I’m a little too young to really appreciate Walter Cronkite’s iron-clad credibility, but it’s nevertheless encouraging to see the retired news anchor tell audiences what he really believes about the state of American politics. In a word, Cronkite’s angry.
What America needs right now, legendary TV anchor Walter Cronkite said Thursday, is a new election — and, he warned a laughing press conference full of reporters, he wasn’t kidding.
“That’s not entirely a joke,” Cronkite said solemnly, arguing that the Bush administration has spent itself into ruin while embroiling the country in a war that will eventually make public revulsion to the war in Vietnam look “like peanuts.”
“I think you journalists today have a great four years ahead of you,” Cronkite observed dryly. “It’s going to be a great story to cover.”
In the last couple of years, Cronkite, who is now 88, has been less shy about the opinions he used to keep to himself. Indeed, he’s been critical of Bush, with varying degrees of subtlety, throughout the campaign season. But now, it appears, Cronkite is through holding back.
On Thursday, he whacked away at the Bush administration even harder, accusing it of destroying the nation’s infrastructure and wrecking its education system to the point that American democracy itself is in danger.
“You want to get down to the nub of how this democracy is going to defend itself,” Cronkite said. “We’ve got to have an intelligent electorate and we’re not going to have it because our education system is in a shambles right now.”
The most immediate problem, Cronkite warned, is Iraq.
“We have a war that is tearing us apart,” he said. But, he added, the administration’s deficit spending is a close second, creating “a debt that will have to be paid by our great-grandchildren, and maybe beyond that.
“In the meantime, we do not have the money to do the things that we ought to — have to — do here at home,” Cronkite said.
Cronkite’s credibility among Americans who grew up watching his nightly news report continues to be, I suspect, fairly strong. With this in mind, I can only hope he’ll continue speaking out like this.