After being extremely kind to President Bush in the first part of his critique of the Bush speech, Wallis lists the major failures:
..what the president failed to deal with was how his central domestic priority, “making permanent” his tax cuts that most benefit the wealthy, will simply not allow such positive government initiatives – because of a lack of resources. Nor did the president acknowledge or take any responsibility for the largest net job loss in any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover; the country’s record deficits; the rise in the number of Americans living in poverty in each of the last three years (now one in eight of us); or the one million Americans who have lost their health care insurance each year he has been in office. As we have continued to say, poverty is a religious issue.
But the heart and passion of President Bush’s speech and of this Republican Convention throughout was a ringing defense of the administration’s war on terrorism, especially in Iraq, and attacks on John Kerry as weak, indecisive, and unfit to command. The Republican Convention has laid down the gauntlet, bolstered by the “Swift Boat” attack ads on John Kerry’s Vietnam record.
In the furious August debate on that topic, the press eventually began to scrutinize the accuracy of those attacks on Kerry’s military service (after the damage had already been done), but mostly stayed away from the most controversial question about Vietnam – whether the war was fundamentally wrong and characterized by the regular commission of “war crimes.” That’s what the young and decorated naval officer John Kerry testified to Congress when he came home from the war. I was a young anti-war organizer then and say today – 30 years later – that it was the truth then, is still true now, and it was John Kerry’s finest political hour.