HOW HE SEES IT Decline in civility tied to rise in politics
By JOHN HALL
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- This is a story about the level of political discussion here and around the country.
When a bipartisan presidential commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recently proposed a photo-identification requirement for voters, they ran into a buzz saw of criticism.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean quickly denounced the proposal and said it would "deny the right (to vote) to millions of citizens who are lawfully registered and eligible to do so."
Although the 20-member commission, which handed in its report last week, had only three dissenters, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle was among them.
Democratic lawmakers joined the fight, with Rep. John Conyers of Michigan denouncing the idea as nothing but "more Republican electoral dirty tricks, where Democratic voters are deliberately disenfranchised so that Republicans can win elections."
Baker was remembered not as a former diplomat but as a Republican lawyer who tried to stop the counting of Florida ballots in the disputed 2000 presidential race.
Crowing Republicans
Meanwhile, Republicans began crowing about their victory. They have never had much good to say about Carter, but suddenly they were treating him like a saint. They cited his endorsement of a voter-ID requirement as proof of the purity of the concept. In states like New Hampshire and Wisconsin, where all such bills have been blocked, Republicans said the "dirty trick" label had been washed away.
Who knows which side is right on the merits about photo identification at the voting booth? The commission said ID cards should be made available for free to those who don't have a driver's license.
But the merits don't have much to do with this debate or anything else, for that matter -- from confirming chief justices to paying for flood relief to election reform.
In an "off year" when no congressional seats are up for grabs, the political world is already in a mean and tight coil. Everyone is poised to read the basest possible motivation into each action.
Former Ambassador David Abshire said the constant incivility is "like a monster on the land." Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the American Presidency, attributes much of it to a carryover from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the Supreme Court ruling on the disputed 2000 presidential election.
Yet, after 9/11, when President Bush put together an international coalition for the war on terror and attacked Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Abshire contends "he was a model war leader and stood for these months alongside Lincoln and FDR, America's two greatest war leaders."
Preemptive warfare
In an essay called "The Grace and Power of Civility" written for a new Fetzer Institute volume called "Deepening the American Dream," Abshire argues that Bush began to go off the rails not with the invasion of Iraq, but before -- when he proposed a new policy of pre-emptive warfare.
"The use of such extended rhetoric as a doctrine and talk of unilateralism only increased anti-Americanism worldwide, further strengthening the image of America as a bully rather than a wise and judicious world power," he said.
After that, Bush and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell never were able to correct that image in their relationship with the European democracies or with the United Nations.
Abshire seems to reserve judgment on Bush.
"Mistakes have been made," he said. "But as the master strategist Napoleon said, in war it is not he who makes no mistakes but he who makes the fewest who prevails. The test is how leaders deal with their mistakes. This too has something very much to do with civility and humility, which George W. Bush spoke so well about in his presidential campaign and his inaugural."
Ironically, the most successful episodes of comity and bipartisan spirit in Bush's time came about in the pursuit of truth about his administration.
The commissions that Bush appointed, growing out of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on America and the intelligence failures preceding the Iraq war, became models of civility. There were few reports of partisan bickering, yet these panels both won praise for independence and boldness in handling the most delicate subject matter of the time.
X John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard.