From The New York Times:

The Values-Vote Myth
By David Brooks

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.

It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues.

Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.

The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.

The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

The red and blue maps that have been popping up in the papers again this week are certainly striking, but they conceal as much as they reveal. I've spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is no one explanation. It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

Good post here from Andrew Sullivan's blog:

EMAIL OF THE DAY:
"So lots of pundits, including you, have been attributing Bush's success nationally to his having excited the base over the gay marriage issue. In particular, the strategy of using the ballot initiatives in 11 states, thereby dragging religious conservatives to the polls to vote against marriage and at the same time check the box next to Bush, is regarded as having been particularly effective.

That is, of course, fiction. Bush improved his share of the popular vote by 3.2% from 2000 to 2004 (47.9 in 2000, 51.1 in 2004). Now how did he do in the states which had anti-marriage ballot initiatives?

Arkansas +3.0%
Georgia +3.3%
Kentucky +3.1%
Michigan +1.8%
Mississippi +2.2%
Montana +0.7%
North Dakota +2.2%
Ohio +1.0%
Oklahoma +5.3%
Oregon +0.8%
Utah +4.2%

Only in two states (Utah and Oklahoma) did he gain a significantly higher vote share than he did nationwide. Maybe comparing to the national popular vote is misleading, so let's compare each of those states to a neighboring, politically-similar state which did not have an anti-marriage initiative on the ballot:

Missouri +2.9 (AR +3.0)
Florida +3.4 (GA +3.3)
Tennessee +5.7 (KY +3.1)
Wisconsin +1.5 (MI +1.8)
Alabama +6.0 (MS +2.2)
Idaho +1.2 (MT +0.7)
South Dakota -0.4 (ND +2.2)
Pennsylvania +2.0 (OH +1.0)
Texas +1.8 (OK +5.3)
Washington +1.2 (OR +0.8)
Wyoming +1.2 (UT +4.2)

Again, not much. In only 3 cases (UT-WY, ND-SD, and OK-TX) did Bush improve a lot more in a state with an anti-marriage initiative than he did in the state with which it was paired. And, in the case of North Dakota, the hotly contested Senate race in South Dakota may have skewed things a bit; a better comparison might be Nebraska, where Bush was +3.0% better in 2004 than in 2000, a better improvement than what he got in North Dakota.

That leaves two states, Oklahoma and Utah, which had an anti-marriage initiative on the ballot and in which Bush's vote share improved more both relative to the nation as a whole and relative to the neighboring state selected.

It is certainly possible that the fact that the Bush administration raised the issue to the level to which did led to increased turnout among religious conservatives nationwide, which then resulted in Bush's overall improved vote share over his 2000 performance. However, one would also expect that this vote share improvement would have been particularly high in states in which the marriage issue was particularly relevant. On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush's performance in those states."

It's a Steyn Doubleheader! From The Australian:

Bush hatred flops big
by Mark Steyn

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Michael Moore was touring the US offering unregistered voters incentives such as free "clean underwear" in return for a promise that they would show up at the polls. I'm not sure whose underwear he was giving away - his own or someone else's - but, if it was the former, the grateful recipients evidently accepted a pair, went and camped out in them up in the Rockies, and forgot to return to town for election day.
The swollen turn-out on Tuesday -- the biggest since 1968 -- killed one of Moore's most cherished myths: that if only more people voted, the natural "liberal" "progressive" nature of the American people would manifest itself. "Slackers are going to rise up in this election," he predicted. "The slacker motto is: Sleep till noon, drink beer, vote Kerry."

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

According to Moore, there are hardly any conservatives in the US, but they do a great job of persuading all the progressives to stay away from the polling booths by putting obstacles in their path, like not giving them free underwear. So the long queues reported at polls were assumed by the media to be proof of that big pro-John Kerry youth vote we always hear about.

But, as always, the "youth vote" never showed up. Last year, I saw some patronising BBC documentary (aired on Your ABC) claiming that George W. Bush was controlled by fanatical Christian fundamentalists who believe in the Rapture. The "youth vote" is the Left's equivalent of the Rapture: it may happen one day, but not on any schedule you want to put money on.

If you had to pick a picture that summed up what went wrong for Kerry, it would be the shot of Moore and Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic national convention. All you needed was P.Diddy, aka Puff Daddy (or vice-versa), of the Vote or Die mythical youth movement and it would have been the Democrats' equivalent of those Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin wartime summits. That picture is the Dems in a nutshell: yesterday's politicians, today's show-biz colossi. It's the other way round at the Republican Party: yesterday's show-biz colossi (well, Pat Boone) and today's politicians -- Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani. On the whole, that's a better combo.

The Michael Mooronification of the Democratic Party proved a fatal error. Moore is the chief promoter of what's now the received opinion of Bush among the condescending Left -- Chimpy Bushitler the World's Dumbest Fascist. There are some takers for this view, but not enough. By running a campaign fuelled by Moore's caricature of Bush, the Democrats were doomed to defeat.

Granted, Kerry was more nuanced about Chimpy: he ran an over-cautious campaign putting up his supposed "competence" against Bush's "incompetence", which naturally degenerated into reflexive anti-Bush oppositionism. Meanwhile, everyone around Kerry sounded like they'd OD-ed on Moore: his stepson, Chris Heinz, called Bush a "cokehead" and John Edwards went on about war profiteering.

Happily, The Guardian, the fever chart of the British Left, decided to arrange a controlled experiment in the effectiveness of the Bush-hating strategy. They targeted the voters of Clark County, Ohio, one of the swingiest counties in a critical swing state, by getting Guardian readers to send them letters explaining why they shouldn't vote for Bush. Antonia Fraser, John Le Carre and other celebrated Guardianistas put pen to paper and marshalled their arguments.

Richard Dawkins demonstrated the incisive forensic analysis of Bush one expects from one of Oxford's most celebrated professors: "An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and vindictive ... thuggish ... pariah state ... brazenly lying ... cynical mendacity." Gloomy film-maker Ken Loach, who makes Moore look like Busby Berkeley, began: "Today, your country is reviled across continents as never before ..."

