The View From 1776

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The President’s approval ratings have declined recently.  According to the newspapers, while a bare majority of people in opinion polls support our sticking it out in Iraq, only about 46% of the poll respondents approve of the President’s performance in office.

If keeping his opinion-poll rating high were the appropriate objective of national policy, President Bush could simply follow the invariable practice of President Clinton: set national policy by sticking up a wet finger to determine which way the breeze is blowing at the moment; change policies to reflect daily opinion polls on every question confronting the administration.  Or pursue foreign policies, without regard to protecting long-range national interests, but as a means of shaping domestic opinion to political advantage.

Even the liberals, who bitterly oppose whatever President Bush does, must acknowledge that he is undeterred by public opinion from policies he believes to be in the national interest.  Liberals can only attack him by saying (a) he is stupid, (b) he is simultaneously diabolically cunning, isolated from reality, and the puppet of neo-conservatives, or (c) that he doesn’t see that foreign nations’ approval, not effective action to stop terrorists, is the appropriate objective of foreign policy.

In pleasant contrast, for liberals, at least, the left-wing elite and their “mainstream” media led President Clinton by the nose like a prize bull.  For a couple of years, President Clinton ignored the atrocities by both sides in the Balkans, as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated into waring camps.  Only after elite media editorialists decided that the United States should play a role did President Clinton move to intervene.  Even then, heeding opinion polls showing that the public would not support combat deaths of infantrymen on the ground, the President decided to conduct the war from 20,000 feet with aerial bombing.

In the midst of Monica Gate and adverse reaction to his lying to the public and Federal grand juries, President Clinton attempted to deflect public opinion by lobbing a few cruise missiles in the presumed direction of Osama Bin Ladin.  Before that, President Clinton had done nothing more than file protests in the UN about Al Queda’s murderous attacks on our embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole.

President Clinton’s pusillanimous inaction and his obsequious deference to liberal opinion, in the face of years of terrorist bombing in Israel and elsewhere, set the stage for 9/11.  Osama Bin ladin had every reason to believe that we no longer had the backbone to stand and fight to protect our national interests. 

It seems clear that liberals still place a higher value on the so-called “community of nations” and believe that the United Nations charter and declaration of human rights have superseded our own Constitution.  They still believe that Muslim terrorists have some legitimate basis for their inhumanity, because we are richer than they are.

Reasonable people can disagree about the specific policies pursued by President Bush.  But at least he defines his policies, acts upon them, and sticks to them even when public support wavers.  Right or wrong, he pursues what reason dictates to be a course in the national interest, and doesn’t waver when the liberal media, baying like a pack of hyenas, attempt to pull him down.

That is precisely the situation that prevailed in the darkest hours of the Civil War, when northern opinion was running heavily against President Lincoln.  It is far from what President Clinton did, or what Al Gore or Senator Kerry would have done in that office. 

Under President Jean Francois Kerry, we would be allowing yet more time for UN inspectors in Iraq, while Saddam Hussein pumped more money to Palestinian terrorists and Osama Bin Ladin maneuvered to take control of the rest of Middle Eastern petroleum supplies.  By now there would probably little gasoline available at any price, and we would be told that liberal secularity’s only moral principle, “tolerance,” could easily embrace a role in our national government for Islamic theocracy.

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