Why Bush Won

November 3, 2004

Both guys blew it. Maybe Kerry blew it worse.

President George W. Bush had the advantage of incumbency, fortified by a crisis that gave him an opportunity to

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consolidate his support and increase his popularity. The makings of a second-term landslide were all there.

Instead he launched a wrong-headed war that divided the country, turned out to lack the justifications he claimed for it, and became a frustrating and scandalous occupation. It will create problems for America around the world for the foreseeable future.

Then the Democrats gave him an opponent with all the excitement of a scarecrow — a lackluster Massachusetts liberal Bush might have prayed for. But Bush lost ground as bad news poured in from Iraq and, after partly rebuilding his lead, lost it again in the presidential debates.

In the end Bush won his second term almost as narrowly as he had won his first term in 2000. He richly deserved to lose. He has given conservatism a bad name, vastly increased government spending, and made this country hated as never before. As a spokesman for American principles, he is simply painful to listen to.

The fear and loathing Bush inspires were Kerry’s chief asset, but Kerry inspired little confidence in himself. His notorious “flip-flopping” was really a series of attempts to befog his dismal and robotic liberal record, which hasn’t been inconsistent at all.

Kerry too wasted opportunities. During the first debate, for example, he brilliantly pitted Bush the Younger against Bush the Elder, whose memoirs explained why he cut the 1991 Gulf war short: to avoid trying to occupy a bitterly hostile country with no exit strategy. But Kerry didn’t press this point; he rushed on to something else. He could have simply asked, “Hasn’t the president read his father’s book?” That would have been a powerful campaign theme, embarrassing Bush and helping give Kerry’s vague position some definition and force.

[Breaker quote: Blunders galore!]

Instead, Kerry allowed Bush to do the taunting, with the charge that he had “no plan” for the occupation of Iraq. But as Peter Beinart of The New Republic has observed, this amounts to accusing Kerry of having no plan for cleaning up the mess Bush himself has made! If true, and it is, it’s more an indictment of Bush’s policies than of Kerry’s inability. Bush has created an insoluble problem. But Kerry didn’t dare say that. It would have sounded pessimistic, “defeatist,” which is of course un-American. Only optimism is patriotic.

But Kerry ran a joyless, wholly unimaginative campaign, and in an important respect he is even less eloquent than Bush. Bush is clumsy, but he at least uses simple, highly charged words that move people. Kerry talks like a committee report, earning an undeserved reputation for “nuance” when he just bores and confuses. You know what Bush stands for, even if you don’t like it. You still don’t know what Kerry stands for, even if you think you know what he might do.

The Democrats made the mistake of thinking that because Kerry lacked definition, he was “electable.” The truth is that because he lacked definition, he lacked positive appeal. Even his liberalism seems more perfunctory than passionate. His bleatings about his “faith” were empty and unconvincing.

The most preposterous moment of the campaign was surely Kerry’s recollection that his dying mother, only a couple of years ago, told him, “Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity!” It tells you a lot about Kerry that he would even tell that story, expecting anyone to believe it, let alone find it edifying. A dying woman feels it urgent to tell her middle-aged son about integrity? This must be the weirdest bit of mother-son dialogue since just before Janet Leigh stepped into the shower.

But that’s Kerry for you: a bit weird. Somehow he just doesn’t add up. He offers his brief war record as proof of his fitness for power, his having been an altar boy as proof of his piety, and never mind the rest of his puzzling life since then.

This was a hard election to call, and it remains so even in retrospect. The outcome was no more inevitable in 2004 than in 2000. It was another fluke. Both candidates were terrible, but one of them had to win.

So why Bush? You might as well ask why a coin toss turned up heads.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2004 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
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