighborhoods.
Most of this can be laid at the feet, in my opinion, of insufficient corporate governance and the capitalistic distortion of wealth in this country.
For one thing, the super-rich maintain themselves as such in part through inheritance, which if my understanding is correct (I haven't googled to confirm this possibly apocryphal notion), was heavily taxed in concordance with the "Forefather's" notion that wealth should be earned, not inherited with privelege (this sounds rather un-like our founding aristocrats, anyway). Ok, so I think I just argued that out of a coherent point. More pertinently -- the super-rich maintain themselves through the very low wages of their workers (at home and abroad), the huge externalization of costs (health and environmental primarily), and the artificial inflation of their own wages at the highest levels (as has been noted, many CEOs are on the Boards of other companies, which decide the salaries for CEOs -- there is no reason to moderate their own salaries because the higher the average of their peers, the higher they can ask for themselves).
The accumulation and acquisition of lavish lifestyles *depends* on the poor welfare of the rest of the world (primarily outside of the US -- the disarticulated economy of the 3rd World garuntees the permanent lack of Fordism to generate higher internal wages and marketing in the 3rd world). And if you believe, like I do, that most of the world contains far more meaningfully communal than personal goods (as one example, the sum of ecosystem services -- pollination, natural pest predators, natural water purification, oxygen cycle, waste remediation, carbon sequestration, etc) has been calculated to be something like $33 trillion. All of this outside of our formal economy, and most of it positive externality.
All of this is to say, if one believes most of society rests on the foundation of communal goods, the proportion one "owes" as related to one's wealth rapidly escalates, considering the huge amount of inequality in the US (and the world). Others are poor, by and large, because the 1st World became rich taking their resources. The rich are (mostly) there because they take advantage (usually legally) of such economic distortions to maintain and advance from where they (usually) started -- already having privilege. And, indeed, if we believe as is official gov't policy by and large, that spending money is free speech, indeed the rich by definition have far more freedom than the rest of us.
The caricature of the rich as sitting-by-the-poolside is unfortunate, because it has no real meaning other than to evoke class jealousy.
However, the fact that the disproven (il)logic of Malthus and social Darwinism continues as the foundation for much of our policy and economy means that there is a very real "war", not against poverty, but against the poor, who have learned it doesn't pay to vote, and it doesn't pay to play by the rules when everyone else has started several laps ahead in the rat race. The Middle class, the petty bourgeois, want to maintain their leg up on everyone else and *become* the pool-sitters. And for appealing to this sense of materialistic entitlement, I may agree with you about the repugnance of Edward's statement. But the fact that the "noblesse" have far more "oblige" to pay towards our bottom rung I think is rejected by most of the US.
And i think they're wrong.
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