In return, The Guardian received many responses, saying things like "real Americans aren't interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions", which was one of the more polite replies in that it eschewed observations on the defects of British dentistry. In 2000, Clark County went narrowly for Al Gore. On Tuesday, it went decisively for Bush. The local Republican chairman claimed that Fraser and co had done a grand job of rallying the county's Bush voters and getting them to the poll. Thank you, Guardian lefties! Had they launched Operation Massachusetts, Kerry would have lost his own state.

Bush hatred flopped big on Tuesday. That's not a problem for The Guardian's editors, who have to sell papers in Britain, but it is for a Democratic Party that has to sell itself in the US. Michael Mooronification damages everyone who gets it.

Look at the recently resurrected Osama bin Laden. Three years ago he was Mr Jihad, demanding the restoration of the caliphate, the return of Andalucia, the conversion of every infidel to Islam, the imposition of sharia and an end to fornication, homosexuality and alcoholic beverages. In his latest video he sounds like some elderly Berkeley sociology student making lame jokes about Halliburton and Bush reading My Pet Goat.

The lesson of Moore's underwear, P.Diddy's "Vote or Die", Bruce Springsteen's "Rock the Vote" and all the other celebrity props of the Democratic Party is very simple: having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side does nothing for your popularity. Every time Kerry was seen cavorting with Hollywood A-listers, he was alienating the Z-listers -- the American people.

On election day, I was driving through Vermont and found myself behind a car with a Kerry-Edwards sticker and an Instead of Being Born Again, Why Not Grow Up? sticker. Fair enough, the feeling's mutual: the secular, coastal, libertine Democratic Party has zero appeal to born-again Christians. The problem is the crude numbers: 40 per cent of Americans identify themselves as born-again. So right there you've written off 40 per cent of the electorate. What have you got in return? The gay vote? Five per cent? And Bush got a quarter of that.

Another significant sliver of their vote doesn't care much for the holy rollers but recognises that on the big issue -- the war -- the Republicans are right.

Feisty internet blogger Michele Catalano put it very well in her election day declaration: "I voted for George Bush. I am not a redneck. I do not spend my days watching cars race around a track while I drink cheap beer and slap my woman on the ass. I am not a Bible thumper. In fact, I am an atheist. I am not a homophobe."

In their desperation, the Democrats have wound up damning a big chunk of the American people as stupid, bigoted and a bigger threat than Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida. This is ridiculous. As Catalano continues: "You will not be thrown in jail for the sole reason of being a liberal. Your child's public school will not suddenly turn into a centre for Christian brainwashing. Your favourite bookstore will not turn into puritan central."

She didn't add to that list of phony terrors my own choice gem from this election season, courtesy of that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz, who advised Oprah Winfrey's viewers: "Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, then you should vote." Poor Cameron. The scary people won. She's just lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she can't even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

As long as Democrats prefer phantom enemies to real ones, they will be increasingly irrelevant. If I were a Dem, I'd support any candidate who pledged to de-celebrify the party and disown the paranoid Left. That's the big lesson of this election: on Tuesday, the bottom dropped out of Moore's underpants.

Mark Steyn, a columnist with Britain's Telegraph Group, is a regular contributor to The Australian's Opinion page.

From The UK Spectator:

A catastrophic night for the Democrats
by Mark Steyn

New Hampshire

Thank you, Lady Antonia Fraser! In 2000, Clark County, Ohio went to Al Gore. This time round, after the local citizenry were targeted by the Guardian to be the beneficiaries of Lady Antonia’s voting advice, and John le Carré’s and Richard Dawkins’s and many others, Clark County went to ...George W. Bush!

How about that? Alas for the Republican party, Lady Antonia and her chums never got round to writing to New Jerseyites and Pennsylvanians and Oregonians, or we’d be looking at a Bush landslide. Instead, Republicans had to settle for a little less. But, despite the best efforts of the US media, the Guardian, some even phonier than usual ‘exit polls’, Bruce Springsteen and ‘Rock The Vote’, Puff Daddy and the ‘Vote Or Die’ rap-the-vote movement, George Soros and Steve Bing and the million trillion bazillion dollars they poured into Ohio, respected foreign leaders like Yasser Arafat and Kim Jong Il, the Arab street, an attempted ‘October surprise’ by the UN’s Mohammed al-Baradei and the New York Times, and a late intervention by the late Osama bin Laden (which seemed awfully close to ‘Vote Kerry or die’), it was still a Republican night.

You might not have gained that impression from the BBC or even from my friends at the Telegraph, who claimed in Tuesday’s issue to be detecting last-minute swings to John Kerry. But just to run through what happened: in the House of Representatives the Republicans have picked up five seats; in the Senate they’ve picked up at least three, maybe four, including David Vitter winning a Louisiana seat that’s been Democrat since post-Civil War reconstruction; it looks like they’ve knocked off their chief obstructionist in the Democratic caucus.

And, oh yes, the most hated man in the world has become the first President since 1988 to win over 50 per cent of the popular vote.

In other words, it’s the perfect hat trick: a Republican President, a Republican Senate and a Republican House have been re-elected for the first time since President McKinley and the GOP Congress of 1900.

How’d that happen? There was a big increase in turnout, adding something upwards of 15 million people to the polls. We were assured by all the experts that an increase in turnout foreshadowed a Kerry landslide. Why, everyone knows an increase in turnout must be that big youth vote we always hear about, roused by elderly gentlemen like Mr Springsteen playing songs that were hits when their parents were courting into stampeding to the polling booths to vote against a return of the draft and Bush’s intolerance of gay marriage.

But, as noted here last week, the ‘Rock The Vote’ crowd didn’t show up for Howard Dean, and they didn’t show up for John Kerry either. They never show up. Or, to be more precise, if they do show up, they’re not a monolithic voting bloc. The Kerry campaign was fantasising if it thought that ‘young people’ trend Democrat in large enough numbers to compensate for all their fraying demographics — blacks, Hispanics, Catholics, rural whites, women, etc. Even with the collapse of the third-party Ralph Nader vote, Senator Kerry could only hold Al Gore’s states with much smaller margins: Gore won Connecticut by 17 points, Kerry by 10; Gore won New Jersey by 16 points, Kerry by 7. The ‘red’ states — the Bush states — got a little bit redder, the ‘blue’ states — Kerry’s — got a bit redder too.

