Bush Will Bury Kerry

[Tigermike 3,039]

Bush Will Bury Kerry

The Democrat will be lucky to exceed Michael Dukakis's share of the popular vote.

BY BRENDAN MINITER

Tuesday, September 7, 2004 12:01 a.m.

NEW YORK--For nearly four years now, we've been told this is a 50-50 nation, that red and blue America are so evenly divided that even a small misstep could swing this presidential election either way. The media may have their own reasons for sticking to the story line--drama is good for ratings, after all--but there's mounting evidence that the electorate is not nearly as evenly divided as it was in 2000; that come Nov. 2, newscasters are going to be putting a lot more red than blue on their electoral maps. I will make a prediction here: Mr. Kerry will be lucky to top the 45.7% of the popular vote Michael Dukakis got in 1988.

Perhaps my prediction is buoyed by the euphoric Republicans who flooded this city last week. Indeed, from the convention floor to lavish after-parties, the Republicans I met carried with them the presumption that of course there will be a second Bush administration--although I must point out that in floating my theory, I couldn't find anyone who agreed with the spread, and that one reason for the confidence among conventioneers is the feeling that there has to be a second term. That if the party loses this election, the nation will lose the war on terror. That sense of urgency is only heightened by the fact that Mr. Kerry will have a few more opportunities to turn things around on Mr. Bush--at the debates, for example. And there's always a chance that bad news out of Iraq or a terrorist attack in America could knock the legs out from under the president's campaign. But of course, it is this sense of urgency that is helping put the Republicans over the top.

The media may finally be catching up to the idea that the nation may have turned decidedly in Mr. Bush's favor. Coming out of the convention Time and Newsweek conducted separate polls, each of which found that the president had opened up an 11-point lead over Mr. Kerry. These surveys seem to have oversampled Republicans, but a new Gallup Poll puts Mr. Bush up by a still impressive seven points, 52% to 45%.

Even as convention euphoria fades, there are plenty of reasons to disbelieve the "50-50 nation" story line:

• Central to Mr. Kerry's campaign is his promise to raise taxes. Walter Mondale had a similar idea, and he went down in a landslide defeat at the hands of the last Republican president to be re-elected. Similarly, the last Republican president to lose his re-election bid, George H.W. Bush, lost partly because he raised taxes. When skeptical voters--otherwise known as independents--are worried about taxes, they are looking for an unequivocal position. They know that promises to only tax the "rich" almost always morph into taxes on the middle class. Mr. Bush is already capitalizing on this. In his speech Thursday night, he noted that Mr. Kerry is "running on a platform to increase taxes--and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps."

• Americans may be the most highly scrutinized and studied electorate in the world, but there's still plenty of activity going on under the radar. Voter turnout is going to be crucial to this election. Indeed, presidential adviser Karl Rove is banking on it. As many as four million evangelical Christians--a group that overwhelmingly supports Mr. Bush--sat out the 2000 election. Getting them to the polls will likely make the difference in several key states. Meanwhile perhaps another 80 million eligible voters didn't cast ballots in the last presidential election. After a close election in 2000 and a sense that this year will be a "historic election" because it will decide whether the nation aggressively pursues terrorists, many are predicting a record turnout in November. Mr. Kerry may be hoping for an anti-Bush surge, but concern for national security is a better motivator for new voters.

• The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform is a bigger factor in this election than most people realize. Everyone now knows that the law gave rise to the much-maligned "527s," named for the section of the tax code that allows them to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. With the gloves off, Democrats hoped these groups would beat Mr. Bush into unconsciousness or at least bloody him a little. Instead, it is Mr. Kerry who's been battered by a band of dissenting Vietnam veterans who spent just a few million dollars.

What most people don't realize is that McCain-Feingold moved much of corporate America out of the business of writing large checks to the political parties and into the business of building grassroots support for candidates who share their concerns. In South Carolina, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, International Paper helped pro-trade candidate Jim DeMint win the Republican senatorial primary by e-mailing employees in the state to encourage them to vote and educate them on the value of free trade to the company. Mr. DeMint is happy the company used its resources this way rather than by writing checks to the party. "I'd rather have the voters," he told the Journal. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart gave similar support to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, because she's been a good friend to the retailer.

The Federal Election Commission keeps track of checks to politicians and parties, but keeping up with what's going on at the grassroots level is much harder. With corporate America now in the game and many churches helping to mobilize voter turnout (regular church attendees overwhelmingly vote Republican), Republicans may finally have found a counterweight to labor union get-out-the-vote efforts.

• Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are swing states with strong unions, but many of the union members there are actually Republicans or are the kind of Democrats who will find it hard to pull the lever for Mr. Kerry. These are the union Democrats who drink beer, watch Nascar and own guns. They have no cultural affinity for a Northeastern liberal who spends his time on the Idaho sky slopes outside one of his billionaire wife's many mansions or windsurfing off Nantucket. Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, picked up on this and told a reporter: "I might have gone windsurfing--you certainly have a right to clear your head. But I'm not sure I would have taken the press with me." Look for all three states to show up red on election night.

• The economy is actually pretty good in several swing states. In West Virginia, Mr. Bush told a cheering crowd recently that the state's unemployment rate of 5.2% is below the national average of 5.4%. In Ohio the unemployment rate is in line with national figures, but even that is lower than the average unemployment rate for the entire decade of the 1990s. With yet another hurricane pounding Florida, the economy there may not be in good shape come Election Day--but it's unlikely voters will punish Mr. Bush for that if he responds quickly with federal assistance.

• Even Mr. Kerry doesn't believe the nation is evenly split, despite the Democrats' public insistence that everyone who voted for Al Gore in 2000 will automatically vote against Mr. Bush this time. Mr. Kerry is flip-flopping in hopes of appealing to voters on both sides of the aisle. On the big issue--the war--Mr. Kerry at times is officially in line with Mr. Bush's policy goals. Indeed, he said last month that even knowing what he knows now, he would have voted for the war. Then, in an angry midnight speech last Thursday, Mr. Kerry sounded like Michael Moore when he accused the administration of having "misled the nation into Iraq." Mr. Kerry's fickleness on the most important issue of the day does not bespeak confidence about his own chances.

• Despite Mr. Kerry's war credentials, Democrats are now expressing doubt that he can win unless he changes the subject from national security to the economy. Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh told the New York Times this weekend that "so much of the [Democratic] convention was focused on national security--if that's where the election is, I don't think he can win. He has got to try to turn the election to domestic issues." Harold Ickes, who served as Bill Clinton's deputy White House chief of staff and is now running an anti-Bush 527, also thinks Mr. Kerry needs to turn the conversation away from national security. He told the New York Times that Mr. Kerry "just needs to hammer home jobs, the economy, health care and education."

Other Democrats now doubt Mr. Kerry's ability to fight back in the political arena, let alone on far off battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. After weeks of punishing attacks on his Vietnam record with no effective response from the Kerry campaign, there's a hint of panic among Democrats that their guy may not know how to fight after all. That's one reason why, before heading into surgery, Bill Clinton counseled Mr. Kerry from his hospital bed and why several former Clinton hands joined the Kerry campaign over the weekend. Meanwhile Michigan's Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Florida's Sen. Bob Graham (both from important swing states) told reporters that Mr. Kerry needs to simplify his message so it will effectively reach voters. What these pols are trying to tell Mr. Kerry is that "nuance" doesn't translate into sound bites very well.

• Which brings us to the final reason Mr. Bush is probably going to walk away with the election: Mr. Kerry is not a very good politician. He's cultivated a reputation as a fighter, a good "closer," because of his last-minute surge past William Weld to win re-election in 1996. But that was in Massachusetts. Why was a two-term Democratic senator having trouble beating a Republican challenger in the only state George McGovern carried? One reason is that unlike Ted Kennedy, Mr. Kerry is not seen as a man who can get things done. No significant legislation bears his name.

Mr. Kerry's problem is much worse than having phoned it in for 20 years in the Senate. Somehow he has built a political career without ever developing the skill of connecting with people or being able to read the pulse of the electorate. In the 1980s, he opposed nearly every new weapons system the Reagan administration rolled out. In the 1990s he fought to slash intelligence funding. Both look like clear mistakes now. On Vietnam, he misread how the electorate would react to his antiwar record. Some Democrats actually argued Mr. Kerry would be popular among veterans. So Mr. Kerry thought he was giving voters what they wanted to hear when he responded to the GOP convention by getting on TV at midnight to talk about Vietnam and whine about imagined attacks on his patriotism. Democrats politely say that he's not very charismatic, but the truth is that he's like a tone-deaf musician who stumbles into a gig at Carnegie Hall and can't understand why the crowd doesn't cheer.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/b...r/?id=110005576

[TitanTiger 20,499]

I hope he's right, but I caution against conservatives getting cocky or complacent. There are 2 months until the election, a time which includes probably three debates and plenty of time for any number of goofy items to come out and sway the idiot vote. Remember the DUI thing the weekend before the election last time? Desperate people say and do desperate things.

