"Don't Believe Everything You Read in the Papers: Observations on George W. Bush, American Foreign Policy, and American Politics"

slide 1 (title)

Good afternoon. This is my second visit to the Institute for International Affairs. I was here one month ago, for a seminar marking the 5th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. I know the Institute is a good host, and I know that the audiences here are serious, tough, and interested in discussion. I have a lot to say today, but I will try to do it concisely so that we will have time for questions.

The title of my speech promises you my observations on three things: George W. Bush; American foreign policy; and American politics. I will discuss them in that order, although my thoughts on George Bush will obviously be part of what I have to say about foreign policy and American politics as well. I'll use slides to illustrate some of my points, if the technology cooperates.

Let me begin, then, with George W. Bush. In previous speeches and interviews in Stockholm I have told the story of how the President and I met. I was 14 years old, at boarding school, away from home for the first time. One fall evening I was walking through the campus feeling sorry for myself, and I met another student coming from the other direction. This guy looked at my shoes and made a joke about how funny they looked - and they were funny, pointy-toed, lace-up things that were the fashion in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. He was wearing cowboy boots, so I said something like "Look who's talking, buddy." And that was it. That was George W. Bush. He was about as far from home as I was; we were both fish out of water, him in his cowboy boots, me in my pointy-toed, lace-up shoes. We became fast friends and have been ever since.

There are some things I want people to know about George W. Bush. Why? Because I think that George Bush has been demonized, made into a caricature. I think that some people - in America and in Sweden - have such a visceral dislike toward the President that nothing he does can be correct, nothing he says can be true. I would like people to at least consider the premise that George W. Bush is a decent man, even a good man, who is doing his best, guided by values and conviction, at a very difficult time for his country and our world.

I want to take you into the Oval Office in the White House. What the President has put there says a lot about him. He's got a bust of Abraham Lincoln. He admires Abraham Lincoln because of Lincoln's great belief in the nation, the United States of America. Lincoln knew that the nation was worth fighting for, and he anguished over the lives lost, but he was guided by his vision.

George Washington is in the Oval Office. The father of our nation, an easy choice, some might say. But that is not why there's a painting and a bust of Washington there. President Bush selected those images because even today, historians argue about the true legacy of George Washington and his achievements. When my family and I were in the Oval Office last June, on the day that I was sworn in as Ambassador to Sweden, George Bush said to us, "You can't worry about being vindicated, because when you do big things, it's going to take a while for history to really understand."

Some might call this naïve, or say that the President suffers delusions of grandeur. Not so. He is in fact highly realistic in estimating the challenge that we face and the time it will take for us to defeat this challenge. What history says about him is beyond his control. What he controls is what actions the United States takes now, and he is making the best decisions he can without worrying about the final historical judgments.

Another scene from the Oval Office. This is a couple of years ago, he and I were there alone. And Jenna came in. Jenna is one of the President's twin daughters, of course. She's the more boisterous of the two. She had been away at college and the President hadn't seen her for a while. His eyes started to water. The President of the United States was tearing up because he was seeing his daughter again. It was a touching moment, a human moment. It reminded me that the President, and all our leaders, are of course just people, with all the same emotions that the rest of us feel. I worry that we forget that sometimes.

And a final view into the White House. July 4, 2002. The lawn was crowded with White House staff and their families; I was upstairs on the balcony with the President and some other old friends. It was a beautiful night, warm, clear; the fireworks were going off directly in front of us. I admit it, I was lost in the moment: Independence Day; friends around; celebrating our nation; feeling patriotic. Then the President said to me, "If al-Qaeda is going to attack, they are going to strike right now." Here I was, overwhelmed by these positive feelings. There he was, burdened with the best intelligence available about the terrorist threat, thinking about what terrible things could happen on the 4th of July.

I could go on. When I was here last month I talked about the evening a few days after 9-11 when my wife and I went to dinner with the President and Laura Bush. That night the President told me that he knew responding to the attacks was going to be the challenge of his Presidency; it was going to be what defined him. In August I spoke to the American Chamber of Commerce and mentioned George Bush and President Musharraf of Pakistan. President Musharraf chose to stand with the U.S. after 9-11, and in return, when Pakistan needed help after the earthquake in 2005, President Musharraf was able to call George Bush and ask for - and get - what he needed.

I'll shift focus now, and while I will continue to talk about the President, I will do so through the prism of foreign policy.

U.S. foreign policy is a of course a huge topic. If I was a more traditional Ambassador speaking here at the Institute, I would probably launch into a long list of the values and interests that the U.S. and Sweden share. Then I would offer you a point-by-point defense of the biggest foreign policy issues facing the U.S. and the world. And you would probably have heard it all before and would start nodding off.

