[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 47 (Tuesday, April 6, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3736-S3738]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FEAR AND PESSIMISM IN CAMPAIGN POLITICS
Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, on the 5th of April, the senior Senator
from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, appearing before the Brookings
Institute, delivered what Larry King described as a blistering attack
on the Bush administration. Last night, Larry King and Senator Kennedy
had a conversation about the speech and Senator Kennedy's comments that
is worthy of comment and reaction in the Senate.
First, let me make this observation. Senator Kennedy earlier in this
campaign made personal attacks on the President which I felt compelled
to respond to in the Senate.
I am happy to report in his conversations with Larry King, Senator
Kennedy backed away from that degree of personal attack on the
President, and I salute him for that. I think it important for us to
recognize how much we can get carried away with election-year rhetoric
and how personal we can get in our attacks sometimes. I salute Senator
Kennedy, in spite of the vigorousness of his attack on the
administration, for his decision to back away from personal attacks on
the President. I would hope other members of his party would follow his
lead.
We have seen the former Vice President of the United States attack
the President of the United States in language reminiscent of that
which Joe McCarthy used to use to attack Harry Truman. We should back
away from that kind of personal hatred, even though historically it has
been part of our election tradition.
There has probably not been a President more personally hated than
Franklin Roosevelt in my lifetime. I remember the things that were said
about him. I remember the things that were said about Harry Truman. I
remember some of the things that were said about Richard Nixon, about
Bill Clinton. We should back away from those kinds of personal attacks.
Unfortunately, this election year has seen them come back to the point
where one could almost say the basis of the campaign against the
President is, in fact, personal hatred.
Former Governor Dean certainly went into that direction in his
attacks against the President. We have seen Senator Kerry, in an
unguarded moment, refer to his opponents as a bunch of lying crooks. I
would hope we could back down from hatred as the primary theme of this
campaign.
But there is another theme in this campaign which did come out in
Senator Kennedy's speech I would like to respond to and comment on. It
is the theme of fear. There is an underlying sense of fear that
pervades the rhetoric of the President's opponents here. It is
interesting to me, because the founder of the modern Democratic Party,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, is perhaps best remembered for his statement in
his first inaugural when he said: We have nothing to fear but fear
itself.
It would seem in this campaign there are those who have nothing to
offer but fear itself--fear and its handmaiden, indeed, its standard
derivative, which is pessimism. We have great fear, and we are
convinced nothing is going to work. That, if I may, Mr. President, is
what pervaded Senator Kennedy's speech before the Brookings Institute,
a conviction that nothing is going to work, that nothing is going to
save this country except the personal replacement of the President. But
none of the policies the President has put in place can possibly work,
and we are in such a terrible morass and difficulty that we live in
fear.
I was tempted to go through Senator Kennedy's speech point by point
and rebut it one at a time. I believe I could do that. It would take a
great deal of time, and it would probably bore everybody. It is the
kind of thing lawyers do in courtrooms where it is essential to build a
record. But, as you know, Mr. President, I am unburdened with a legal
education. I would like to step back from the point-by-point kind of
refutation that would be called for in a courtroom and have an overall
view of what Senator Kennedy was saying. I refer to him personally, but
I think this speech, in fact, is a distillation of the position
the Democratic Party will take in the upcoming election. So I think we
should step back from the point-by-point situation and look at the
overall message of what they are trying to tell us. That is what I
would like to address today.
Basically, as I say, it is rooted in fear and its derivative,
pessimism. That is what they are offering the American people: fear and
pessimism. This is the fundamental position Senator Kennedy's speech
takes: If it is bad, and it happened on President Bush's watch, he is
responsible for it. If it is good, and it happened on President Bush's
watch, it was coincidence or anybody could have done it, and he does
not deserve any of the credit.
Let's go down the history of what has happened on President Bush's
watch and see if, in fact, that pattern I have just described did play
itself out.
Turn to today's headline where we have a Commission examining what
happened prior to 9/11 in the year 2001. Well, we are being told
repeatedly it was Bush's fault. He is responsible for 9/11 because he
did not do enough to prevent it. 9/11 was his fault. Then the
Commission goes on to detail what he did. Basically what he did was
what the Clinton administration did. They kept track of al-Qaida. They
monitored what was happening. They did their best to find out what was
happening, but they did not do enough. In other words, they did not
invade Afghanistan.