So the story of the election is yet another catastrophic night for the Democrats. If the Kerry campaign goes into full legal mode sending the chad-chasers into Ohio, it will be doing so from a much wobblier footing than in 2000; this time, their man lost the popular vote decisively, by four million votes. Legally speaking, you can bring the boys in, but, morally and politically, suing your way into victory is a trickier proposition when your guy’s such a clear-cut loser. At 2.30 on Wednesday morning John Edwards came out to address a demoralised crowd in Boston’s Copley Square, pledging ‘to make every vote count’ — which is Dem code-speak for ‘lawyers’. But it sounded kinda lame when, vote-count-wise, George W. Bush is likely to beat Ronald Reagan’s 1984 record and wind up with more votes for President than any man in the history of the republic.

It didn’t look that way at the start of the evening. As is now traditional, election night began with a bunch of bogus ‘exit polls’ that proved to be even junkier than the ones in 2000. The networks refused to call Virginia and the Carolinas because they had exit polls showing Kerry ahead. Had those polls been correct, it would have been a landslide for the Senator. But they weren’t correct: they were bunk, and the only thing stopping me from calling for a fraud investigation is that I’ve begun rather to enjoy it. At 7 p.m. Eastern time the networks come on the air with their big specials, and you can see the anchors and the pundits and the Democratic spinmeisters are all excited because they think things are all going their way and the Republicans are in big trouble, and by 9 p.m. nothing’s gone their way and they’re all discombobulated. They don’t seem to understand the point I’ve been making for years now — that the Democrats and the media reinforce each other’s delusions.

That happened again this time. The notion of a ‘youth vote’ scared up by the Democrats to vote against an entirely mythical draft is essentially a spontaneous invention of the Democrat-media bubble. Out in the real world, meanwhile, 11 states voted for ‘gay marriage’ bans by overwhelming margins. The ‘youth vote’ is largely fictitious, the anti-gay marriage vote is real. That may be unfortunate or in deplorable taste, but, if the national media ignore real constituencies in favour of fake ones, it’s hardly surprising that the Democrats wind up, in the words of CNN’s Candy Crowley, ‘depressed and bewildered’.

The Dems have a long-term problem: their vote is becoming more and more concentrated in a few enclaves on the Pacific coast and the Atlantic north of Washington, even as the population shifts to the south and the mountain states. What have traditionally been Democrat states — Tennessee, West Virginia — and what have traditionally been swing states — such as Missouri — are looking lost to the Democrats in perpetuity. No matter how many movies Michael Moore makes, America is basically a conservative country. If you don’t believe me, look at Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader and the first such party leader to be defeated in over half a century. Daschle’s going down to defeat in South Dakota by a big enough margin that even the traditional Democratic trick — finding a few thousand extra ‘late votes’ lying around under an abandoned pick-up on one of the more distant Indian reservations — is unlikely to suffice. Daschle has spent years as a doctrinaire liberal Democrat in Washington while posing as a ‘bipartisan’ ‘moderate’ ‘centrist’ back in his conservative home state. This year it caught up with him.

Look at John Kerry’s campaign, which is — as Democratic national campaigns invariably are these days — deeply evasive: despite a long anti-gun voting record, he fired off guns and shot at animals everywhere he went; despite voting as an abortion absolutist, he insisted that he ‘personally believed’ life begins at conception; despite voting against the Defence of Marriage Act, he declared that he was opposed to gay marriage. And the red states still wouldn’t buy it.

The Democratic party have got themselves out of step with a huge chunk of the population. They’d probably do well in Belgium and much of southern England, but unfortunately neither of those jurisdictions is a US state. And, in the places which are, the party is increasingly uncompetitive. None of its issues resonates with rural America, and most of them — abortion and race-baiting — just sound stale: Selma, Alabam’ is 40 years old, Roe vs Wade is 30 years old, and the scare talk about Bush’s Supreme Court appointees just doesn’t work. The party is intellectually exhausted and short of talent, which is how a vain, mediocre senator ended up with the nomination. There are still enough tribal Democrats to make it impossible for even the worst candidate to fall below 40 per cent, but they’re so concentrated in New England, New York and California that the party can’t break beyond that. Hence, the White House, Senate and House in Republican hands.

I think the party needs to stop suing and go on a long retreat to try and figure out what it means to be a Democrat in the early 21st century.

As for Bush, I’m glad he survived, if only because every anti-American on the planet was looking forward to dancing on his political grave like those nutso Palestinian women in the streets of Ramallah on 9/11. But I’m annoyed that it was this close. Two years ago I wrote that the President had missed an opportunity. In August 2002 I wrote in these pages, ‘President Bush has won the first battle (Afghanistan) but he’s in danger of losing the war. The war isn’t with al-Qa’eda, or Saddam, or the House of Saud. They’re all a bunch of losers.... In a unipolar world, it’s clear that the real enemy in this war is ourselves, and our lemming-like rush to cultural suicide.’ Transformative leaders use turbulent times to reshape the nation, as FDR did with the Depression. Back in his 90 per cent approval-rating days, Bush could have used the new war to shift the culture, to toughen it.

The 43rd President is a radical, at home and abroad: had Kerry been elected, not only would he have abandoned this administration’s broader ambitions in the Middle East, but, unlike Bush, he would have made no serious attempt to reform social security. The Texan moron is, in fact, the kind of leader people always say they want: not poll-driven, with the courage to take the tough decisions, etc. But he’s very poor at selling them to the American people, and what seems obvious to him isn’t necessarily that obvious if you’re in one of the many cities with a reflexively anti-Bush monodaily. It should have been a bigger victory, and Republicans need to examine carefully why it wasn’t.

