The case for change
SOUTH KOREA'S president, Kim Dae Jung, traveled to Washington early in 2001 with high hopes that his "sunshine diplomacy" would be embraced by the new American president. He hoped for an agreement that would obligate North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for energy assistance and other aid from the United States. His effort had won Kim the Nobel Peace Prize the year before.
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But President Bush took a hard line toward North Korea, which a top Bush aide said had been "cosseted" by the United States in the recent past. Bush snubbed Kim and sent him home empty-handed.
As Bush seeks reelection, the incident is pertinent for two reasons:
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The meeting occurred on March 7, 2001, six months before the terrorists' attacks of Sept. 11, illustrating that Bush's confrontational foreign policy was not forged by that horror.
In the absense of the agreement, North Korea accelerated its weapons program and now, according to published estimates, its store of nuclear weapons has risen from a possible one or two to a probable six to eight. North Korea is now a greater terror threat than Iraq was in 2003, yet Bush's efforts to deal with Pyongyang show no sign of improving.
When the Globe makes political endorsements, we normally focus on the candidates we support and the reasons for that support. Often the opponent is not even mentioned. But this election more than others is a referendum on the performance of the incumbent president.
President Bush has been a polarizer at home and abroad, confrontational with allies and adversaries alike, blind to the effects of his favor-the-rich economic policies and deaf to the millions of Americans who have lost jobs or health care or have sunk into poverty on his watch. Far too many of the numbers are dismal. No matter how he tries to argue it, Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a private-sector job loss. Even the recent recovery is slow, barely keeping pace with the growth in the labor force. And the number of long-term jobless who have exhausted unemployment benefits has hit an all-time high.
Bush has run the federal budget deficit to record levels ($413 billion this year), an act of generational immorality. Just last week the US Treasury had to start using accounting tricks to keep the country solvent because the federal red ink has hit the debt ceiling -- a shocking $7.4 trillion. The dollar is weak. The trade deficit last month was the second-highest ever. The income gap between rich and poor, the highest in the developed world, grows worse. Consumer confidence is low across the country and lower on Wall Street. While the president insists that the economy is recovering, 1.3 million more Americans fell into poverty last year, and 1.4 million lost health insurance. Meanwhile, health costs are soaring.
These trends would be bad enough in an administration that was trying to counter them. But the reaction from Bush far too often is either equivocation or stubborn denial. Budget deficits, he once said, are just "numbers on paper."
If he were elected to a second term, Bush could not be expected to solve problems he doesn't concede exist. Instead, he would likely compound the mistakes of his first term: further alienating our allies; adding to the civil liberties abuses of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the Ashcroft Justice Department; withdrawing himself and his administration even further from public scrutiny; and planting a conservative ideology in the Supreme Court, as he has already done in the lower courts.
Bush has proclaimed himself a war president; he is certainly a war candidate. He is running on fear, betting that voters will subordinate their own interests and America's role in the world to a continuing threat of terrorists. It is no way to run a campaign, or a country. 