[Tigermike 3,039]

I agree Titan. It was a well written and well thought out article, that is why I posted it. Like you, I hope he is right.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Remember, Bush still has to talk during the debates. And, if he is going to win he must speak in complete sentences free from error. Furthermore, our system of checks and balances will reveal truths about what this administration is really doing,. So I don't look for Dubya to be there in January. Bush/Cheney and company will be in jail in about four years.

[rexbo 104]

Yes, and Kerry will have to speak too, he will finally have to answer some hard questions about his record (or lack thereof). He has hand picked all of his appearances in front of the reporters. I am confident that he will be exposed in front of his peers when he is on live TV. Bush has been there and done that, and made Al Gore look like the robot he his, we will soon see the Kerry Lurch that he is...

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Yes, and Kerry will have to speak too, he will finally have to answer some hard questions about his record (or lack thereof). He has hand picked all of his appearances in front of the reporters. I am confident that he will be exposed in front of his peers when he is on live TV. Bush has been there and done that, and made Al Gore look like the robot he his, we will soon see the Kerry Lurch that he is...

I agree. I hate both of these guys and the two party system that we have in our Constitutional Republic. I wish both of them ill. I'll cry during the debates, in wishing a true public servant would be allowed to debate them. Preferably, Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.). He could really stir the pot, if you know what I mean.

Yes, I voted for Gore. But, I have since learned the meaning of conservatism. And, Dubya is no conservative. Conservatism doesn't allow the Federal Reserve to exist. It doesn't expand the government while reducing the liberties of the citizenry. It doesn't unfairly put taxes on the middle class (by artificially raising the cost of energy, gas and transportation). It doesn't meddle into the private lives of it's citizenry. And it doesn't conquer sovereign nations for the excuses previously presented to the American public. I could go on, but unless you are a true conservative you would never understand. If you are a true conservative, then you must despise the fascist state we live in and would want to change it back to its original form.

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1597

[CarolinaTiger 0]

i had lunch w/ an intelligent and well educated fella today that believes we already have osama in hand...and if, by chance we don't, he is certain he'll be "captured" during october...the infamous 'october surprise'.

[War Eagle 96 10]

Yes, and Kerry will have to speak too, he will finally have to answer some hard questions about his record (or lack thereof).  He has hand picked all of his appearances in front of the reporters.  I am confident that he will be exposed in front of his peers when he is on live TV.  Bush has been there and done that, and made Al Gore look like the robot he his, we will soon see the Kerry Lurch that he is...

I agree. I hate both of these guys and the two party system that we have in our Constitutional Republic. I wish both of them ill. I'll cry during the debates, in wishing a true public servant would be allowed to debate them. Preferably, Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.). He could really stir the pot, if you know what I mean.

Yes, I voted for Gore. But, I have since learned the meaning of conservatism. And, Dubya is no conservative. Conservatism doesn't allow the Federal Reserve to exist. It doesn't expand the government while reducing the liberties of the citizenry. It doesn't unfairly put taxes on the middle class (by artificially raising the cost of energy, gas and transportation). It doesn't meddle into the private lives of it's citizenry. And it doesn't conquer sovereign nations for the excuses previously presented to the American public. I could go on, but unless you are a true conservative you would never understand. If you are a true conservative, then you must despise the fascist state we live in and would want to change it back to its original form.

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1597

My goodness, haven't we come unglued?

[rexbo 104]

If you are a true conservative, then you must despise the fascist state we live in and would want to change it back to its original form.

You don't have a clue what a facist state is, go to the library and read about 1930's and '40's Germany. In fact, Bush's America is much, much freer than 1940's America under Roosevelt.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

If you are a true conservative, then you must despise the fascist state we live in and would want to change it back to its original form.

You don't have a clue what a facist state is, go to the library and read about 1930's and '40's Germany. In fact, Bush's America is much, much freer than 1940's America under Roosevelt.

Did you take philosophy while at Auburn University? And, while you're at read about "Trading with the Enemy Act." That's Bush's inheritance we are talking about.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/...e%20Enemy%20Act

In an article in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, written by Giovanni Gentile Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), Fascist philospher, was the ghostwriter of 'A Doctrine of Fascism' which, signed by Benito Mussolini, described Fascism in the Italian Encyclopedia (which was edited by Gentile). He described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism, führerprinzip, abolition of the parliamentary system, and autarky. Gentile was minister of education and later a member of the Fascist Grand Council during the fascist regime. He stayed loyal to Mussolini after the establishment of the Republic of Salo and was killed by communist partisans.