One constituency that’s more or less dead after this election is the liberal warmongers — the fellows like Andrew Sullivan (of Britain’s Sunday Times) and Thomas Friedman (of the New York Times) and my compatriot Michael Ignatieff. Before the Iraq war, they were some of its biggest boosters. In recent months, they all turned, and most of them persuaded themselves that Kerry was the man to fix the mess in Iraq and see things through. I found this extraordinary. The defeat of Bush would have been seen around the world as a repudiation of his view of the war, and especially the aspect that the moulting hawks were once so keen on: his commitment to bringing liberty to the Middle East. John Kerry couldn’t have been more explicit that that was not his aim. The moulters’ willingness to abandon the long-term goal because of a nickel’n’dime jailhouse scandal and a rate of combat fatalities that any earlier generation of Americans would have regarded as the blessings of a merciful God speaks very poorly for them. Even as an armchair warrior, I wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with these guys.

In the last few days, John Kerry wore himself hoarse shouting that America was crying out for ‘change’. But Bush is the candidate of change, and Kerry was the one running as the status quo candidate — work through the UN, the IAEA, the EU. Bush is promoting radical change in foreign policy, change in domestic policy, but both consistent with ‘red state’ values, expanding liberty abroad and promoting opportunity at home. As long as the Democrats have nothing to offer and stay on the wrong side of the guns’n’God issues, they will continue to decline.

On a personal note, New Hampshire narrowly went for Kerry. Shame on my wussier Granite State neighbours. The southern third of the state is full of transplants from Taxachusetts who’ve evidently forgotten why they moved up. Personally humiliating for me, and disastrous for the state if it were to succumb to the policies that have enervated the rest of New England. But don’t worry; we’ll claw it back for the Republicans in 2008.

Escellent piece from The Wall Street Journal. It's interesting to note that the writer of the song "Eve of Destruction" quoted at the beginning of this piece, Barry McGuire, converted to Christianity after his brief moment of fame and moved from Blue to Red America.

Generation Gap
Blue Democrats lost red America back in 1965.
By Daniel Henninger

And you tell me over, and over, and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

--Vietnam War Protest Song, 1965

How did the 2004 election map of the United States come to look like a color-field painting by Barnett Newman? In fact, if you adjust the map's colors for votes by county (as at the Web sites for CNN and USA Today), even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red.

This didn't happen last Tuesday. The color-coding of the 2004 election began around 1965 in the politics of the Vietnam era. The Democratic Party today is the product of a generational shift that began in those years.

The formative years of the northern wing of the Democratic Old Guard go back to World War II. It included political figures like Tip O'Neill, Pat Moynihan and Lane Kirkland. It was men such as these whose experiences, both political and personal, informed and shaped the Democrats before the mid-'60s.

Over time the party passed into the hands of a generation, now in their 50s and early 60s, whose broad view of America and its politics was formed as young men and women opposing the Vietnam War. That would include the party's current leading lights--John Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi. And its most influential strategists, such as Bob Shrum, Mary Beth Cahill and James Carville. The old industrial unions, whose members went over to Ronald Reagan, gave way to the more dependable public-employee unions run by John Sweeney and Gerald McEntee.

These Baby Boomers--the generation of John Kerry, Al Gore and Bill and Hillary Clinton--transformed the world view of the Democrats, on everything from foreign policy to cultural issues. This new ethos--instinctively oppositional, aggressively secular--sank its roots deep on the East and West coasts, but it never really spread into the rest of the country, then or now.

Early on, the military became a focus. Democrats belonging to the World War II generation believed that one "served." There was a nonpartisan pact of reverence for the services. After Vietnam, Democratic partisans worked hard, and successfully, to eradicate ROTC from elite, coastal campuses and to adopt an ethos that no longer revered the services, but held them suspect of doing harm. Bill Clinton's relations with the military were strained. John Kerry tried to use his service biography to erase the Vietnam-era legacy of Democratic opposition to things military. It didn't work.

Expressed emotion matters greatly for this generation. The most notable phenomenon of the 2004 election was widespread liberal "hatred" of George Bush. Many wondered what sleeping volcano brought this lava to the surface. It came from the style of protest politics born in the 1960s. A famous liberal political phrase then was "the personal is political." Letting oneself become emotionally unhinged during a protest, as at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, became a litmus of authenticity. It became the norm, and it still is. But again, only for people who scream themselves blue.

Another phrase heard often in the campaign just ended was, "I'm frightened." Admiration for childlike fears in politics received approval in 1970 from Charles Reich's bestseller "The Greening of America," a paean to youth and "a new and liberated individual." Reich's book, by the way, also popularized the notion then that something called the "Corporate State" was blotting out the Aquarian sunshine. This is the mindset that just produced the Democrats' weird obsession with "Halliburton," as if anyone would care beyond the people who were long ago baptized into the blue faith.

But the politics of the Vietnam generation wasn't just about Vietnam. It was about changing everything, most notably the culture. This generation really opened up the culture. The old pre-Vietnam strictures on behavior and comportment--Tip O'Neill's old Boston Catholic world of Mass on Sunday and at least a working if not functioning knowledge of the Baltimore catechism--got hammered down till the moral landscape became flat and fast. Now you can drive anything at all into theaters, music or movies. This post-Vietnam culture of non-restraint, now almost 40 years old, produced Whoopi Goldberg's double-entendre jokes about George Bush's name at Radio City Music Hall, the Massachusetts Supreme Court's sudden decision on gay marriage, and hard-to-defend support for partial-birth abortion.

George Bush, age 58, was a reproach. He personifies everything they have fought since they drove LBJ and Richard Nixon out of politics. And this week they are trying to discover why most of the people who live between the Hudson River and Hollywood Freeway don't agree with them. Expect documentaries soon about Christian evangelicals on the Discovery Channel.

There is no hope that the Vietnam generation braintrust who just lost this election will ever understand Red America. Until someone in the party recognizes this, the tides of demography will inexorably erode the blue islands that remain on the map.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

From The Wall Street JournalL

So Much to Savor
A big win for America, and a loss for the mainstream media.
by Peggy Noonan

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan's old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

It will be hard for the mainstream media to continue, in the face of these facts, the mantra that we are a deeply and completely divided country. But they'll try!

The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

The elites of Old Europe are depressed. Savor. The nonelites of Old Europe, and the normal folk of New Europe, especially our beloved friend Poland, will not be depressed, and many will be happy. Let's savor that too.

George Soros cannot buy a presidential election. Savor. "Volunteers" who are bought and paid for cannot beat volunteers who come from the neighborhood, church, workplace and reading group. Savor.