You would probably not be convinced, either. You have heard the rationales for the war on terror, for the war in Iraq, for the U.S. decision not to become a party to the Kyoto Protocol. I think that at this point, very few minds remain open on these issues. What I would like to do is offer some larger observations, again relating to the President. If during question and answer you want to talk about specific issues, I will be happy to do that.

Let me start with the war on terror, which includes in my view the war in Iraq. I think that Swedes, and many Europeans, have some twisted images of George W. Bush.

slide 2 (Turning Torso)

I hope to straighten out a few of the twists today.

slide 3 (remote control)

In this slide, you see the President as a child, but we're sure it's him because he's got the cowboy hat and the six-gun. There's a rocket or missile of some kind in there, too. You can't go wrong depicting George Bush as a cowboy, can you? And he usually has to be stupid. Here he's talking about sending bombers to Iraq, and what he thinks is some sort of military device in his hand is actually the remote control to the television.

slide 4 (Ekdal)

This next slide also has him as little boy, without the cowboy hat but wearing a neckerchief, which is also supposed to make us think "cowboy." He is playing with matches and has set a fire. The headline is something like "The President Who Lost His Way."

I show you these for a couple of reasons. First, they're caricatures. I recognize that caricatures are a part of politics, a part of publishing. I just think that this kind of image is so overplayed that people believe they represent the truth about George W. Bush. They don't. The decision to go to war in Iraq was probably the most difficult thing George Bush has had to do. Afghanistan was necessary and everyone understood that. Iraq - as I think most of you will agree - is another matter.

I have to take exception as well to the idea that the President has lost his way. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is completely committed to the path he has chosen. As I said earlier, he is not deviating or letting setbacks sway him. He believes in what he is doing and he will keep doing it. He is on what he believes - and I believe - to be the right way.

Let me add that I met Niklas Ekdal earlier this week. We talked about the substance of his editorial. I don't agree with what he wrote here, but he is a thoughtful and serious man and I respect him. I hope he would say the same of me, including the part about not agreeing with me. I am using the headline here and the illustration to make my points about George W. Bush.

The fundamental point concerning the President and 9-11 is perhaps what I said earlier. It defined him, or his reactions to it defined him. This was a tragedy thrust upon him, an attack against American soil. Everything he has done since then springs from a desire to defeat the people who did this and see to it that it never happens again.

One of the ways in which President Bush intends to defeat the terrorists is democracy. He believes that tyrannies produce terrorists and democracies do not. For 60 years, the U.S. and the west more generally tolerated autocratic regimes in the Middle East. We had the illusion of stability, perhaps, but beneath the surface generations of resentment built up. Terror has provided one outlet for that resentment. Democracy is the antidote.

Last month, another speaker at another podium, in New York not Stockholm, held up a book. It was not, however, this book.

slide 5 and book (Sharansky)

Funny, I don't smell any sulfur here today.

This book, The Case for Democracy, has had a powerful impact on George Bush. He has said as much. He met Nathan Sharansky at the White House and he often quotes him. About a year and a half ago, the President met with a group of young professionals in Germany. One of them asked him about Sharansky's ideas. What the President said was this: Sharansky's book confirmed how I was raised and what I believe, and it's essentially this: that deep in everybody's soul -- everybody's soul, is this deep desire to be free. That's what I believe. No matter where you're raised, no matter your religion, people want to be free; and that a foreign policy, particularly from a nation that is free, ought to be based upon that thought.

I can't say it any better than he did.

Iraq is a testing ground for this idea. A free and democratic Iraq will replace the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and the Middle East will be better off because of it. The work is far from done, as the President has acknowledged. Reconstruction has been slow, the Iraqi security forces are still developing. Terrorists in Iraq are happy to kill other Iraqis, Americans, or anyone else they can, to keep a democratic state from emerging. The Iraqi people have however had their first opportunity to elect the government of their choosing, and that government, with a host of international partners, is working to establish functioning institutions and bring stability to Iraq.

I am going to shift gears now, remaining in the foreign policy area but also moving a little closer to us in Sweden.

