Thursday, September 23, 2004
(8:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
But -- he voted for it!
This discussion over at our sister site has reminded me once again of one of the simplistic forms of thinking that seems to have poisoned the electorate. I'm referring to the idea that a legislator's voting record displays his or her inmost convictions. There are a million reasons to vote for or against a piece of legislation -- party loyalty, back-scratching exchanges with other legislators, and most commonly, believing that this non-ideal piece of legislation is probably the best thing that's going to come down the pike.Individual legislators don't set the agenda. There is a limited group of people who decide which pieces of legislation come to a vote. Just like the American public, individual legislators have to make do by deciding between often undesirable options -- although, unlike the American public, they usually feel like they still need to vote on a lot of those issues. So it's dumb to say that by voting for the authorization to use force in Iraq -- something, mind you, that I think no one should have done -- John Kerry was expressing his conviction that conquering Iraq was the best idea ever. It doesn't mean that criticizing unforeseen action that the president took as a result of that authorization constitutes "flip-flopping" -- just as voting against the $87 billion doesn't mean that what he really wanted was to abandon all the soldiers out there in the desert so they could find their own way home.
Legislative bodies are complicated environments. In fact, since the American people are so poorly informed, I think it would make a lot more sense if senators didn't get nominated for president. That way we wouldn't have to put up with these apples-and-oranges comparisons between the actions of someone who had a free hand to set the agenda and someone who, on most issues, basically has to hold his nose and vote in favor of some things that he wouldn't have proposed if he had been in charge.
In short, the fact that Kerry voted in favor of the resolution to use force does not tell us what he would have done had he been president and thus been able to set the agenda himself. I daresay that virtually any president would have invaded Afghanistan, but Iraq would not have been the obvious next choice to people who had not been obsessed with Iraq for more than ten years (i.e., the Bush administration). Voting for the authorization to use force in Iraq might display a certain naivete in the person who thus voted, but it certainly doesn't indicate that when the president started talking about Iraq, everyone thought, "You know what? I thought Iraq was the biggest possible threat ever, too! I love you, George Bush, for bringing it up! I can hardly wait to invade!"
Ideally, of course, the Democrats would have nominated someone who was resolutely anti-war from the beginning, and ideally, they would have realized the kind of idiocy they were dealing with on the Iraq question and not put themselves in a position where nominating an anti-Iraq-war candidate would mean admitting that the party leadership had previously made a mistake -- but then, I don't set the agenda. I can only vote for one of the options that's presented to me. It seems self-evident that Kerry is a better choice than Bush. That doesn't mean that he's a great choice in absolute terms or that I preemptively approve every step he would take as president. I hope people would realize the absurdity if I were complaining in three years about how we didn't have universal health care and someone said to me, "If you wanted universal health care, then why the hell did you vote for Kerry, knowing he didn't support universal health care?"
As an endnote, I actually think my ideal candidate, from among all the Democrats who have been sufficiently aged, would be The New Al Gore. If he could somehow manage to be running for president and maintain the new balls he's grown since the Florida debacle, I think he would do really well -- and the fact that he's been out of government service during the whole Bush administration means that he's not implicated in "favoring" any Bush policies at all. If I remember right, he also meets my requirement of being anti-Iraq-war from day one. Of course, even The Old Al Gore somehow managed to win the popular vote by half a million votes, thus gaining more popular votes than any other candidate in history other than Ronald Reagan. I know, I know -- the official stance right now is that he "lost" and that focussing on the irregularities is typical liberal irrelevance and bitterness, but I think that Al Gore and the American people could have made beautiful music together in November.