The leaders of the Bush effort see it this way: A ragtag band of more than a million Republican volunteers who fought like Washington's troops at Valley Forge beat the paid Hessians of King George III's army. Savor.




As I write, John Kerry is giving his speech. He looks hurt. Who wouldn't? He fought to the end, for every vote, untiring and ceaseless. I told some young people recently who were walking into a battle, "Here's how to fight: You fight until they kill you, until they kill you and stop your heart, and then you let them carry you out of the room. But you fight until they carry." I think that's how the Democrats fought. Good for them.

To admit defeat with attempted grace is a moving sight. Kerry did well. His talking about his "good conversation" with the president was gracious and helpful. He was honest about the facts of the vote in Ohio. When he thanked his people from the bottom of his heart it was a real thanks. "Thanks to Democrats and Republicans and Independents. . . . Thanks to everyone who voted." "Don't lose faith, what you did made a difference . . . and building on itself . . . the time will come when your votes, your ballots, will change the world. And it's worth fighting for." A lot of pundits and editorialists are going to say, "His best speech of the campaign was his last." But that's not the point.

Mr. Kerry graced democracy today. He showed his love for it. Savor.

And now the president is speaking. He looks tired and happy. He looks as if the lines on his forehead are deeper. Maybe it's the lighting. "We had a really good phone call," he said of Mr. Kerry. "He was very gracious . . . and he and his supporters can be proud of their efforts." Good for them both. He announced his agenda: reform the tax code, privatize Social Security, help the emerging democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan. "And then our servicemen and -women will come home with the honor they have earned."

"Today I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. . . . I need your support. . . . I will do all that I can do to earn your trust. . . . We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us." All good. Savor.




Who was the biggest loser of the 2004 election? It is easy to say Mr. Kerry: he was a poor candidate with a poor campaign. But I do think the biggest loser was the mainstream media, the famous MSM, the initials that became popular in this election cycle. Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief--CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election--the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America. Some day, when America is hit again, and lines go down, and media are hard to get, these bloggers and site runners and independent Internetters of all sorts will find a way to file, and get their word out, and it will be part of the saving of our country.

Last note. As much as anyone, the POW wives of Vietnam, who stood against the Democratic nominee for president and for the Republican, can claim credit for the Bush victory. Everyone with a computer in America, and a lot of people with TVs, saw their testimony about the 1970s, and their husbands, and John Kerry. You could not come away from their white-haired, soft-faced, big-eyeglasses visages without thinking: He should not be commander in chief.

Oh, another last note. Tuesday I heard three radio talkers who refused to believe it was over when the ludicrous, and who knows but possibly quite mischievous, exit polls virtually declared a Kerry landslide yesterday afternoon. They are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. The last sent me an e-mail that dismissed the numbers as elitist nonsense and propaganda. She is one tough girl and they are two tough men. Savor them too.

From FrontPageMagazine.com:

Death of a “Blasphemer”
By Robert Spencer

Theo van Gogh was shot dead on an Amsterdam street on Tuesday morning. His assailant was a Dutch Moroccan who was wearing traditional Islamic clothing. After shooting van Gogh several times, he stabbed him repeatedly, slit his throat with a butcher knife, and left a note containing verses from the Qur’an on the body. Said Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende: “Nothing is known about the motive” of the killer.

Others were not quite so cautious. A Dutch student declared: “This has to end, once and for all. You cannot just kill people on the street in a brutal way when you disagree with them.” Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, declared: “We will show loud and clear that freedom of speech is important to us.”
 
Freedom of speech: Eight weeks ago, van Gogh’s film Submission aired on Dutch TV. The brainchild of an ex-Muslim member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Submission decried the mistreatment of Muslim women — and even featured images of battered women wearing see-through robes that exposed their breasts, with verses from the Qur’an written on their bodies.
 
In poor taste? Insulting? Probably that was a bit of the intention. Van Gogh, the great grandson of Vincent van Gogh’s brother (“dear Theo”), was a well-known gadfly on the Dutch scene; in the past, he had attacked Jewish and Christians with enough vehemence to elicit formal complaints. But after Submission, the death threats started to come. Van Gogh, in the eyes of many Dutch Muslims, had blasphemed Islam — an offense that brought the death penalty. The filmmaker was unconcerned. The film itself, he said, was “the best protection I could have. It’s not something I worry about.”
 
His death shows that it’s something that everyone who values freedom should worry about. For the murder of van Gogh, if it indeed turns out to have been committed by a Muslim enraged at his “blasphemy,” has precedents. In 1947, the Iranian lawyer Ahmad Kasravi was murdered in court by Islamic radicals; Kasravi was there to defend himself against charges that he had attacked Islam. Four years later, members of the same radical Muslim group, Fadayan-e Islam, assassinated Iranian Prime Minister Haji-Ali Razmara after a group of Muslim clerics issued a fatwa calling for his death. In 1992, the Egyptian writer Faraj Foda was murdered by Muslims enraged at his “apostasy” from Islam — another offense for which traditional Islamic law prescribes the death penalty. Foda’s countryman, the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in 1994 after accusations of blasphemy. Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, many non-Muslims have been arrested, tortured, and sentenced to die on the slimmest of evidence. And of course, there is the Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious death fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
 
But for such things to happen in Iran and Egypt, two countries where Islamic radicalism is widespread, is one thing; to have a “blasphemer” gunned down on the streets of Amsterdam in broad daylight is another. Europe has for thirty years encouraged massive immigration from Muslim nations; Muslims now comprise five percent of Holland’s population, and that number is growing rapidly. But it is still largely taboo in Europe — as in America — to raise any questions about how ready that population is to accept the parameters of secularism. When Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn tried to raise some of those questions in 2002, he was vilified as a racist — in line with the continuing tendency of the Western media to frame questions regarding Islam in racial terms, despite the fact that the totalitarian intransigence of the ideology of radical Islam is found among all races. And Fortuyn himself, of course, was himself ultimately murdered by a Dutch assailant who, according to The Guardian, “did it for Dutch Muslims.”
 
