On September 9 at the Academia Balboa, the American Society of Panama held its quadrennial debate between Democrats and Republicans, before an audience about half composed of high school students and half of adults. Representing the GOP was businessman José Brito, while Richard Koster spoke for the Dems.
The argument began with the flip of a coin, which had Brito giving his 15-minute opening statement first.
But before that started, Brito asked for a minute of silence for the victims of terrorism around the world, with which the audience unanimously and respectfully complied.
Brito, a naturalized US citizen, made fun of his thick Latin American accent and describe the United States as “a country I choose to be mine.”
Then he commenced his attack. “The world has changed,” Brito argued. “Every plan and priority that America and George W. Bush had changed on September 11, 2001.”
Asserting that “what happened in New York, Washington, Madrid and Russia can happen anywhere --- even here,” the Republican spokesman argued that the Democrats are weak in the face of the threat facing the United States. He dismissed the Kerry campaign’s argument that it’s important to win the cooperation of the United Nations and America’s traditional European allies as “outsourcing our foreign policy.”
“While Kerry and company offer to manage the country,” Brito charged, “Bush offers leadership.”
“For us, the real discussion is about the last 12 years.” From his Republican point of view, the Clinton years were a time of sleaze and decline, while the Bush years have been a time when America has become stronger.
Brito then read a long letter from a Vietnam veteran, excoriating John Kerry for his early 1970s activism with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The letter’s author was one Oliver North.
Addressing his remarks to the youngsters in the audience, and speaking as a member of America’s Latino minority, Brito warned of an “illusion” that Democrats want to help working people. But he argued that “nothing is free in this life.”
Then it was Koster’s turn.
“I’m going to do something that he hasn’t done,” the Democrat said. “I’m going to talk about the president.”
“George W. Bush has failed,” Koster argued. “America has become a zero-sum game in which there are a lot more losers than winners.” He noted that employment is down, poverty is up and more Americans are without health insurance. He decried “the erosion of America’s industrial base.”
“That is the first reason why Bush should not be elected,” Koster said. But not the only one.
Addressing the war and terrorism issues head on, Koster argued that after the al Qaeda attacks on the United States Bush “exploited America’s tragedy for narrow partisan reasons.”
“Bush and company don’t want friends” in the world, Koster alleged. By reversing a long-standing US policy and adopting the doctrine of preventive war, he said, “they threw away all the good will that came to America from all over the world.”
“The most serious failure,” in Koster’s view, has been in the fight against al Qaeda. He accused Bush of “outsourcing” the war against Osama bin Laden and his followers to Afghan warlords just when the enemy was holed up around Tora Bora, and as a result, now “the Taliban is back in business.”
About the Iraq War, Koster remarked that “if I were working for Bush, I’d want to keep quiet about that too.” Remarking that Iraq is beset by problems “that no one has solved since the time of Hammurabi, 4,000 years ago,” he criticized Bush for ignoring the advice of his military advisors, to the extent that he sent in an invasion force without sufficient troops to seal Iraq’s borders or to guard Saddam Hussein’s ammunition dumps. “This was damage no enemy could have inflicted, but there was the president, costumed and strutting.”
Then came the questions, submitted by the high school students, which both Brito and Koster had their opportunities to answer.
How should relations between the United States and its old allies be restored?
Brito argued that under Bush, America is winning friends in the world. “Listen to President Putin of Russia. He’s coming to our side.”
More importantly, from the Republican’s point of view, “America, thank God, has not been hit again.”
And France? “The French may not like it,” Brito argued, “but I prefer Americans in the territory of the bastards who attacked.”
Koster replied that he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the United States getting international help. We have a common interest with our old allies, he argued. “It’s the fight of civilized people, of reasonable people, against religious fanatics.”
The next question was about how to deal with environmental issues.
“First of all, you have to want to,” Koster opined. “Bush doesn’t care about the environment --- he doesn’t even pretend to care.”
Brito argued that sometimes well intended ideas backfire. He defended the Bush administration’s rejection of the Kyoto greenhouse gases treaty as “a realistic approach to global climate change.” He defended the Bush record on conserving national parks and other federal lands and efforts to control air pollution.
Then, a questioner wanted to know what the two parties would do to make health care more affordable.
“Health care, without a doubt, needs a big overhaul,” Brito said. “The first thing is tort reform, to stop the lawsuits that are putting doctors out of business.” He also advocated easing of restrictions on the purchase of cheaper prescription medicines abroad.
Koster retorted that Kerry intends to give all Americans the same sort of health care that members of Congress get, and argued that “the malpractice impasse” must be addressed not only on the side of reducing frivolous lawsuits, but also by penalizing insurance companies that he accused of colluding to keep malpractice coverage expensive.
The debate got back to the dichotomy between unilateral US military action versus acting with UN support.
“If you see an attack coming, you have to parry that attack,” Koster said, citing John F. Kennedy’s 1962 blockade of Cuba when it was discovered that Soviet missiles had been set up on the island. He also noted with approval the coalition that George H. W. Bush assembled to throw the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and compared it with his son’s much narrower “Coalition of the Willing” for the current Iraq War.
“The problem is that God gave daddy the brains, and maybe Jeb’s got some,” Koster concluded.
In Brito’s opinion, however, the younger Bush has done precisely what he should have done. “American presidents should take action,” he argued. “The United States president has a responsibility to United States citizens, not the French.”
On a question about budget priorities, Brito put security and education at the top of the list, while Koster put his main emphasis on intelligence --- “penetrating the enemy and finding out his plans.”
The debate got back to Iraq, and how a US invasion could be justified in the absence of weapons of mass destruction.
Koster read a passage from George H. W. Bush’s book “The World Transformed,” in which the former president justified his ending the Gulf War without driving into Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein with an argument that to do so would have immersed America into a terrible quagmire with no easy exit. “I wish George W. Bush would have read his daddy’s book,” Koster said.
But now that the United States is in Iraq, just pulling out is not a viable option, Koster argued. “We broke Iraq --- I don’t think for any good reason, but we broke it and we gotta fix it.”
Brito took John Kerry to task for voting to authorize the Iraq War but now opposing it. “President Bush acted with the same information that Tony Blair and Senator Kerry had,” he argued.
Moreover, the Republican spokesman said that he doesn’t believe that an Iraqi cache of weapons of mass destruction won’t be found.
Nor is Brito overly impressed with arguments about international law. “Combating terrorism requires more than law enforcement methods,” he argued.
In concluding remarks, Brito emphasized that “it’s our security, stupid.”
“Security implies many things,” the Republican spokesman argued. “One of them is to give the troops the tools they need.” He went on to read a litany of weapons programs that Kerry opposed in the Senate. “That is not the way to protect the country. That is not the way to help our troops,” he concluded.
In his closing argument, Koster recalled how in 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson promised not to send young Americans to fight a war that young Vietnamese had a duty to fight, when later evidence showed that at that very time he was planning to send half a million US troops to Vietnam after the election. “When presidents lie, the people ought to protest it,” Koster remarked.
The Democrat added that the Republicans are trying to divide Americans at a time when the country is at war, which he decried as treachery and dismissed as a way to distract attention from the poor state of the US economy.
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