It is interesting to me that the people who are now saying President
Bush did not do enough prior to 9/11 are the same people who are saying
he did too much in Iraq. He acted before Iraq became a threat. That is
in Senator Kennedy's speech--he should have waited until Iraq became a
threat. But, of course, the same critics are saying he should have
acted before al-Qaida became a threat. You cannot have it both ways.
Either he was prudent in doing what the Clinton administration did
prior to 9/11, and watched the situation carefully to see how it would
play out, or he was too timid. And if he was too timid and should have
taken more forceful action prior to 9/11, he learned that lesson and
took more forceful action with respect to Iraq. You cannot attack him
for doing the one in the one situation and then the other in the other;
you must be consistent. But the President's critics are not.
As I say, he is responsible for 9/11, according to his critics,
because he did basically what the Clinton administration did, but he
should have seen it coming and done more. Then when he did do more--
that is, when the President led us into Afghanistan--the President's
critics were outraged. What did we hear over and over again? Maybe the
media has short memories, but I do not. We heard lessons from history:
The British went into Afghanistan, they got bogged down, and they
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could not accomplish anything. The Soviets went into Afghanistan; they
got bogged down and ultimately humiliated. We are going to get bogged
down, and we are going to get humiliated. And going into Afghanistan is
a terrible mistake.
Then suddenly the battlefield situation changed, and now we hear the
President's actions in Afghanistan were brilliantly planned and
brilliantly executed. We see Afghanistan on the verge of a new
constitution. We see women back in the Afghanistan economy, women going
to school, women now being allowed rights they did not have under the
Taliban. But we do not give President Bush any credit for that. No. As
I say, the mantra is: If it is bad, and it happened on Bush's watch, he
is responsible. But if something good comes out of what happened on
President Bush's watch, that was coincidence, and he has no right to
claim any credit for it.
I am interested in a comment Senator Kennedy did make in his speech,
and I will go to the speech for this one. He said, referring to our
decision to go to war in Iraq:
. . . President Bush gave al Qaeda two years--two whole
years--to regroup and recover in the border regions of
Afghanistan.
I find that an incredible statement--incredible in the true meaning
of that word: incredible, not credible, not to be accepted.
Afghanistan, prior to the time we went in--Afghanistan, during the
period of the Clinton administration--was a haven for al-Qaida. It was
a training ground for al-Qaida. President Clinton ordered the lobbing
of cruise missiles into some of those training grounds but did nothing
more.
Now, in response to 9/11, President Bush led the world into cleaning
out the al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan. The al-Qaida leadership
has been disrupted. A large percentage of their leadership has been
either killed or arrested. Assets, totaling in the tens if not hundreds
of millions of dollars, of al-Qaida have been discovered and frozen,
and yet the Senator says: ``President Bush gave al Qaeda two years . .
. to regroup and recover in the border regions of Afghanistan.''
Al-Qaida has been on the run. Al-Qaida has been disrupted. Al-Qaida
has seen its assets destroyed in the 2 years we have been at war with
al-Qaida and Afghanistan has been freed. Those are solid
accomplishments for which the President's enemies give him no credit
whatsoever.
Let's talk about Iraq. That is the core of most of the criticism of
the President. There are those who suggest Iraq was created by George
W. Bush; that is, the crisis was created by George W. Bush. There are
those who suggest--and Senator Kennedy comes very close to it--that
George W. Bush was the first one to indicate there might have been
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Again, the media may not have any
memory on these issues, but I have a clear memory. Sitting in this
body, I remember who it was who first convinced me al-Qaida had weapons
of mass destruction. That was Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's
Secretary of State.
We all went to 407, the room in the Capitol where we receive
briefings on confidential and top secret information, classified
information. Madeleine Albright laid out in chilling fashion all of the
evidence to tell us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In
response to that evidence, President Clinton went to war against Iraq.
We forget that. We pretend that never happened. President Clinton,
using his powers as Commander in Chief and acting under the authority
of the U.N. resolutions that had condemned Iraq following the first
gulf war, launched a heavy bombing attack upon Iraq for the sole
purpose of destroying their weapons of mass destruction. And to his
credit, during the current political debate, President Clinton has made
it clear we did not know whether or not that bombing attack destroyed
all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Clinton has made
it clear we had no way of knowing how successful that bombing attack
was.
