Sunday, January 02, 2005

Kerry-bashing? Me?

Well, maybe just a little...

While I still think he was the best choice for President that our Party has offered in decades, I've still got my complaints about the way the Kerry campaign was conducted. A principle one was the failure to put enough emphasis on his energy independence plank, which was one of the most important issues he raised, but hardly raised enough, either in frequency or emphasis, to satisfy me. It was his best issue, in many ways, and yet it was perplexingly underplayed.

It's a great issue that hits national security, the national economy and consumer pocketbooks all at once. Sure, it's a complex issue that can get buried in a cloud of wonkish detail, but it's got the advantage of the kind of symbolic foe that the American electorat seems to need to hang an issue on. Naming that foe consistently drew a strong response every time I heard Kerry invoke it. A strong enough response that he should have beat that drum till our ears hurt.

The foe in question, of course, is Saudi Arabia. John Kerry was the only Presidential candidate in my memory to directly identify the problem the Saudis pose to the security of the United States, and there is no more deserving target for American scorn. As the New York Times editorialized yesterday...
Part of the price of every extra gallon helps, albeit indirectly, to finance mosques and religious schools all over the world that spread a fanatical variant of Islam that sees legitimacy in terrorist attacks. This financing, amounting to billions of dollars a year, comes from the government and private charities of Saudi Arabia, a country that is now taking in roughly $80 billion a year from oil exports.

****

There is no sinister Saudi conspiracy at work here. This is just what anyone should expect to happen when mind-boggling sums of oil money flow into an absolute monarchy that bases its legitimacy on puritanical militant Islam and offers no pretense of political accountability or transparent accounting. The more copiously that oil money flows, the less pressure a divided Saudi royal family feels to undertake the kind of difficult political and economic reforms that might conceivably break the nexus between oil and terror.

The Saudi syndrome is not the only reason Americans need to get much more serious about energy conservation. But it is a powerfully compelling one.
And, of course, the Saudis are among Bushco's best pals. Could Kerry have won the election by riding the energy independence issue, and the associated national security considerations, harder? I think so, but either way, he did a service by raising the issue in the campaign, and would have done a greater service by raising it higher and louder. Failing to perform that greater service, was, I think, a fundamental mistake by the campaign.


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