From Robert A. George of the New York Post:

Sixteen years ago, just out of college, I volunteered at the Republican National Convention as a man named George Bush prepared to begin a fall campaign that would see him defeat a Democrat from Massachusetts. The sparkling words of an acceptance speech crafted by Peggy Noonan--and delivered almost flawlessly--helped him inspire his party and a country that saw him as an extension of Ronald Reagan. It fell to that George Bush to "close out" the cold war and launch a different one in the Persian Gulf.

Now, sixteen years later, after tenures working for the party and a couple of Republican members on Capitol Hill (including a speaker named Newt Gingrich) and becoming an earnest fellow traveler of the conservative movement, I find it impossible to support the current George Bush--whom his party sees as the ideological extension of Ronald Reagan--as he faces his own showdown with a Democrat from Massachusetts and oversees a war centered in the Middle East...

...this administration shows little inclination to demand accountability from those who serve within it. In turn, the Republican Congress--ignoring its 1994 vow to "restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives"--appears disinclined to check the powers of the executive. Together, these factors endanger the long-term health of the republic...

The past four decades have seen "wars" on social conditions ("poverty"), inanimate objects ("drugs"), and physical states ("teenage pregnancy"). (Each has met with limited, if any, success.) What is different now is that, this time, a president has asserted that we are in an actual war that must be fought with the full wartime powers of the presidency. With vague congressional approval, this assertion grants the president--and, more importantly, the presidency--powers deeply disturbing from a civil liberties perspective. Indeed, this expansion of presidential prerogative is anathema to the conservative belief in limited government...

...Ultimately, on both foreign and domestic policy, the public's trust has been betrayed. Why should the public trust its leaders with future policy if those leaders deceive and manipulate the people's elected representatives to get a favored policy passed? If the American public and the world at large now react skeptically to future presidential claims that the United States faces a foreign threat, who can blame them?

...No, a Kerry administration would not be any conservative's ideal. But, on limited government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a Republican Congress to act like a Republican Congress. The last such combination produced some form of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to accountability, one could hardly do worse...