Yes, the difference between President Bush and President Clinton is
President Clinton bombed. He carried on the war from the air. President
Bush decided to carry on the war at ground level. I do not suggest that
is a trivial difference. It is a very significant difference. But if we
are going to talk about who went to war in Iraq over the issue of
weapons of mass destruction, we have to say the answer is President
Clinton. If we are going to talk about Secretaries of State who
informed the Congress about Iraq's program of weapons of mass
destruction, we have to say the first one who did it was Madeleine
Albright.
I am one who believed Madeleine Albright. I am one who believed and
supported President Clinton. I find it a little disheartening to have
those who agreed with us then now suggesting it was President Bush who
first brought up the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and it was
President Bush who first said we had to deal with those weapons by acts
of war. Memories should be longer than that.
When President Bush decided to go ahead in Iraq, what did his critics
have to say? It will never work--fear, pessimism; we can't succeed. On
the floor of this Senate, we heard over and over again: There will be
thousands and thousands of body bags coming back as Saddam Hussein uses
chemical weapons against our troops. We cannot send our troops there to
be exposed to these weapons.
These are the same voices now who are saying: There were no weapons.
But certainly they believed there were, as they warned us that our
troops would be gassed, that they would be killed with chemical
weapons, and we could not run that risk.
Then when the action started, these same voices said: Bogged down on
the road; held down by the resistance of the Iraqis. We are in a
quagmire; we will never succeed.
Then when Baghdad fell within a matter of weeks from those prophesies
and predictions, now we are being told: Anybody could have done it. No
big deal. We can't give Bush any credit for having gone into Iraq and
winning the war. It was a piece of cake.
Before the fact, fear and pessimism; after the fact, blame, no credit
for success, determination that it is not going to work in the long
term.
I could go on about Iraq in that regard, but there will be many more
debates. Let me go into the other substance of Senator Kennedy's speech
and demonstrate the same pattern: fear and pessimism.
The Senator talks about education, talks about No Child Left Behind.
He takes credit for having helped write No Child Left Behind,
appropriately. One of the reasons I voted against No Child Left Behind
is because I thought the things the Senator from Massachusetts
succeeded in getting into that bill would be too heavy handed in terms
of the Federal pressure on State boards of education. In that, I feel
vindicated because State board after State board has complained that
this represents entirely too much Federal control on education.
Now Senator Kennedy says: No money for education; lots of promises
out of the administration but no money.
The facts are that under President Bush's leadership, this Congress
has increased Federal spending on education to higher actual levels and
at a higher percentage increase than any other administration in
history. This administration has spent more on education than the
Clinton administration did and has accelerated that spending at a
higher rate than the Clinton administration did.
Yet we are being told: No, they are holding back on education
spending. They are being too stingy on education spending--as they
spend more than any other administration and Congress in history.
In advance, can't work; after the fact, pessimism that we can't get
there--fear and pessimism.
The Senator talks about cost estimates with respect to the Medicare
bill. Here we have to get into a little inside baseball so people can
understand exactly what happened. Senator Kennedy quotes the fact that
we used the figure in the Senate of $400 billion as the cost of this
bill and that an official in the Department of Health and Human
Services said it is going to be closer to 500, that it is going to be
over 500. And he was told not to make that estimate public. Senator
Kennedy berates the administration for selling the $400 billion number
when it knew $500 billion was the correct one.
Now let's get into the facts. A number of us on this side of the
aisle were
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equally disturbed by this gap between numbers. We assaulted the
chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Nickles, to ask him: How did
this happen? How did we get trapped with a low estimate when there was
a higher estimate out there?
He pointed out this fact that doesn't get into the public
consciousness and that the media does not take the time to understand
and explain: By law, we in the Congress, as we are adopting a budget,
can use only one source for our estimate of costs. By law we have to
take the estimate or score--to use the word we all understand around
here--of the Congressional Budget Office.
As Senator Nickles pointed out to us, during the debate, the
Congressional Budget Office said: This will cost $400 billion.