The deaths of Fortuyn and now van Gogh indicate that the costs of maintaining this taboo are growing ever higher. One of the prerequisites of the hard-won peaceful coexistence of ideologies in a secular society is freedom of speech — particularly the freedom to question, to dissent, even to ridicule. Multiculturalism and secularism are on a collision course: if one group is able to demand that its tenets remain above criticism, it no longer coexists with the others as an equal, but has embarked on the path to hegemony.
 
It is long past due for such considerations to become part of the public debate in Western countries. To what extent are Muslim immigrants in Western countries willing to set aside Islamic strictures on questioning, criticizing, and leaving Islam?
 
After van Gogh was killed, thousands of people took to the streets of Amsterdam to pay him homage. Among them, according to Agence France Presse, was a Muslim woman who stated: “I didn’t really agree with van Gogh but he was a person who used his freedom of expression.” She held up a sign saying, “Muslims Against Violence,” explaining: “I decided that as a Muslim and a Moroccan I should take up my responsibility to show that we do not support this act.”
 
But the traditional Muslim view is, unfortunately, alive and well; it was firmly restated several years ago by Pakistan’s Federal Sharia Court: “The penalty for contempt of the Holy Prophet …is death and nothing else.” No one knows how many Muslims in Europe and America hold the views of the Moroccan woman at the rally, and how many would side with Pakistan’s Sharia Court — and the killer of Theo van Gogh.
 
If Western countries continue, out of ignorance, fear, or narrow self-interest, to refuse to find out, they will find themselves playing host to many more incidents like the bloody scene in Amsterdam Tuesday morning. The longer this question is ignored, or attributed only to “racist” sensibilities, the more likely it becomes that the killing of Theo van Gogh will not be a tragic anomaly, but a harbinger of things to come.  

Well, here's hoping Steyn's prediction of 315 electoral votes for Bush holds true.

It's not just the economy, stupid
By Mark Steyn

Well, it's the big day, when Campaign 2004 moves from its electoral round into the litigation round.

For John Kerry to become President, he has to win 270 of the 538 electoral-college votes.

For George W Bush, it's not quite that simple: he's got to win big enough to be outside the margin of lawyer. For example, if he gets 270 and wins New Hampshire's four electoral-college votes very narrowly, the Democrats will sue to flip the state into their column and hand the election to Kerry. If Bush gets 288 or under, the Dems will sue to flip Ohio into the Kerry column. If Bush gets 295 or under, they'll sue to flip Florida.

In other words, Bush has to be up over 300 in order to stand a chance of shaking off the Democratic Party's chad-chasers. I think he can do it. I predicted in The Spectator last week that he'd win 315 electoral-college votes, and I'm sticking by that. But even at 315 the Kerry camp might think it worth contesting Ohio and Florida. Once you've accepted that you can sue your way round one state, as in 2000, it's not such a stretch to sue in two.

This is, supposedly, the 9/11 election. But, in fact, on one side of the divide there's remarkably little interest in the war on terror and Iraq beyond the pro forma sloganeering. Mooching around New Hampshire these last few days, I've seen just one lone sign that any Democrat is even thinking about the subject: in the yard of a Kerry/Edwards supporter on Route 10 just north of Hanover was a placard that read "Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home". Tell it to the Marines, lady. Bring them home, discredited and defeated, to sit safe in their barracks and be told, don't worry, from now on you can be just like the Canadians and the Europeans – safe at home except for the odd stint as international traffic cops benignly presiding over some UN-mandated ethnic stalemate for decades on end. That'll do wonders for recruitment.

No, the big date for a lot of these people is not 9/11 but 11/7 - November 7, 2000, the date Al Gore had his election victory "stolen" from him. If you've seen Fahrenheit 9/11, you'll know that Michael Moore's film starts with a long prologue about the Florida recount, the Supreme Court decision, etc. It doesn't seem the most obvious material for inclusion in a film about Iraq, Osama and the Saudis. But, for the likes of Moore, November 7 is the issue: it's where the tale begins, it's what led to September 11, which is no more than a First Act plot-twist cunningly manipulated by Bush to obscure what the story's really about.

Even if you sue in all 50 states, I don't think you can make a majority for the Michael Moore view of Bush. Al Gore did his best two years ago, travelling hither and yon on behalf of gubernatorial and Congressional candidates, and you can basically correlate their margin of defeat by the amount of time Al spent campaigning for them. Everywhere he went in 2002, the unprecedented unPresident had a consistent message: This election isn't about the war or the economy, it's about me and "the disputed Florida vote two years ago".

"Are you over it?" he roared at the crowds.

"No!" they roared back.

As I wrote at the time: "Earth to Al – the rest of us are over it."

That still holds. You can't re-fight the Florida recount, you can't Bush-bash your way into the White House. Nor can you win by pitting pocketbook issues against faraway countries of which we know little. Bob Kerrey – no relation but another snooty self-regarding Democratic senator – was on Meet The Press on Sunday and, after comparing Osama bin Laden to Jeffrey Dahmer, remarked: "I was in Gallia, Ohio, down in the southeastern part of Ohio. They don't give a damn about the war in Iraq. They're terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions. That's what's bothering them."

Oh, come off it. The unemployment rate in Gallia County is 6.9 per cent, which is high compared with the US rate (5.4 per cent) but as nothing compared with Canada (7.8 per cent), France (9.7 per cent) or Germany (10.5 per cent), to name but three countries John Kerry wants to make America more like. I don't believe the good folk of Gallia are so "terrified" about their unemployment creeping up to two thirds of Franco-German levels that they "don't give a damn" about Iraq.

That's the trouble with talking down the economy: you wind up talking down the people, too. In fact, the people – in Gallia, Ohio and many other places – understand the relevance of Iraq and Afghanistan to their wellbeing rather more clearly than the Democratic leadership do. Despite Bob Kerrey and John Kerry and Tom, Dick and Harry Kerrye assuring the plebs that they ought to be terrified because even though they've got jobs they could lose them any day now and then they'd discover those welfare queens in Basra and Mosul are hoovering up all the Federal gravy, the people keep insisting that war and national security remain their priorities.

