Nation-Building >> Lost in Translation | return to front page

So one line I didn't get to in the recap of last night's forum, but which The Note helpfully reprints, was by John Kerry as he belittled Howard Dean's health plan:

"I don't think you can translate the experience of a state with a budget of less than a billion dollars to the United States."

Well, the Arkansas state budget in 1991 was less than $2 billion, and Bill Clinton somehow miraculously managed to translate those budget small-scale budget skills as president.

I guess the response to John Kerry would be two-fold. First, Howard Dean has experience writing a balanced budget and leading a legislature -- of any size -- to pass it. John Kerry does not.

Second, notwithstanding John Kerry's votes for President Clinton's balanced budget, it might be said that being just one single vote of a hundred simply doesn't translate into the kind of experience necessary to lead the country back into an era of fiscal sanity.

Of course, I wish Dean wouldn't say any of this just as I wish Kerry wouldn't have made his disingenuous charge. People spend a lot of time talking about "personal attacks" in an effort to get candidates to focus on each other's record. But I think it's probably equally if not more important to chastise candidate for the kind of disingenous "concern" about the other guy's experience or agenda.

Surely enough differences exist between Kerry's and Dean's respective programs that they can be argued on the merits without this kind of glib insincerity.