Hercules goes bananas

Listening to Governor Schwarzenegger's speech last night, I found myself agreeing with many of the broad principles he discussed, even as I found myself thinking, gee, it's pretty tough to see how the GOP can now claim to have stood with Nelson Mandela (when the Reagan administration was, shall we say, less than critical of apartheid) or the protesters in Tiananmen Square (when the first Bush administration [which I'm quite amazed to realize I now think of as "the good one"] reacted to the Chinese government's massacre by giving China most favored nation trade status). Schwarzenegger himself is an oddly compelling messenger and I've got enough libertarian leanings that my head nodded a few times early on, until I came to my senses and remembered that Republicans by and large have a hell of a time living up to any of their stated principles, and tend to spend money like drunken sailors and vastly increase the scope and snooping power of government whenever they get their hands on it. William Saletan goes even further, with this argument about why you shouldn't vote for Bush even if you're a Schwarzenegger Republican:

The GOP under Bush is nothing like what it was under Lincoln or even Roosevelt. The notion of wartime deficit tax cuts would have made Lincoln ill.

There's a curious gap in Schwarzenegger's speech as he segues from his litany of Republican principles to the case for Bush. Essentially, the principles vanish. He stops talking about accountability and starts talking about faith. He asks for "faith in the resourcefulness of the American people, and faith in the U.S. economy. To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!" The audience roars—it's the loudest moment of the convention—but the descent from logic into grade-school humiliation is unpersuasive and revealing. The American economy is performing far below par. Bush got the tax cuts he wanted when he came into office. He said they would fix the economy. They didn't. He will be the first president in Schwarzenegger's lifetime to preside over a net loss of jobs.

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Schwarzenegger implies that giving up on Bush would be un-American. "We may hit a few bumps, but America always moves ahead. That's what Americans do," he says. But remember that Republican principle about the government being accountable to the people. The suggestion that giving up on Bush means giving up on ourselves—which is essentially the argument of the Bush campaign—directly subverts this principle. Bush is your employee. You don't have to vote for him just because he's in charge and represents the spirit of the nation. That's Communist talk.

Same goes for Bush's Iraq policy. It's a betrayal of everything Republicans claim to stand for—fiscal prudence, the reservation of U.S. military resources for the protection of the national interest, and skepticism of government's ability to shape society. The weapons of mass destruction that Bush touted as the reason for spending our blood and treasure in Iraq are simply not there. We were not greeted with sweets and flowers as the administration suggested. We have lost nearly 1,000 soldiers. We have sunk about $200 billion into this mistake, and there is no end in sight. It's a complete failure.

Unable to defend the policy, Schwarzenegger defends Bush as "a man of inner strength. He is a leader who doesn't flinch, who doesn't waver, who does not back down." But "inner strength" is exactly the kind of New Age pap no hard-headed Republican should fall for. Accountability means judging a president by visible results. Schwarzenegger says leadership is "about making decisions you think are right and then standing behind those decisions." Fine. But standing behind your decisions means taking responsibility at election time. This is election time, and Bush's decisions have turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Schwarzenegger applauds Bush for taking a hard line on terrorism. So do I. Bush's clarity on this subject is his finest quality. But it doesn't make his foreign policy wise, any more than liberal piety about compassion makes liberal social programs effective. In Iraq, Bush has confused a mortal enemy with a less urgent one, and he has botched the worthy idea of American military leadership by biting off more than we can chew. The hatred manifested by terrorists "is no match for America's decency," Schwarzenegger opines. Decency? Do you think we're going to defeat Osama Bin Laden with decency? That's liberal talk. What we need is smart allocation of our resources. At this, Bush has utterly failed.