Dick Cheney has been dismissive of other people for so long that his lips curl in a permanent sneer. Still, it was stunning to see his response to an interviewer who pointed out that polls show two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Iraq.
“So?” the vice president smirked, clearly relishing the opportunity to demonstrate his disdain for public opinion. Taken aback, the interviewer followed up, “Don’t you care what the American people think?”
“No,” Cheney said.
The Bushadministration has always boasted that it puts no stock in opinion polls — and, to some degree, that is reasonable. The president and vice president have information other citizens don’t have. George W. Bush receives firsthand reports from the war zone; Cheney was in Iraq only days ago, making firsthand observations.
Moreover, the American public is notoriously uninformed. It would be interesting to see how many of those who oppose the war could find Iraq on a map.
Nonetheless, to disregard the will of the American people is to disregard democracy. Bush and Cheney were not elected to impose their will on us; they were elected to execute our national will. What the American people want from their leaders should matter — particularly in the most consequential decision a president can make: sending soldiers into battle to risk their lives.
Neither his daughters nor the vice president’s are in harm’s way because of their fathers’ decisions. To the contrary, as wards of the Secret Service, the Bush and Cheney daughters enjoy the safest and most convenient life possible. While their contemporaries in the military are dodging bullets and bombs, they are dodging the nuisances of everyday life. For the vice president to respond with “So?” after being told that other parents also don’t want their children sent to battle was grotesquely callous.
Moreover, many Americans who oppose the war are not the buffoons Cheney imagines them to be. Some considered it a mistake from the start to invade a country that had not attacked us. Others believe it is a lost cause to try to impose secular democracy on a country seemingly bent on Islamic rule. Still others see that the war is exacting tremendous costs for no benefit. Americans historically have fought to protect our way of life, but that is already lost. The terrorists won. Instead of living in defiant freedom, we now live in pre-emptive fear.
Lauding the president’s refusal to be “blown off course” by public opinion, Cheney compared Bush to Abraham Lincoln, but the more accurate comparison may be to Lyndon Johnson. In the mid-1960s, the prevailing theory among the intellectual elite was that poverty could be cured by social engineering: If the poor were provided the means to escape their plight, they would embrace middle-class values.
Realists warned that establishing a welfare state would more likely have the opposite effect. Even Franklin Roosevelt had characterized a permanent public dole as “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
Reflecting that common-sense assessment, a 1965 Gallup Poll taken after Johnson declared war on poverty revealed that 83 percent of Americans doubted it could be won.
But, in part by exploiting congressional sentimentality in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ was able to push through the welfare programs that have been subsequently ruinous. They did everything conservatives warned that they would. Instead of providing a means for people to climb out of poverty, they allowed poverty to become entrenched. They rewarded indolence and the abdication of paternal responsibility. As one of the Great Society’s architects, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later conceded, “The government did not know what it was doing. It had a theory — or, rather, a set of theories. Nothing more.”
Yet because of that mistake, Americans have spent the past 40 years subsidizing a parasitic and often predatory underclass that has contributed to the increase in almost every marker of social pathology. It all might have been avoided if those in power in 1965 had paid more attention to the opinions of the American people.
The war in Iraq may turn out to be a success. Bush and Cheney may be ultimately vindicated. But no matter how fervently they believe that now, it does not give them license to be contemptuous of the citizens they ostensibly serve.
Examiner Columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