Slide 6 (globe under glass)

Slide 7 (people drowning)

Why do I choose to bring up global warming? I want to attack some more caricatures - you see them here. That second one is particularly hideous, suggesting the George Bush will let the world drown. And I want to talk about something that is very important to George Bush, to me, and, I hope, to many of you. I call it One Big Thing. Here are some better pictures of the President to go with this idea.

slide 8 (zero emissions President)

That photo on the top is not the most flattering I've ever seen of him, but focus on the car. That's a fuel cell car, and it is part of the President's Advanced Energy Initiative, and part of the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm's One Big Thing.

slide 9 (Advanced Energy Initiative)

The Advanced Energy Initiative, launched by President Bush this past January, focuses the U.S. Government's efforts on reducing emissions and developing alternative fuels. The President's "30/30" plan calls for a 30% reduction in fossil fuel use in the U.S. by the year 2030. He is increasing funding for clean energy research, in the areas that you see here.

slide 10 (Advanced Energy II)

I intend to make alternative fuels the focus of my tenure here in Stockholm. You may find this unusual. Ambassadors usually set out to increase trade, or improve bilateral relations in some hard-to-define way. We want to do those things, too, but I wanted to set a definable goal - One Big Thing -- that we could try to reach as an Embassy. I also wanted to do something that I thought would matter to Sweden and would appeal to many Swedes. I want us to be Partners for Cleaner energy.

slide 11 (Mission Statement)

Here is the Mission Statement, one sentence that defines our objective.

This is not the place to go into much more detail about the One Big Thing, except that I do have to mention Kyoto. I believe that it is time to stop arguing about whether or not the U.S. should sign on to Kyoto. We have not done so, we will not do so. If in 2008 we have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, the U.S. will not become a party to Kyoto. It is a flawed mechanism that will not bring significant benefits. Let's look at what else we can do to address global warming.

Yes, George Bush is concerned about global warming. He saw Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." I saw "An Inconvenient Truth" here in Stockholm. Afterward I met Al Gore, and I said to him, "You know, George Bush has seen your film, and he gets it. He understands." Al Gore was speechless. Maybe you are too.

I view the U.S. Embassy's One Big Thing as a contribution to the Advanced Energy Initiative. It is also a small contribution to the huge struggle to deal with global warming. I hope it will be an area where the U.S. and Sweden can really come together as partners.

I'm now going to turn to the final part of my presentation, in which I gaze into a crystal ball and tell you what I think is going to happen in the U.S. midterm elections.

Election-watching is of course a game lots of people enjoy. In the month before the Swedish elections I asked everyone I met what they thought was going to happen on September 17. I got three kinds of answers. Most people said it was too close to call. They played it safe, wouldn't pick a winner. The permanent pessimists were a smaller group. They bet against their hearts. "Well," they would say, "I really want the Social Democrats to win, but I think the Alliance will pull it off." Or vice versa. The third group was the ones who would commit themselves and call it, one way or another.

I am going to put myself into the third group and make a prediction. The Republicans will retain control of both Houses of Congress. I expect a diminished, very thin majority, 51-49 in the Senate, 218-217 in the House, but no loss of power.

We'll put the text of this speech - with this prediction -- onto our Embassy website. You can read it again in a month. I promise we won't make any edits after the fact. If I'm wrong, no one will ever let me forget it. If I'm right, I'll be joining Soren Hölmberg as an expert commentator next election night on SVT.

Am I just being partisan? Am I calling it for the Republicans because that's the outcome I want and I am too blind to see that the Grand Old Party is in trouble? I don't think so. I read the news, I look at the maps, and I just don't see the Democrats pulling off a big victory.

Don't take my word for it. Trust the New York Times. This is the projection of the Senate races, according to the Times, on October 9, this past Monday.

slide 12 (Senate races)

Of course, these numbers will be changing over the next month, but two days ago, the Times considered 49 Senate seats to be safely Republican and four seats to be toss-ups. If the Republicans get two of those toss-ups, they'll be at 51. Currently, they have 55 seats, so this would be a loss.

The House is also tight.

Slide 13 (House races)

Here the Times shows 209 safe for the Republicans, 208 safe for Democrats. Split the toss-ups, and the Republicans end up in the majority, 218 to 217. That would represent a loss for the Republicans, who currently hold 231 seats. A loss of 13 seats is hard to call a victory, but they will retain control.

The numbers, for now, seem to bear out my prediction. What else am I basing my decision on? Mostly on George W. Bush. The Democrats are arguing that this election is about President Bush. Fair enough. In the 1990s, the Republicans ran against Bill Clinton. In the 1994 mid-term elections that worked very, very well. In 1996, for Bob Dole, it did not work. The Democrats are hoping that the President is so unpopular that even if his name is not on the ballot, voters will vent their unhappiness on the Republican candidates.

