RIGHT, LEFT & NONE OF THE ABOVE
Higgins, Thomas
my mind in this election on most economic questions. To judge by their recent presidential questionnaire, our bishops imply that the minimum wage, farm policy, low-cost housing, and other such...
...Changing leaders now is less risky than sticking with folly for four more years...
...George Bush is neither stupid nor evil, as some would have it...
...Mostly, I vote against abortion these days because I think that this one practice has coarsened our national life and deadened our finer human sentiments as nothing else in my lifetime...
...John Kerry was not my first choice to be the nominee of the Democratic Party...
...The major media outlets often say that the Republicans are hostage to a narrow "theological" minority on abortion, embryonic stem cells, gay marriage, and various other issues...
...I am reminded of the late 1970s, when the Democratic Party began to lose a significant part of the Catholic vote because of abortion...
...As the Bard of New Jersey, AKA Bruce Springsteen, wrote in his endorsement of Kerry-Edwards, "Our American government has strayed too far from American values...
...And I cannot, in conscience, cooperate in the permanent corruption of our moral life—particularly at the hands of a professed Catholic...
...It is hard to imagine that Colin Powell had any idea what he was signing on for as secretary of state, given the very different record of the previous Bush administration...
...Because the United States has now proclaimed a new foreign policy, the Bush Doctrine, which embraces a theory of "preemptive war," even when the United States has not been threatened with attack, as in the case of Iraq...
...Because as a nation we are less equal, less prosperous, and less secure than we were just four years ago...
...So when all is said and done, I'll vote Republican because President Bush, I believe, won't appoint Supreme Court justices who will further entrench Roe v. Wade in our dear land...
...Most public opinion polls failed to pick up the shift immediately because of limitations in polling methodology with small samples—they underestimate the defection of vertical slices of the electorate...
...I myself will not go to the mat for a stronger immigration policy or faith-based initiatives or No Child Left Behind...
...It is as though he needed somehow to repudiate the record of his father, who respected alliances and was fiscally responsible...
...Thomas Higgins W by am I supporting John Kerry...
...under Bush, the average annual decline has been 450,000...
...The majority of military and diplomatic professionals in government had grave concerns about the wisdom of going into Iraq with such flawed assumptions and poor planning...
...Enough was known at the time about the intentions of the Bush ad-ministration to warrant a refusal to grant them the authority to invade Iraq...
...But his conduct of the war and the direction of the economy are a reflection of underlying incompetence...
...The environmental record of the Bush administration is a special cause for alarm, especially for future generations who will have to live with the consequences...
...and opening the nation-al forests for massive new logging operations are all fraught with peril...
...No other developed nation does so little for such a vulnerable population...
...A cavalier disregard for the effects of global climate change, symbolized by rejection of the Kyoto treaty...
...The average annual job growth under Clinton was 2.83 million...
...Ronald Reagan 's famous debate question, "Ask yourself if you are better off now than you were four years ago," is a fair one...
...John Kerry isn't ideal...
...And on matters of character and judgment, which are harder to quantify, but more important than any Senate vote, I believe that Kerry is far more likely to lead America wisely, to protect our liberty, and to restore our honor...
...The shameful treatment of the late Bob Casey at the 1992 Democratic convention inaugurated an ideological chokehold on the party that keeps many of us, who might otherwise look at a Democratic candidate—occasionally, in theory, in fear and trembling—from ever doing so...
...On the budget, tax cuts, trade policy, and more, this has been the most radical administration of my lifetime...
...Kerry has an even stronger case to make in domestic policy...
...It has often been said that Catholics have no political home in America: the Republicans are hard-hearted toward the poor and the Democrats callous about innocent life...
...Kerry deserves particular credit for his proposal to address a crisis in health care that has left 45 million Americans without insurance protection...
...Robert Royal is president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C...
...My friend Leon Kass, who heads the president's bioethics commission, for instance, has been wrongly characterized as a tool of Republican sectarians...
...But I think Kerry will win, and win decisively...
...For me, an abortion society is the moral equivalent of a slave-holding society and maybe worse: at least slave masters did not kill over a million slaves every year...
...Because despite the decency, fairness, and generosity of our people, America has never been more feared and despised in the world than it is today...
...Presidential elections involving an incumbent are invariably a referendum of sorts...
...Under the Clinton administration, the number of Americans living in poverty declined an average of 800,000 per year...
...repeated efforts to drill for oil and gas in sensitive ecosystems...
...Only the wealthiest segment of the country could reasonably answer yes today...