It was, with hindsight, foolish to think that the differences between America and most of the rest of "the West" would somehow not also be manifest within America itself. For all those who complain with feigned ennui about the choice of candidates – the lesser of two evils, the evil of two lessers, yawn – the political system has contrived to throw up two men who are almost perfect embodiments of the choice facing the country.

John Kerry, with his pining for summits, his aspirational French, his boundless retrospective wisdom after some other fellow's taken the difficult decisions he ducked, his modish embrace of the Viet Cong and the Sandinistas and even Saddam in his Kuwaitswallowing days, is almost a parody Eurograndee.

But America cannot be a Greater Belgium or a Greater Canada or a Greater Spain. The only thing that enables Belgium to be Belgium and Canada to be Canada and Spain to be Spain is that America is America. If everyone in the civilised world's torpid and ineffectual and semi-non-aligned, it's not gonna work. Americans will not choose transnational complacency over national resolve.

From National Review Online:

Dante at Halloween
There’s nothing scarier than Hell.
by Thomas Hibbs

Near the bottom of the Inferno, in the eighth circle, Dante encounters the sowers of discord: fomenters of schism and civil war. The wounds of these sinners are represented by a man with his throat cut, his nose severed up to his eyebrows, and possessing only a single ear. Another sinner endures decapitation; it carries "by the hair its severed head dangling from its hand like a lantern which looked at us and said, 'Woe is me!'"

Dante is transfixed at the horrifying pageantry: "The great crowds and the diverse wounds/ had made my eyes so inebriated/ that they were eager to remain and weep." His guide, the Roman poet Virgil, chastises him for bestowing inordinate attention on the "sad, mutilated shades."

The Inferno is only the first of three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy, but it is the most read and the most entertaining. The Comedy, as it was known in its day, is always great reading — but never more so than at this time of year, the season of Halloween, a holiday whose popularity seems to increase with each passing year. Now a thoroughly secular celebration, Halloween is short for All Hallows Eve, the holy evening preceding the November 1 Feast of All Saints — whose celebration began as a way of honoring the martyrs of the early Church. In the liturgical calendar, All Saints is followed by All Souls, a commemoration of the unity of the dead and the living.

Take a film like Seven, from the 1990s, about a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who is repulsed at the way the modern world wallows in the seven deadly sins. He decides to take it upon himself to provide instructive acts of punishment. He begins selecting salient examples of each of the vices, and executes each individual in a way designed to illustrate the vice in question. The result is a grotesque version of the medieval sermons on the deadly sins, with vivid examples of the disorders involved in our attachment to vice.

The killer is pursued by two detectives: the young and pugnacious Mills (Brad Pitt) and the aging and jaded Somerset (Morgan Freeman). At one of the crime scenes, the killer leaves a quotation from Milton: "Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light." Somerset catches onto the pedagogical intent of the killer and suggests to his partner that they consult Aquinas, Dante, and Milton. The impatient and combative Mills casts asides a copy of Cliff's Notes to Dante with the taunt, "Dante, poet, faggot." Meanwhile, Somerset heads to the library, where he unfurls a map of Dante's Inferno — which, in this film, could function as a map of the city itself.

Seven's ending, which unveils the utter destruction of the bold Mills, ranks among the grimmest endings in modern American film. Seven is thus a truncated and deformed Divine Comedy, a hell without prospect of purgatory or paradise, a world of evil and vengeance bereft of providence, mercy, or love.

In Dante, by contrast, the visions of the horrors of hell are inscribed within divine justice, which itself is a partial manifestation of divine love. For Dante, the great mystery is not evil, but goodness. Evil is fairly easy to describe; it is finite and parasitic on the good. One of the few contemporary authors who can be said to stand in the tradition of Dante — William Peter Blatty — has said of his book, The Ninth Configuration, that it addressed the question of the mystery of goodness. Blatty explained, "If we are reducible to matter without spirit, to soulless atomic structures, then we ought to be always rushing blindly and irresistibly to serve our own selfish ends. Yet how is it that there is love in this world — love as a God might love — and that a man will give his life for another."

This is precisely Dante's goal. But before he can reach the love that moves the stars, he must traverse the full extent of Hell, including its lord. In the depiction of Satan, Dante manages at once to satisfy our appetite for horror and to undermine our expectations about the power of Satan. Disproportionately large, with three heads and huge, flapping wings, Satan is submerged in ice, immobile (except for the wings), with tears dripping from all six eyes, and each mouth filled with a traitor (Judas, Brutus, and Cassius). The combination of his fearful visages with his paralysis and tears creates an image at once terrifying and humorous. Satan is, in the end, an absurd, petty rebel — not a noble anti-hero.

Like the medieval cathedrals that found a place for gargoyles alongside saints, Dante gives us what we seem to want in our popular celebrations of Halloween: masks, disguises, and the momentary thrill of being scared. But, through Virgil, he warns us against inordinate fascination with vice and the grotesque. Dante also gives us a sense of the significance of the liturgical celebrations of All Saints and All Souls, celebrations now ignored in the onslaught of Halloween activities.

The introduction of examples of virtues, to counter examples of vice, marks the transition from Hell to Purgatory. The training in being repulsed by evil gives way to the longing to imitate virtue and participate in the living source of all goodness. Dante has a harder time describing the delights of Heaven than the monstrosities of Hell. But this is not because Heaven is less interesting; on the contrary, its beauty is so intense, at once arousing and satisfying the "ardor of his longing," that his "memory is overcome by excess." Here Dante perceives the interconnection of the lives of the living and the dead, of the saints already enthroned in heaven with the humblest and least noticed of lives on earth.

As enjoyable and entertaining as our contemporary Halloween festivities may be, they pale — on the scales of entertainment and significance — in comparison to the presentation of the mysterious union of the living and the dead in Dante's masterpiece.

From the October 28, 2004 London Times:

Bush's Enemies
They are the reason he deserves reelection.
by Gerard Baker

FOUR YEARS ago, when I covered the last U.S. presidential election campaign, it was hard to be impressed with George W. Bush. He seemed a callow sort, propelled effortlessly towards the presidency by a combination of heredity and money, swagger and bonhomie.

It didn't matter that he couldn't name the President of Chechnya. It was more troubling that he could not really say why he wanted to be American president at all.