I don't see if happening that way. First of all, George Bush is very good at winning elections. He is more than happy to have the Democrats run against him. Remember, in 1994 he was not supposed to beat Ann Richards, who was the incumbent, to become Governor of Texas. In 2000, he won the Republican nomination over John McCain, and then defeated Al Gore. It isn't easy to defeat an incumbent candidate, in this case, the Vice President, when the economy is relatively strong. George W. Bush did it. Then the Republicans gained seats in Congress in 2002, and in 2004, the President won against John Kerry. I don't think this year is going to be an exception. He is out there campaigning and raising funds and talking to the American people. He does those things well.

The President also has an advantage when it comes to political strategy. I think most of you have heard of Karl Rove. He's the man behind the President's victories. He did for George W. Bush what James Carville did for Bill Clinton. Carville's retired from campaigning, and the Democrats don't have anyone to match Karl Rove.

Part of what Karl Rove does is get out the money and get out the votes. I know that the amount of money that goes into elections in the U.S. strikes many people as obscene. However, our candidates rely heavily on ads placed on commercial TV and radio stations, and those are expensive. Direct mailings, polling, hiring strategists - unfortunately, it takes a lot to win an election, and it all costs money. We also view campaign contributions as one way that individuals can have an impact on the system.

Karl Rove also brings out the voters. We saw it in the last two Presidential races. This is sometimes called the "72-hour machine," the ability of the Republican Party to mobilize its supporters at the very end of the campaign and actually get them to the voting booths on Election Day.

slide 14 (polls)

Here's an indication that things are looking better for the President and his party. This shows the compiled results from a number of different polls. The trend is clear. The President's job approval ratings bottomed out in May and have been climbing since then.

If you can read the text on this slide, you'll see that on a number of key issues - Iraq, the economy, security - confidence in the President is up. A majority also believe that the President has made America more secure. Gas prices are down; the stock market just hit a record high. Unemployment is low, only 4.6%. This doesn't leave the Democrats much to run on.

To be fair, the Democrats do have issues. Iraq is one of them. There are a lot of people who are not happy with the course of the war in Iraq. However, the Democrats have not, in my view, laid out a real alternative. With very few exceptions, Democrats are not advocating a rapid withdrawal. They recognize that we have to win this fight because if we don't, Iraq becomes what Afghanistan was. There's more unity on this than you might think from what you read in the newspapers.

I think that one indication of this general consensus on Iraq is the Senate race in Connecticut. This was covered in the Swedish media. The incumbent Democrat, Joe Lieberman, lost the Democratic primary. He was challenged by Ned Lamont, who ran on a strong anti-war platform and accused Senator Lieberman of being too close to George Bush and too supportive of the war. For a sitting Senator not to be renominated by his party is very surprising. Lieberman was first elected to the Senate in 1988, and he was his party's Vice Presidential candidate in the 2000 election, Bush vs. Gore. But he was defeated because the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party in Connecticut was strong enough to deny him the nomination. Remember, in the primary, only members of the party vote. Turnout is also usually low in the primary elections, so a small but committed group can have a big impact.

The surprise ending to the story, however, is that Joe Lieberman is almost certainly going to remain the Senator from Connecticut. He is running as an independent candidate, not representing either party, and the polls show him ahead of Lamont. (Both of them are way ahead of the Republican in the race.) In the general election, everyone votes. The anti-war and anti-Bush Democrats certainly made their voices heard in the primary campaign, but now, the broader electorate is prepared to send Joe Lieberman back to the Senate, knowing that he supported the war and that he generally supports the President.

If he goes back, Joe Lieberman is going to sit with the Democrats. His reelection will not be a victory for the Republican Party by any means. It will however be a victory for common sense, and it will support what I said earlier, that there is a general consensus in the American mainstream that the war in Iraq needs to be fought to eventual victory.

Another issue for the Democrats could simply be "change." Here Göran Persson might have some things to say. After six years of Republican leadership in Washington, there could be some voters who just want something different. Bill Clinton represented change when he defeated George H.W. Bush. That was after 12 years of Republicans in the White House. Here, Göran Persson had been in office for 10 years. I don't think that six years of George Bush is too much, but these are difficult times and I do expect some people will vote Democratic just for the sake of change.

Of course, some of you might be silently wishing that everyone in America would vote Democratic, for any reason they like. I understand that Swedes generally feel more comfortable with a Democrat in the White House. Even the label "Republican" seems to frighten some people here. I was talking with a Swedish political scientist recently. He had lived in the U.S. for quite a while. He said that Swedes who lived in the U.S. were always shocked to find out that the nice people who lived next door, who invited you to dinner, whose kids played with your kids, were Republicans. It was like they were secretly heroin addicts or tax cheats or something.

