New York Times / November 2, 2006
Editorial
The Great Divider

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly
nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly
behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies
and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to
campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the
real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index
that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide
toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm
in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off
civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the
removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian
militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who
are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it.
Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans
who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And
at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is
a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question
his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation,
offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats
manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and
the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he
decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry
of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the
punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.”
In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s
intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as
Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the
president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the
troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign
Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went
to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would
hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s
control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office.
And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been
running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be
friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near
felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United
States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who
love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the
fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of
fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the
bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest
outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this
president will ever be willing or able to make room for
bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has
left in office.