Seriousness and foreign policy.
The MSNBC “After Hours” program following the debates is the best cable news show on the election.
Here’s part of the transcript after the Vice-Presidential debate. (*)
Ron Reagan starts it off:
REAGAN: And now a critical exchange in tonight‘s battle took place when John Edwards compared this Bush administrations record of building an alliance for Iraq against the president‘s father‘s record in the Gulf War. That triggered a harsh response from Vice President Cheney. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You demean the sacrifice of our allies and you say it‘s wrong war, wrong place, wrong time and oh, by the way send troops. Makes no sense at all. It‘s totally inconsistent. There isn‘t a plan there. Our most important ally in the war on terror in Iraq specifically is Prime Minister Allawi.
He came recently and addressed a joint session of Congress that I presided over with the Speaker of the House and John Kerry rushed out immediately after his speech was over with where he came and he thanked America for our contributions and our sacrifice and pledged to hold those elections in January. Went out and demeaned him, criticized him, challenged his credibility.
That is not the way to win friends and allies. You‘re never going to add to the coalition with that kind of attitude.
GWEN IFILL, MODERATOR: Senator Edwards, 30 seconds.
SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC), VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you. The vice president suggests that we have the same number of countries involved now that we had in the first Gulf War. First Gulf War cost the American people $5 billion.
And regardless of what the Vice President says, we‘re at $200 billion and counting. Not only that, 90 percent of the coalition casualties, Mr. Vice President, the coalition casualties are American casualties. Ninety percent of the cost of this effort are being born by American taxpayers. It is the direct result of the failures of this administration.
INFILL: Mr. Vice President.
CHENEY: Classic example. He won‘t count the sacrifice and the contribution of our Iraqi allies. It‘s their country, they‘re in the fight, they‘re increasingly the ones out their putting their necks on the line to take back their country from the terrorists and the old regime elements that are still left. They‘re doing a superb job and for you to demean their sacrifice it strikes me as…
EDWARDS: Oh I‘m not demeaning…
CHENEY: It is indeed—you suggest that somehow it shouldn‘t count because you want to be able to say that the Americans are taking 90 percent of the sacrifice. You cannot succeed in this effort if you‘re not willing to recognize the enormous contribution the Iraqis are increasingly making to their own future.
We‘ll win when they take on responsibility for governance which they‘re doing and when they take on responsibility for their own security, which they increasingly are doing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCARBOROUGH: Mike Barnicle who got the better end of that exchange?
MIKE BARNICLE, THE BOSTON HERALD: I think the Vice President.
SCARBOROUGH: Why is that?
BARNICLE: I just think people look at him no matter whether they like him or not, no matter whether they think he‘s so filled with doom and gloom most of the time that, you know, he‘s a serious fellow and—not that John Edwards isn‘t a serious fellow—but the contrast between the two, I think, goes to the Vice President.
SCARBOROUGH: How—you know, I always said, you know, that Bill Clinton could have never gotten elected in 1988 when there was a Soviet Union in 1992 — all of a sudden; he was acceptable to the American people.
Are we looking at people like Dick Cheney in 2001, you know, after September 11, 2001 saying you know what, he may not be the smoothest guy in the world, he may scare little kids and puppy dogs—at the same time we‘re in a war, we want somebody tough and competent like that?
HOWARD FINEMAN, NEWSWEEK: We want somebody who scares people but the other point is that if the Kerry-Edwards theory doesn‘t hold up because their not saying they want to get out of Iraq.
They‘re saying the war was wrongly begun but they want to finish it. They needed to have said good things about Allawi if they‘re being honest about what they believe because Allawi is trying, we have to think, to install some kind of more democratic government there.
The problem with Kerry-Edwards is that they‘re not speaking up for freedom around the world, which they need to do to try to get to high ground in the debate.
If they don‘t do that then Dick Cheney is going to say, look, it‘s messy—yes we made some mistakes but we‘re still on basically the right course and it‘s that fundamental part of that that Kerry-Edwards can‘t challenge because they‘re basically saying we want to say—heck they‘re saying we want to go into Fallujah.
SCARBOROUGH: We‘re going to stay there but we‘re not necessarily going to support the Iraqi prime minister when he comes over and speaks to a joint session of Congress.
FINEMAN: That doesn‘t make any sense. That doesn‘t make any sense unless you‘re going to dismiss that whole thing as a corrupt exercise over there, which they‘re not—the Democrats are not quite willing to do.
There is no Kerry-Edwards foreign policy vision other than excessive pragmatism. That is a statement about the impoverished state of contemporary progressive political thought.