..... Click the link for more information. and attributed to Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (July 29, 1883 - April 28, 1945) ruled Italy as a dictator from 1922 to 1943. He created a fascist state through the use of propaganda; through total control of the media, he disassembled the existing democratic government system. His biggest political mistake was to enter World War II on the side of Nazi Germany; this made his regime a target for Allied attacks and ultimately led to his downfall and death.

...fascism is described as a system in which "The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad. ...For the Fascist, everything is within the State and ... neither individuals or groups are outside the State. ...For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative."

As a political science, the philosophical pretext to the literal fascism of the historical Italian type believes the state's nature is superior to that of the sum of the individual's comprising it, and that they exist for the state rather than the state existing to serve them. The resources individuals provide from participating in the community are conceived as a productive duty of individual progress serving an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore all individual's business is the state's business, the state's existence is the sole duty of the individual. In its Corporativist model of totalitarian but private management the various functions of the state were trades conceived as individualized entities making that state, and that it is in the state's interest to oversee them for that reason, but not direct them or make them public by the rationale that such functioning in government hands undermines the development of what the state is. Private activity is in a sense contracted to the state so that the state may suspend the infrastructure of any entity in accord to their usefulness and direction, or health to the state.

The social composition of Fascist movements have historically been small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats and the middle classes. Fascism also met with great success in rural areas, especially among farmers, peasants, and in the city, the lumpenproletariat. A key feature of fascism is that it uses its mass movement to attack the organizations of the working class - parties of the left and trades unions.

The concept of dictatorship of the proletariat alluded to by Von Mises is not the same as the dictatorship concept employed by fascists. Dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to mean workers democracy or dictatorship by the working class rather than dictatorship by the capitalist class. This concept had been distorted under Stalin to mean dictatorship by the General Secretary over the party and the working class but that means that Stalin deviated from Marx rather than that the Stalinist form of government is Marxist.

Instead, the fascist economic model of corporatism promoted class collaboration by attempting to bring classes together under the unity of the state.

However, the fact that fascist states, on the one hand, and the USSR and the Soviet bloc, on the other, were police states does not mean that their commonality is a product of socialism. While all one-party states can be said to be police states, there is no correlation between socialism and police states as all one-party capitalist states, such as the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang or Afghanistan under the Taliban as well as monarchist police states such as Iran under the Shah have also been police states. Conversely, there have been multi-party socialist states that have not been police states.

And, to answer the above abou Osama I agree.

[AURainman 6]

Hey bottomfeeder. I think you are a little unstable. You might want to check yourself into a clinic.

REMEMBER: This guy thought raising the terror alert was Bush's idea after the DNC. Turned out just weeks later we caught the guys and exposed their plans.

Heave. Splat........Heave. Splat.......... Heave. Splat........."Daddy, Daddy, THAT one STUCK!!!!"

[Tiger in Spain 0]

Hey bottomfeeder. I think you are a little unstable. You might want to check yourself into a clinic.

The understatement of the year!!

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

Personally I'm looking forward to the debates. I have said all along that I think that Bush will eat kerry alive in the debates and I am more convinced than ever. After all he will be coached by Zell Miller

[Tiger in Spain 0]

He handled Mr Internet during the debates leading up to the 2000 election very easily without Zell Miller. The followers of the donkey party will once again have their collective panties in a wad when "W" stomps ol' Botox boy and his ambulance chasing partner this fall.

[DKW 86 7,431]

He handled Mr Internet during the debates leading up to the 2000 election very easily without Zell Miller. The followers of the donkey party will once again have their collective panties in a wad when "W" stomps ol' Botox boy and his ambulance chasing partner this fall.

Cool! A Burke Class DDG! Which one, btw?

[Tiger in Spain 0]

USS Howard (DDG 83)

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Hey bottomfeeder. I think you are a little unstable. You might want to check yourself into a clinic.

REMEMBER: This guy thought raising the terror alert was Bush's idea after the DNC. Turned out just weeks later we caught the guys and exposed their plans.

Heave. Splat........Heave. Splat.......... Heave. Splat........."Daddy, Daddy, THAT one STUCK!!!!"

Been there done that. I am very familiar with fascism. Enough to know that is where this country is headed. Don't forget how long we have been here compared other countries; and it's still an experiment.

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH (R-TX), PRESIDENT-ELECT: I told all four that there were going to be some times where we don't agree with each other. But that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.

http://quest.cjonline.com/stories/121800/g...218007459.shtml

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier," Bush said, pausing and then joking, "just so long as I'm the dictator."

See it for yourself:

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/bush-dictator.zip

__________________________________________________________________

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/seize.html

No longer does the judicial branch and an independent jury stand between the government and the accused. In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination "a full and fair trial."