Eisenhower to Vote for Kerry

John Eisenhower, the son of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, has voted Republican for 50 years - but not this year. John Eisenhower no longer regards the current Republican leadership as representative of his values and intends to vote for John Kerry.

John Eisenhower writes in The Union Leader:

The fact is that today’s “Republican” Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word “Republican” has always been synonymous with the word “responsibility,” which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today’s whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion.

Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations, has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance.

In the Middle East crisis of 1991, President George H.W. Bush marshaled world opinion through the United Nations before employing military force to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Through negotiation he arranged for the action to be financed by all the industrialized nations, not just the United States. When Kuwait had been freed, President George H. W. Bush stayed within the United Nations mandate, aware of the dangers of occupying an entire nation.

Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, “If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both.” I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today.

I would appreciate hearing such things from the Republican leadership as well. Someone like John McCain might say it, but he has been largely marginalized in the Republican Party and that further emphasizes just how far the current GOP has moved away from where it was in the past. John Eisenhower is not the only conservative Republican to publicly declare that he no longer has enough faith in Bush or the Republican Party to give them support in the coming election, and I doubt that he will be the last.

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• 2004 Elections
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• George W. Bush
• John Kerry
• War on Terrorism