...I am not aware of any president whose second term was much of an improvement, especially when the first term was seriously compromised...
...The country we carry in our hearts is waiting...
...His book The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History (Crossroad) is soon to be reissued in paperback...
...He wasn't even my second choice, primarily because of his confusing stance on the war...
...Thomas Higgins is the CEO of a biotechnology company in San Francisco...
...But there are actually some diversity of opinion among Republicans and real debate at the level of nation-al politics...
...The annual average surplus in the Clinton years was $5 billion, and the annual average deficit under Bush is now a staggering $350 billion...
...It is time to move forward...
...For communities of faith, this degradation challenges the biblical injunction for us to be stewards of the Earth and all that lives on it...
...This is something of a political cartoon, but it expresses enough truth to make us reflect...
...To judge by their recent presidential questionnaire, our bishops imply that the minimum wage, farm policy, low-cost housing, and other such issues are crucial...
...They are important, and other things being equal, might even be decisive in certain times and circumstances...
...Indeed, we are more divided, more vulnerable, and more impoverished...
...But on a range of other issues both broad and deep, Senator Kerry's public record is vastly superior to that of President Bush...
...Because future generations of Americans are now saddled with budget deficits so crippling, their opportunities for financial security are gravely imperiled...
...It was already evident that an invasion would squander the support of most of our allies and risk the precarious gains we had made in the war on terror...
...If you want narrow dogma, how about the plight of a major political party in which being prolife disqualifies you from seeking national office because special interests forbid it...
...Karl Rove, the White House political director, has made no secret of his view that the president's father erred in governing as a moderate...
...When the Baby Boomers begin to retire, it will get much, much worse...
...BALOO Commonweal 13 October 8, 2004 had the support of most of the world...
...But I frequently hear the opposite, and Gore won the popular vote the last time...
...It is affordable...
...The president who campaigned as a "compassionate conservative," as "a uniter, not a divider," turned immediately after his election to a governing strategy designed to appease the most conservative elements of his political base...
...It seems wholly irrational to return to office an administration that has failed so thoroughly the test of national security...
...Now we are left to cope with the bitter fruit of the ideologues' arrogance: the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years...
...The Democrats' enslavement to special interests and consequent inability to run prolife candidates for high office is doing deep harm both to their own party and to the nation...
...foreign policy and upended some of our most basic values...
...This time it is a part of the Republican base that is quietly defecting—moderate conservatives who are dismayed by events in Iraq and the size of the budget deficits...
...John Kerry could potentially nominate four proabortion justices, which would establish abortion through the lifetimes of my children and future grandchildren, and probably for-ever...
...By covering the uninsured, we have the prospect of improving quality and controlling health costs, which now threaten our economic recovery...
...In this time of danger, I will vote my hopes, not my fears...
...At this writing, the polls show President Bush with a lead...
...Yet Kerry made his choice, and his subsequent explanations for that vote have been wanting both in clarity and consistency...
...But other things are not equal...
...The greater shock, however, has been the degree to which a hard core of extremists, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, gained control of U.S...
...Under President Bush, the number has increased an average of 1.5 million per year...
...We could do so much more to reduce this tragedy by providing greater assistance to mothers in need of assistance for their children...
...While this is not altogether the fault of George W. Bush, no other individual bears greater responsibility...
...His record on abortion is also troubling, not so much on account of his endorsement of Roe v. Wade, as for his lack of initiative to reduce the number of abortions...
...I have yet to hear someone who voted for Gore the last time say he or she is supporting Bush this time...
...But he has served our country with distinction throughout his career...
...For the poor, the working and middle classes, life is notably more difficult and the future is strikingly more uncertain...
...It is especially difficult to square his support for the Iraq resolution with his vote against a similar grant of authority in the Kuwait war, which involved a legitimate exercise of power to uphold international law and which, accordingly, "Why, of course 1 want voter input—just tell see what you want to hear...
...Commonweal 14 October 8, 2004...
...Anyone who knows him and the commission's work also knows that he thinks deeply and is far from dogmatic—too far for me, in some cases...
...it would be paid in part by repealing tax cuts showered on the wealthiest Americans by President Bushand the Republican-controlled Congress...
...Even if you grant that abortion should be legal in order to be safe, it is nevertheless incumbent on a moral society to make abortions rare by offering women means of support to care sufficiently for their children...
...What politician is...
...His health plan would extend cover-age to 95 percent of the population, including every child...
Vol. 131 • October 2004 • No. 17
