It's Hard to Be Humble

It's Hard to Be Humble
Gore's arrogance is a matter of philosophy. Last night Bush had the answer.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, October 12, 2000 4:42 a.m. EDT

George W. Bush came into his own last night, with a presidential-caliber performance that lit up brilliantly the basic issue. What's on the table in this election is not just the character of the next president, but of America itself.

Certainly by the end of this second presidential debate, the haze of distractions and minutiae that marked last week's match had cleared. The difference between the two candidates was stark. Al Gore thinks he can manage your life better than you can. Mr. Bush thinks you'll do better managing your life for yourself.

That's a mighty difference in philosophy, likely to dictate very different policies not only on the issues of the moment but on questions that we may not yet foresee. At the extreme, it's a distinction that defined politics and divided the world into winners and losers--free nations and unfree ones--during the Cold War. And even in a country secure, rich and lucky enough for citizens to have a vote on such matters, it is not a mild choice. This is an election in which it really does matter who wins; it is a vote with large implications for what kind of society we become.

The big question going into the debate, of course, sounded rather less grand. The world was wondering whether Mr. Gore would atone for his arrogance in last week's debate: his sighing, lying and exaggerating that played so ill in the polls. Who would want a president with bad manners and such disregard for the facts?

And it was indeed a more polite Mr. Gore who appeared at the debate table, telling voters: "I can't promise that I will never get another detail wrong," but "I'll work my heart out to get the big things right for the American people."

But what came through in the 90-minute debate was that Mr. Gore's chief problem lies not in the details, or the debating mannerisms--bothersome though those can be. Rather, these are spillovers of the core problem that for a would-be leader of a free nation, what he's got most wrong are precisely the big things.

At the heart of this trouble is the extraordinary arrogance that leads Mr. Gore to believe he can micromanage the U.S., and maybe the rest of the world as well. That arrogance is exactly what came through--especially in contrast to Mr. Bush's views--in, for instance, the big chunk of last night's debate devoted to foreign affairs.

Questioned by Jim Lehrer about what mattered in U.S. foreign policy, Mr. Bush delivered a clear bottom line: not the diffuse gospel of foreign "nation building" that has been the scattershot signature of the Clinton-Gore administration (recall, for example, Haiti, Somalia and assorted debacles on Mr. Gore's special turf, Russia--not to mention the "peace process" whose results we are now witnessing in the Middle East). Saying the president's job is to look out for U.S. interests, Mr. Bush listed concisely his priorities for deciding what those are and summed up the mission of the U.S. military: not to police the world, but to prepare "to fight and win a war." It was a tantalizing glimpse, in fact, of something this country does not currently enjoy--a solid foreign policy.

Mr. Gore, on the other hand, professed himself deep into nation building--a phrase to which he tried to bring some humility with the backhanded acknowledgment that it "sounds grandiose." The trouble is, it is grandiose. Even for a man as powerful as the president, to sit in the Oval Office hatching projects for revamping the rest of the world is costly and unrealistic. It can backfire into tremendous resentment in countries where we simply wade in trying to impose a new order and botch the job. Russia, for example, is by now riddled with anti-American sentiment and run by a not-entirely-genial former KGB man, despite--in part because of--all the meddling and U.S. billions poured in on Mr. Gore's watch.

As Mr. Bush noted, reform in other countries needs to come chiefly from those who live there--the principle, as in domestic policy, being that the world works best when people take responsibility for themselves, not when they hand over control to Washington. This is not to suggest an isolationist America, but to find a cleaner line between the grandiose and the genuinely functional. The best thing America can do for the rest of the world is be true to its own interests as a democratic free-trading nation, serving chiefly as a model and ally, rather than trying to play nanny to the planet.

But the planet, for Mr. Gore, is only the beginning. Again and again last night he displayed the arrogance with which he assumes he knows best for us all, especially in contrast with Mr. Bush's basic view that "you can spend your money more wisely than the federal government can."

Mr. Gore is sure he knows the cause of global warming and how to spend billions upon billions to deal with it--even if science still doesn't know just what it's all about or whether it even exists. Mr. Gore wants federal laws to "enhance" penalties for "hate crimes"--and never mind if Texas is already putting such criminals to death. Mr. Gore wants to use our money to handcraft our health care and decide where our children go to school and preside over a tax code meant to motivate Americans like a bunch of laboratory frogs to behave in business as he deems best. And if he tends to get details wrong, he promises "to try not to anymore."

Mr. Bush's presidential move last night was to give Americans the clear message: "I don't believe in command and control out of Washington, D.C." This is the vital philosophy for a free nation. It's a winner in my book, and a lot easier on the eyes, the nation's prospects and the general needs of human dignity than the spectacle of Mr. Gore now trying against all his own internal logic to sound humble, at least until after the election.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."