E-Mail This Article to a Friend Talking points It’s time for leadership from the Democrats

IT’S BECOME a cliché, but it’s true: in the political race to defeat (or rather, re-defeat) George W. Bush, we are in the race of our lives. Under Bush’s leadership, we pre-emptively invaded Iraq on the basis of intelligence failures and political lies. Civil liberties have been constrained. Funding for good government initiatives like education and health-care reform has been choked off in favor of tax breaks for the wealthiest among us. And a culture war over gay marriage has been foisted on the country.

All this is reason enough to vote against Bush in November — as opposed to voting for the Democratic Party’s nominee, John Kerry. But next week, the Democratic Party has the opportunity to outline its vision for how America can flourish in the post-9/11 world — and give voters reason to support its ticket enthusiastically. Toward that end, we challenge Kerry to show leadership unequivocally on the following issues:

• Foreign policy. Repudiate the Bush Doctrine, which authorizes pre-emptive invasion of foreign countries suspected of harboring ill intent toward the United States. Under the most generous possible interpretation of Bush’s policy, the doctrine exists to make this country safer by eliminating threats before they can be carried out. The results of the Iraqi invasion — 900 American soldiers dead and thousands more wounded, as well as the creation of a terrorist breeding ground in Iraq even as the establishment of true democracy remains a neoconservative dream — reveal the Bush Doctrine to be little more than a miserable failure dressed up as a grand idea.

We don’t need a road map for success in Iraq from Kerry — none exists. But we would like to hear — clearly, forcefully, and unequivocally — that the pre-emptive invasion of foreign nations is inherently un-American, with consequences that compound exponentially when such a course is pursued on the basis of deceit and incompetent information.

• Civil liberties. Denounce the Patriot Act. Under this odious legislation, even librarians can be turned into spies for the state. Attorney General John Ashcroft claims that this has never happened, but honestly now, does anyone actually believe him? After 9/11, thousands of Arab men were rounded up and detained by the FBI. The government has chipped away at the protections afforded by habeas corpus. Locally, the MBTA is randomly searching its passengers (and plans to do so long after the throngs of DNC attendees leave town). And hundreds of security cameras have been installed throughout Boston. Does anyone actually believe these measures make us any more secure? They surely make us less free.

We want to hear Kerry talk about how freedom is the surest path to security. We want him to remind the country just what it is that we’re protecting; indeed, the erosion of privacy, the elimination of basic rights, and the unchecked expansion of police powers diminishes us as a nation.

• Culture. The GOP in general and Bush in particular has seized the gay-marriage issue to wage an ugly — yet subtle — campaign of homophobia. During a recent Saturday radio address to the country, for example, Bush declared that marriage should be off-limits to gays, yet he conceded that gay Americans should have a right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes. While that sounds benign, or even compassionate, it’s designed to raise all sorts of visions of what it is, exactly, that gays do behind closed doors. Could Kerry please inform the country that what gays do in the privacy of their own homes is not unlike what heterosexuals do? They drink coffee, watch television, make dinner, put the kids to bed, and, yes, make love.

Bush and the GOP are also using the Massachusetts marriage decision to decry the actions of "unelected activist judges." Kerry and the Democratic Party must place the Massachusetts marriage decision in the context of other heroic judicial decisions — such as Brown v. Board of Education — that expand the rights of all Americans.

Freedom, civil liberties, and civil rights make America great. Now is not the time to shy away from these values; it’s the time to defend them vigorously.

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