That is where it was scored. After the estimate came out of the
administration that it was going to be higher, the Congressional Budget
Office said: The number is still $400 billion, according to our
estimates.
By law, we could not have used the higher estimate in writing the
budget because it came from a source outside of the Congressional
Budget Office. Now, the one thing I know about the $400 billion number
offered by the CBO and the $500 billion-plus number offered by OMB is
that both of them are wrong. I cannot tell you whether either one of
them are too high or too low. I can only make my own estimate.
But stop and think about it for a moment. We are talking about a
program, spread over 5 years, that is not working yet, and we are
making guesses as to what it would cost. You feed into your computer
certain assumptions and you get a number; you change the assumptions in
the computer and it will give you another number. The question is not,
Is the number correct? The question is, Are the assumptions correct?
The answer is, all of the assumptions are guesses--whether CBO is
making the guess or whether HHS is making the guess or whether it is
OMB. Everybody is making the guess.
But in terms of the debate on the floor of the Senate, we had no
choice but to accept the CBO number as the controlling number. That is
the law. So Senator Kennedy is attacking the Republicans and the
decisions in this Senate with respect to the budget for following the
law. He is attacking us for not accepting estimates which, by law, we
cannot use. I think it is important to understand that as we go through
this debate, and talk about what is going to happen in the election.
In summary, as we look ahead to the election, I think we should pay
attention to the details, but we should also understand the overall
thrust of the two campaigns. I do believe that the campaign mounted on
the Democratic side of the aisle has begun out of personal hatred of
President Bush, and now more into a litany of fear and pessimism. They
are afraid the economy is not coming back. They tell us pessimistically
that we are never going to get any jobs.
Once again, before this last Friday, we were told, well, the
unemployment rate might be coming down, but that isn't the rate we
should look at; we should look at the number of jobs created. On
Friday, it was announced that 308,000 jobs were created in March. Now
we are told, no, don't look at that, look at the unemployment figure;
it is not coming down fast enough. Don't pay attention to the number of
jobs created.
We are told this is the worst economy in 50 years. I have heard that
rhetoric on the floor. According to the blue-chip economists who are
looking at this recovery, they are projecting for 2004--another guess,
I make that clear--the highest growth rates in 40 years. If that is the
example of the kind of economy we are getting from George W. Bush, I
say give us more. The highest growth rate in 40 years is what the
experts on Wall Street are projecting.
And the pessimists are complaining about that. The pessimists are
telling us we cannot get there. Look at Iraq. Of course, things are bad
in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq. The deaths of Americans and the deaths
of Iraqis are tragic, and we should mourn them and do everything we can
to try to prevent them, but let us not focus solely on those deaths.
Let us look at the fact that Iraq is on its way--however haltingly or
however slowly, and with whatever difficulty--toward establishing a
constitution and, one hopes, a democracy. The pessimists say we can
never get there. The pessimists are filled with fear and are saying we
will fail and when we fail al-Qaida will destroy our cities. But George
W. Bush is not a pessimist. He is an optimist and he does not peddle
fear.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The time of the Senator has
expired.
Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to continue
for an additional 4 minutes.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. BENNETT. That is the core of this election. Do we face the future
with fear and pessimism and a conviction that we cannot do it or do we
face the future with a clear, realistic understanding of how difficult
it will be, but with a confidence and an optimism that we can do it,
that we can succeed in implanting a democracy in Iraq, in bringing
freedom into that part of the world in a way that it has never known
before?
We see signs that we are succeeding already. We see India and
Pakistan, two nuclear powers that have been on the verge of war, now
looking out over the world of George W. Bush and American resolve and
saying maybe we should talk and try to resolve our differences short of
war. We see Qadhafi in Libya saying: Maybe it is not a good idea to
have weapons of mass destruction and I will voluntarily surrender them
and dismantle them in this new situation that George W. Bush has
created.
I believe the American people will respond more actively to hope and
optimism than they will to fear and pessimism. For that reason, I look
forward to this election season with some relish about debating the
details of the issues raised by the Senator from Massachusetts and, at
the same time, some confidence in the wisdom of the American people and
their willingness to embrace hope and optimism and put aside the fears
and pessimism that are being peddled by the President's opponents.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New Hampshire is
recognized.
Mr. GREGG. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to proceed for
10 minutes as in morning business.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
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