Choices for president

The presidential choice this year is between a believer and a thinker. Sen. John F. Kerry is clever and knows many things. George W. Bush knows one big thing. The debates were between two boxers, a jabber and a hooker Ali and Frazier, perhaps — one who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee and a bull that bores in till he bangs a hard one to the chin.

But there were no knockouts. Mr. Kerry won on points. He was confident, smooth and articulate. He danced circles around President Bush, who awkwardly absorbed punishment untill he could finally land his big left fist. “Global test.” Bang. Mr. Kerry almost went to the mat. It resounds today, and as the president’s bruises and bumps heal Mr. Kerry’s head still aches from the blow that came when he dropped his guard.

Question: Does America really want a commander-in-chief who subordinates security to a “global test?” What, pray, is that? Is it the United Nations, whose impotence and incompetence is exceeded only by its hypocrisy and corruption? Is that Mr. Kerry’s sentry of our safety? What of George Bush? What does he propose? Everyone can see that he is truly a believer, a man of faith. He does not know as many wonderful things as the senator, but he believes a man with faith has enough, and a man without it does not. Faith is his strength, and it takes a faith to defeat a faith — an idea to defeat an idea.

In Vietnam we wondered why our enemy was so resolute and our ally was not. The answer was simple. The enemy believed, with the fervor of faith, and won. This is why the terrorists today hate and fear George W. Bush. The terrorists know he fights for an idea, and that it takes a crusade to defeat a jihad, just as Europe once had faith when it was Christendom and believed in itself and had not yet sacrificed its stirring faith on the altar of cold reason.

Clearly, Mr. Kerry is not such a believer but a man of reason. He sees both sides and is always ambivalent. In the matter of Vietnam, he was a warrior one day and an antiwarrior the next. He is a complex, sophisticated man of reflection and accordingly does not so much seek to defeat Islamo-fascism as to understand it. That is why the word “victory” falls so limply from his lips. He wishes to dialogue, then come to terms on a rational basis — to see one’s own fault and to appease.

But irrational reasons are always impervious to rational objections. Of course, reason is essential but in the end it cannot be the essence of faith because faith in reason is a contradiction. What reason creates it will always destroy. Reason digs in the sands of speculation until despair obstructs the search for certainty. Without faith, reason becomes a disease, a scepsis, enervating and corrosive to the spirit. Man is not truly reasonable.

This is so simply because man wishes to believe rather than to continually think about disbelieving. Give him an idea and he can do anything. Give him skepticism and he will do nothing. In one lies paralysis and inaction, in the other, action and will. When Jesus asked St. Peter to be “a fisher of men,” Peter did not inquire of the cost. That would have been a reasonable question, but not the response of faith. The rational thing is to keep fishing for fish. Discipleship is difficult. Because Peter believed, he became a superman. Had he been merely reasonable, he would have remained simply a man.

George Bush sees his mission in just this way, and views his as a war of faith — a crusade. Charles Martel by his victory over the Muslims at Tours saved both his faith and France, and he won because he believed, like his Islamic opponent, that he was fighting the infidel.

It’s complicated, of course, but conservatism is increasingly the politics of traditional faith: Faith in God, faith in America and faith in a tested moral code, while liberalism is the politics only of reason, and tries instead to think its way past danger, decadence and despair to reach some other shore, however vaguely imagined that shore might be on a global humanistic horizon. This is the essence of John Kerry’s “global test.” It’s an appeal to a reasonable world that most Americans of faith simply don’t believe is out there.

Phillip H. McMath, son of a Democratic governor of Arkansas, is a lawyer and a novelist in Little Rock. This essay appeared earlier in a somewhat different version in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.