To the editor:
As a lifelong Republican and recent Bush supporter, I welcome the president's obvious intention to run again. Even with all of the country's and this administration's problems - and they are considerable - I shudder to think of where we would be now, both from a world perspective as well as on the domestic front, if his 1988 opponent, with his view of America as an enlarged Massachusetts, had won.Like most Americans, I have admired and supported the president's courage and decisiveness in making the difficult - and in my view correct - decision to stand up to Saddam Hussein's megalomania. I also applaud contributions to the ongoing reform in the Soviet Union, his early and constant support for a unified Germany and unified Europe, and his attempts to break through the status quo toward some kind of fair and balanced peace in the intractable Middle East.
These successes in foreign policy leadership are not insignificant and may yet produce even greater results and grant the president a place along some of our better president-diplomats, such as Richard Nixon, whose understanding and mastery of foreign affairs helped fashion a freer world while strengthening the U.S. role in it.
The Nixon comparison, however, should also serve as a warning - perhaps too harsh - for Bush on the domestic front. His claims to a viable domestic program notwithstanding, the president's record here - to put it charitably - constitutes only the palest reflection of what has been accomplished abroad.
For the rest of this first term and certainly during a potential second one, there is plenty of room at home for leadership and statesmanship.
We need statesmanship, not partisan bickering with the Congress, to reduce soaring budget deficits and to produce a tax policy that will encourage saving, reward the thrifty and still meet our most pressing national needs.
We also need leadership to strike a balance between self-help and voluntarism on the one hand and social cooperation through government on the other in solving such problems as drug dependency, family breakdown and homelessness.
Let's also see a real emphasis upon education - both public and private - with a president who helps educate the country to the importance of education in the post-industrial age.
Finally, Bush has rightly emphasized the importance of America's religious underpinnings and values. Now is also the time to take the lead of both Republicans and the country in directing that religious impulse away from divisiveness and dogmatism and toward compassion for the weak, the disadvantaged, the forgotten.
Douglas F. Tobler
Provo