I won't try to explain what makes a Republican. Some people are Republican because of national security issues, for others it is all about taxes and the economy. For some, the Republican stance on issues like abortion and gun control matter most. One good explanation that might make sense to you is to consider how many Swedes view Brussels. What does it make you think of, Brussels? Far off bureaucrats making decisions that affect your daily lives without ever consulting you? Well, in the U.S., if you have that same kind of suspicion of a large and powerful central bureaucracy, you might very well be a Republican. (This analogy is not my own, by the way. I credit the idea to the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, who said something along these lines in a speech last summer.)

At the end of the day, Republican is just a label, like Moderate or Social Democrat, Liberal, or Green. It tells you a little bit about a person and their political beliefs. It does not tell you if someone is a good father, a hard worker, a lousy golfer, or if he likes a cigar after dinner. I think we are all better off if we remember that - and yes, this applies equally to Democrats. Just a label, not an indictment.

Since I am playing political predictor, I'm going to take just a few more minutes to look ahead to 2008. In 2008, as you know, the race for the White House is wide open. There is no incumbent President running, and no sitting Vice President seeking the party nomination.

So who will get the nominations and who will win? I think I know who a lot of Swedes would like to see.

slide 15 (Hillary)

Hillary Clinton is very popular, no doubt about it. She won her Senate seat easily in 2000, doesn't face a real challenge this year. She's raised $35 million and is going to have a lot of that left when the current campaign ends. Her husband remains very popular and would presumably be an asset to her.

For the Republicans, I think John McCain is probably the favorite. He ran for the party nomination in 2000 and lost to George Bush, but has remained a very visible figure in the Senate and nationally through his work on campaign finance reform and for his willingness to confront the President on issues such as torture and detentions. He is conservative but also appeals to some Democrats precisely because he will break from his party leaders from time to time.

As an aside, since I am mentioning McCain, the media in Sweden and the U.S. reported a lot about the supposed "revolt" among Republicans who were opposed to some parts of the President's proposal to use military tribunals in the war on terror. Of course, about a week after these stories broke, the President and the party came together on a plan that satisfies everyone's concerns. I think people who oppose the President see this kind of thing as a defeat, as proof that he is losing his support. I disagree. In politics and government you always have debates. We don't have a parliamentary system where individual members of the legislature pretty much hew to the party line. We have differences, even within one party. But we work them out.

So, here is what the 2008 election might look like.

slide 16 (Hillary vs. McCain)

But there are many other possibilities.

slide 17 (other possible nominees)

Some of these names might be familiar to you, many are probably not. They are mostly state governors. We like to send governors to the White House. George Bush was governor of Texas; Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas; Ronald Reagan, California; Jimmy Carter, Georgia.

Mitt Romney is an intriguing choice among the Republicans. He is governor of Massachusetts, a very deeply Democratic state, home of the Kennedys and John Kerry. That's an argument in his favor; he's a Republican who gets Democratic votes. Mark Warner has the same profile for the Democrats. He was the two-term Democratic governor of Virginia, a traditionally Republican state. He can also make the claim that he reaches across party lines.

Whoever the candidates are, we can probably look forward to another very close race. 2000 and 2004 were both decided by a single state. 2008 could well be the same. I think the Republicans start out with the advantage. They know that if they can keep all the states George Bush won, they keep the White House. The Democrats have to move at least one state from Red to Blue, from Republican to Democrat.

That won't be easy. I think the basic political makeup of the country has not changed much. The number of states that might realistically move is small. Republicans also benefit from the fact that most of the population growth in the U.S. is occurring in the Red states. U.S. population rose from 200 million in 1967 to 300 million today. Roughly 80 million of that increase has occurred in the south and west, mostly Red states. That trend is likely to continue, fed by internal migration from north and east to south and west, and by new arrivals, immigrants, who also tend to end up in the south and west.

We regularly reapportion the number of seats in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College based on population. If the Red states grow in population, they become an increasing percentage of the electoral votes a candidate needs to be elected President. Of course, the character of a state can change. New arrivals from the Midwest or northeast or from Latin America might not adopt the voting behavior of their new neighborhoods. What we think of as a Red state today, Florida or Arizona, perhaps, could be a Blue state one day. In the short term, however, I think that the population figures do increase the chances of a Republican presidency in 2008.

Am I going to give you a prediction for 2008, my guess as to who the candidates will be and who will win? No. My crystal ball doesn't see that far. However, I have every intention of being in Stockholm in 2008. If the Institute will have me back again, after all the hot air I've expended today, I'll be glad to give you my predictions then. With that, I will conclude my formal remarks. I want to thank the Institute for having me, and you for coming. I will be happy to respond to your questions.