Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Silver Linings

(Reprinted from the issue of November 11, 2004)

Well, at least we won’t have a phony Catholic as president. I’m not sure my nerves can bear four more years of George W. Bush, but I’m trying to look on the bright side.

One advantage of favoring neither candidate is that no matter which one wins, it’s a great relief that the other lost. I awoke on Election Day fearing a Bush victory; at the end of a long night I was almost elated by John Kerry’s defeat.

As I write, Kerry has just conceded to Bush, so he won’t be appointing federal judges. A friend suggests that Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s sudden illness may have made the difference in this election, by reminding pro-lifers of the stakes. Of course the other side may have been mobilized by the same news, and in such a close election it’s hard to say which factor was decisive, but this is an interesting reflection.

The Supreme Court of Massachusetts may have doomed the Democrats when it imposed sodomatrimony on the state, outraging millions of voters across the country and making a Massachusetts liberal an especially inapt choice for a candidate. Kerry never managed to exorcise the strong suspicion that he sympathized with the loopiest judges on social issues.

It will be revealing to see how much of the Catholic vote Kerry got. I hope analysis of the results will show that his altar boy act hurt him more than it helped, but as Bill Clinton might say, it depends on what you mean by “Catholic.”

This unpredictable election wasn’t quite as close as expected; Bush won the popular vote by more than three million. Oddly enough, Kerry nearly reversed the results of the 2000 election when he almost won in electoral votes, Ohio threatening to do this time what Florida did four years ago.

Adding to the excitement, Osama bin Laden delivered his own October surprise, a video that suggested he’d been watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: He taunted Bush for reading the little girl’s book about a goat after the first tower was hit. This too may have helped Bush. Bin Laden boasted that every dollar al-Qaeda spends forces the U.S. government to spend a million, which I can well believe after enduring airport security recently; thanks to Bush’s reaction to 9/11, the man has certainly gotten a lot of bang for his buck.

The Republicans also gained seats in both houses of Congress, which will strengthen Bush’s hand in his second term, perhaps allowing him to be somewhat bolder in filling any Supreme Court vacancies. But judging by his record, I doubt he’ll want to put up a fight about abortion. It doesn’t seem to interest him, let alone horrify him.

Will he try to find a way out of the Iraq mess? He’s plenty stubborn, and he continues to insist that “freedom is on the march” with a U.S.-imposed “democracy” that enjoys little legitimacy in Arab eyes. One of the big questions about Bush is whether he realizes that his neoconservative cheerleaders pushed him into a war that went so badly that it nearly cost him the election.

A year ago Bush looked invincible. The Democrats were desperately looking for a candidate who could beat him; then they settled on the dreary liberal Kerry, whose only strength was Bush’s growing unpopularity. But Kerry never managed to take full advantage of the avalanche of bad news from and about Iraq, which made Bush so vulnerable. In fact Kerry never really made it clear where he stood on the war, except that he would somehow do it better.

Had Kerry won, he’d have had his hands full just trying to fix the messes Bush has made, budgetary as well as military. With a Republican Congress, he could hardly have pursued much of a liberal agenda, and he might have had difficulty getting judges and justices confirmed. As James Burnham used to observe, presidential agendas usually get derailed by unforeseen events anyway. Jimmy Carter, for instance, came to the White House with ambitious plans, only to be completely consumed by inflation and, at the end, events in Iran.
 
Voting as a Moral Gesture

Bush’s second term may bring nothing quite so unforeseen as the 9/11 drama, but we can assume that even with a solidly Republican Congress there will be surprises; there always are. He has already shown his, shall we say, indifference to conservative principles, especially limited or constitutional government. He even makes it his boast that his kind of conservatism views government as a “positive” force. Here again the neocons have encouraged him in his “big-government conservatism,” a self-contradictory phrase he avoids but which fits him.

The strangest part is that Bush really sees himself, and manages to sell himself, as a true conservative holding the fort against those crazy liberals. He uses the old right-wing shibboleths as if he means them; Kerry felt obliged to match him by stressing his “faith,” his military record, his love of hunting, and so forth, but all in vain. The man has Massachusetts written all over him, as Bush never let us forget, whereas Bush goes out of his way to seem Texan.

Election-day polling showed that most voters said they were chiefly concerned with “values,” rather than specific issues, and this attitude helps Republicans more than Democrats. The voters certainly didn’t speak in unison, but Americans, in contrast to Europeans, see voting as a moral gesture. Bush is quite comfortable with this; Kerry isn’t. Kerry never seemed natural talking faith-talk.

In that respect, the campaign was fought on Bush’s terms. That the race was as close as it was is a measure of Bush’s many failures; he began with advantages — incumbency, a sense of crisis, and an earthy rapport with ordinary people — that should have given him a landslide. A better campaigner than Kerry would have made the most of all this year’s terrible headlines from Iraq.
 
It’s Finally Over

Bush’s victory is already beginning to seem inevitable, though on Election Day it seemed anything but. Polls and predictions were flying every which way. It was maddening. How quickly we forget our own uncertainty!

At any rate, it’s finally over. Bush has become the first presidential candidate in 16 years to win more than half the popular vote. The last one was his father.


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Joseph Sobran