Jim Wallis: Stay the Course No More

Perhaps most interesting in this campaign were some of the negative Democratic ads. They simply assert that the Republican candidate agrees with George W. Bush. That’s all they tried to prove and trotted out the percentage of times the candidate has voted for President Bush’s agenda. That was extraordinary. Just to attach a Republican to the record of their own President was negative enough in this election, and Republicans were running away from their President.

In the final week of the campaign, the President himself weighed in with his own negative campaigning when he told an audience in Texas (one of the few places who still wanted him to visit) that “the terrorists win and America loses” if the Democrats won this election. His problem is that more and more Americans think statements like that are ridiculous. And that Bush’s continual assertions about winning the war in Iraq (despite the obvious facts) are also ridiculous, and that the opposite is now true—that America is losing around the world and the terrorists are winning BECAUSE of George Bush’s complete disaster in Iraq.

Iraq is one of the biggest reasons that the Republicans are losing tonight. With a unique combination of arrogance and incompetence Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are proudly going full speed ahead in their deadly war in Iraq, despite the growing opposition from all sides of the political spectrum and even from the military. It must now be said that George Bush and his partners in the crime of Iraq are unnecessarily killing lots of people—both Americans and Iraqis—with no plan to stop the killing. So they must now be stopped, and that is a big part of tonight’s message.

It’s the reason that both Republican and Democratic candidates are promising to find new ways of trying to resolve the war in Iraq rather than simply repeating, “stay the course.” The Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney course must now be stopped. Whatever the outcome of the election, Iraq must be the first item on the agenda of the next Congress.