The trauma of 9/11 has tended to obscure the memory of [the 2000] election, and its nail- biting aftermath, which verged on a constitutional crisis. But its legacy is very much still with us, made far worse by President Bush’s approach to dealing with it. Despite losing the popular vote, Bush governed as if he had won Reagan’s 49 state [landslide]. Instead of cementing a coalition of the center-right, Bush and Rove set out to ensure that the new evangelical base of the Republicans would turn out more reliably in 2004. Instead of seeing the post-’60s divide as a wound to be healed, they poured acid on it.Yeah...instead, he chose to side with the extreme fascists on his side of the political spectrum.
With 9/11, Bush had a reset moment—a chance to reunite the country in a way that would marginalize the extreme haters on both sides and forge a national consensus. He chose not to do so.
Sullivan goes on to discuss how a Clinton vs. Giuliani contest in 2008 would only intensify the bitterness of the Baby Boomer generation, as it has played out in every election from 1968 to 2004:
In normal times, such division is not fatal, and can even be healthy...[But] we are not talking about normal times. We are talking about a world in which Islamist terror, combined with increasingly available destructive technology, has already murdered thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Muslims, and could pose an existential danger to the West. The terrible failures of the Iraq occupation, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the progress of Iran toward nuclear capability, and the collapse of America’s prestige and moral reputation, especially among those millions of Muslims too young to have known any American president but Bush, heighten the stakes dramatically.That, in turn, leads to a key point in Sullivan's pro-Obama stance (as posted in the first excerpt on Monday):
It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.When it comes right down to it, I am still undecided in the Democratic primary. I believe Sen. Joe Biden could be the Democrats' Ronald Reagan in this election cycle and that he has the better chance at rectifying all that has gone wrong in the foreign policy realm under George W. Bush. The argument for an Obama presidency is also strong and could just as well be the perfect medicine for the United States and the globe in the post-Bush years.
I'll eventually make a decision. But the perfect team against any of the Republicans would be a Biden/Obama ticket!
Don't ya think?!
