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Seeking Dave’s thoughts about ’04 politics

By MICHAEL BOYLAN

With all of the election hubbub that has been clogging up the airwaves and Internet, the sound bites spewing incessantly and the rhetoric amped up to absurd levels so that everyone with any type of political opinion feels the need to shout it from the rooftops, there is only one voice I wish I could hear right now and unfortunately, I can’t.

Back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie at this paper, Dave Hamrick was the grizzled veteran who knew more about everything than I could ever hope for.

He was the one who would point out my mistakes, point me in the right direction and encourage me when I needed it. We became pretty good friends and I learned a lot from him.

One thing I really enjoyed was talking politics with him because we could have civil debates, which is rare for a “Massachusetts liberal” and a “conservative, Southern son of a preacher.”

No one ever won our debates because they were never really over. The most one could hope for was scoring a point here or there and making the other one look at an issue from a different point of view.

I got more interested in following politics because of him. I’m still not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Dave passed away in 2002. He has been missed by all of us here at The Citizen and I’m sure he has also been missed by the many faithful readers of his column.

I really wish that Dave were still here because these last few months would have been full of good debates. I have often wondered if Dave, not someone to always follow the party line, would be following the party line this year.

Since I can’t talk to Dave, I decided to go back to his columns and search for clues into how he thought about the issues. Maybe I could see how Dave would feel about President Bush after his first term.

I don’t know that he would have changed his mind and voted against a Republican, but you never know.

Before the 2000 election, Dave wrote, “Bush was the obvious choice for those who value freedom and believe in the principles of free enterprise and self-reliance upon which this nation was founded.”

I guess that is true since Bush wants people to have more control over Social Security and their own health care and corporations get many big tax breaks, but I also think that most, if not all, Americans value freedom. It doesn’t belong to just one party or person and it never has.

In that same column, Dave continues by stating, “Both leading candidates will involve the federal government in activities that it should not be involved in.”

Boy, is that ever true of Bush’s first term (See proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, portions of the Patriot Act that are extremely far reaching, etc.).

None of that seems to be enough to push Dave from voting for W. again this time around, but maybe he would have chewed on it for awhile.

A few weeks later, Dave wrote another column touching on his beliefs about the size of the federal government. “As a conservative and partly libertarian pundit, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that the federal government is too large and intrusive, and is involved in matters it is not authorized by the Constitution to be involved in.”

See, this is where our core debate always came back to. Dave defined Republicans as people who wanted a smaller government, which is fine, except that it seemed to me that few, if any, Republicans, realized that government was just as big, if not bigger, under Republican control.

Bush’s government is massive and with federal standards on education and new departments and government positions being added all the time, the hypocrisy stares one right in the face.

I clearly remember winning points with Dave when I pointed out that federal education standards went against what Republicans claim to believe.

I’m sure this point isn’t enough to score a major coup, but I would like to believe that Dave would have to seriously consider some of the missteps of the current administration against a traditional Republican definition.

And that’s not even talking about the lack of fiscal responsibility that conservative pundits claim to cling to as a core Republican value.

After all of the 2000 election mess was resolved, Dave wrote a column about Bush’s “must do’s” in his first term.

“Bush’s job is to develop an agenda that will be acceptable to the people and move it along. To do that, he will have to listen to everyone, then make his own decisions, and then communicate well enough to sell it. Rather than be imprinted with an agenda, he will have to imprint one on the Washington scene, without being too partisan.”

I don’t think that happened. All of that, “Uniter, not a divider,” talk never really happened and the togetherness and unity that existed after Sept. 11 has been squandered.

I don’t fault Bush for all of that, but there was definitely a neo-con agenda from Day One and there was a plan to invade Iraq before Sept. 11 even occurred.

I think Dave would have seen Democrats as the ones stalling the agenda and I think he would have denied the “Invade Iraq” scenario existed before Sept. 11, but I would have argued until I turned blue in the face that it was there.

Dave gave President Bush high marks for crisis management after 9-11 and followed it by writing, “The true test of his leadership will be whether he is continuing that fight (meaning the fight against the terrorists) two years from now, and whether he is continuing it with the same level of support from the American people, the Congress and the international community.”

Bush is continuing that fight but he does not have that same level of support from any of those groups. The reason why is the war with Iraq.

It is important to remember that at the time Dave wrote this column, we were not even talking about invading Iraq. Our focus was still on Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban and Afghanistan.

Yes, Afghanistan recently held elections, but the work there is far from over and we’re stuck with more troops and a bigger mess in Iraq.

This is where Dave might have started considering crossing over. He began asking questions, which is something this administration really doesn’t want people to do, unless you’ve signed a loyalty oath and had the question pre-screened.

“We’ve started something with this war that won’t stop anytime soon not if we want to be successful. All we’ve done so far is kill a few terrorists and stir up a hornet’s nest of hatred and resolve among thousands more. Will we be able to stay the course to the end? Will we be willing to pay the costs? Can we do it without becoming basically an imperial power, forcing the world into a mold of our creation?”

Remember, those questions aren’t about Iraq, but rather terrorists in general. Our invasion of Iraq illustrates that we are becoming an imperial power forcing the world into a mold of democracy. We see every night that not a lot of Iraqis want it, at least not our definition of it or the way we are imposing it.

Dave touches upon this theme again in a Feb. 27, 2002 column. “I hope at the end of four (maybe eight) years the U.S. has not killed a few hundred terrorists and created many thousands more.”

Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened and continues to happen. The terrorists may be in Iraq now and while Bush and his crew feel it is better to fight them there, can anyone really be certain that terrorists won’t come over here anyway? Is every terrorist in the world fighting us in Iraq?

In his final column, March 13, 2002, Dave writes about the push to spend money encouraging people to get married.

“Our current president has given me several reasons to part company with the Republican Party, including his recent push to spend a bunch of million dollars of my tax money encouraging young people to get hitched. But do not, Mr. President, put your hands into my pocket, backed by the government’s power to take away my liberty, and use my money to embark on a program of social engineering. Whether it is conservative values you are preaching or liberal makes no difference. Use your own money to do it.”

As you can see, Dave wasn’t all gung-ho about the President but I’m also sure that he wouldn’t necessarily be gung-ho about John Kerry, though I’d like to think that I may have shown him that Massachusetts liberals aren’t all bad and that we can be reasonable people with positions all over the political spectrum.

Would he have endorsed Bush this time around? I don’t know. Would he have voted for Bush this time? Maybe.

You can bet that I and all of his liberal friends (and he had a ton of them) would have been hammering these same points and showing him his words. I’m also sure that he would have given us food for thought and put things in a perspective we may not have considered.

Dave might not have changed his mind, but I like to think he would have been willing to consider it. I believe Dave would have seen Bush’s mistakes in the first term and called them that, which is something the President isn’t willing to do.

If there’s an Internet in heaven, I hope Dave is reading this column and he’s not planning on haunting me this weekend.

We miss you, Dave.