I would certainly have preferred the Republican senator John McCain, one of the few men I have met for whom I would be prepared to leap in front of a flying bullet. If he had not been such an insufferable prig, I might even have preferred Al Gore. But those were fat, happy, complacent times. The election was about nothing; who cared who won? Having an aimless, shiftless president seemed somehow appropriate.

There have been many times in the past four years when that initial judgment on Bush seemed vindicated. His economic policies have been stunningly reckless. It was right to respond to the collapse of the 1990s bubble by easing fiscal policy; but Bush's approach was precisely the wrong way round. It has jeopardized the nation's long-term fiscal health, while doing little to provide immediate economic stimulus.

His easy abandonment of free trade principle over steel tariffs and farm subsidies was a disturbing glimpse of political opportunism at work. He has happily signed every spending bill that has been presented to him, making him the most fiscally incontinent leader in living memory.

His governing approach is secretive and overweening. That the war on terror requires constraints on the liberties that Americans have long enjoyed is without question. But Bush has been too ready for my taste to abandon the most basic civil protections on some pretty flimsy grounds.

In Iraq the catalogue of errors his administration has made is a serious count against his reelection. The U.S. did not plan, it seems, in any meaningful way for the challenge of running an ethnically diverse foreign country 8,000 miles away in a volatile region with little experience of self-rule and an unhappy history of foreign intervention. It did not send enough forces to pacify and secure the country. It stumbled from one grave error to another in constructing an occupying administration. It did not provide enough resources for the task of reconstruction. The one thing America should surely have done in the days after the fall of Saddam was to shower the Iraqi people with money.

The reason for all these misjudgments is the biggest indictment of all: a set of absurdly over-optimistic assumptions about the postwar situation. Summed up, they went like this. The Iraqis will love us and the freedom we will bring; the world will flock to help us when we uncover the weapons of mass destruction; and the country will rebuild itself with billions of dollars in oil revenues. All nice possibilities in an ideal world. Nobody seemed to prepare for the slight chance that they might not happen.

But for all this, if I had a vote on Tuesday I would be voting to reelect President Bush.

It is partly Bush's character. The perils of war really do demand leadership and moral clarity. It is partly, to be honest, the quality of his opponent. The more you see of John Kerry the more troubling the thought of his presidency becomes. Behind a lifetime of careful, calculated decision-making it is clear that he harbors a deep suspicion about the very idea of moral clarity in foreign policy.

It is partly what Bush has done. Afghanistan is an infinitely better and less threatening place today than it was four years ago. Iraq, despite the catalogue of errors, is still heading that way.

But above all, in this oppositional sort of age, when it is often easier to be defined by what one is against rather than what one is for, I have to say it is his enemies who most justify Bush's reelection.

The list of those whose world could be truly rocked on Tuesday is just too long and too rich to be ignored. If you think for a moment about those who would really be upset by a second Bush term, it becomes a lot easier to stomach.

The hordes of the bien-pensant Left in the universities and the media, the sort of liberals who tolerate everything except those who disagree with them. Secularist elites who disdain religiosity except when it comes from Muslim fanatics. Europhile Brits who drip contempt for everything their country has ever done and long for its disappearance into a Greater Europe. Absurd, isolationist conservatives in America and Britain who think the struggles for freedom are always someone else's fight. Hollywood sybarites and narcissists, self-appointed arbiters of a nation's morals.

Soft-headed Europeans who think engagement and dialogue with mass murderers is the way to achieve lasting peace. French intellectuals for whom nothing has gone right in the world since 1789.

The United Nations, which, if it had its multilateral way, would still be faithfully minding a world in which half the population lived under or in fear of Soviet aggression. Most of Belgium.

Above all, of course, Middle Eastern militants. If your bitterest enemies are the sort of people who hack the heads off unarmed, innocent civilians, then I would say you are probably doing something right.

This may sound petty. It is not. This constellation of individuals, parties and institutions has very little in common other than the fact that it has contrived to be wrong on just about every important issue of my adult lifetime.

And so, perhaps for the wrong reasons, perhaps less because he has been right and more because those who hate him so much have been so wrong, I want this President re-elected.

Go on America. Make Their Day.

Gerard Baker is U.S. editor of The Times of London and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Mark Steyn should be emperor of the world.

Justifications for backing Kerry fall flat
by Mark Steyn

Reading the media "endorsements" of John Kerry is like having lunch with a woman who wants to tell you about her great new boyfriend. She spends seven-eighths of the time bitching about the old boyfriend -- cocky, hot-headed, insensitive, never wants to listen, never gonna change -- and in the remaining few minutes tries to come up with the new guy's good points:

"Mr. Kerry himself is not a compelling candidate. But this year he offers a --"

Yes?

"-- a respite, a pause for reappraisal."

That's The Economist, pining for a quiet night in.

"What the Republicans tar as waffling strikes us as --"

Hmm. What is le mot juste?

"-- flexibility."

That's my Sun-Times colleagues, looking for a man they -- or, at any rate, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan -- can mold.

"According to the Almanac of American Politics, Kerry is 'more respectful of economic free markets' and more inclined to an expansionist foreign policy than --"

Than Ronald Reagan?

"-- than other liberal Democrats."

Oh, well. That's the Des Moines Register, arguing that he doesn't seem like a wimp and a loser if you put him in a room full of even bigger wimps and losers.

"We have misgivings about Kerry's ability to connect with ordinary people. We were frustrated by his long-winded explanations --"

But?

"His zigs and zags reflect his digestion of new information and his arrival at new insights." Honestly, sighs the Virginian Pilot, he only comes over like a snooty windbag because he's so much smarter than us.

"Mr. Kerry's description of the war as a 'diversion' does not inspire confidence in his determination to see it through. But Mr. Kerry has repeatedly pledged not to cut and run from Iraq --"

You're right, says the Washington Post, he has a commitment problem, but we'll work that out after the wedding.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan in the New Republic sounds like some blousy torch singer sitting atop the piano in a Jazz Age cabaret doing one of those laundry-list songs ruefully adumbrating her lover's faults: "His record is undistinguished, and where it stands out, mainly regrettable. He intuitively believes that if a problem exists, it is the government's job to fix it. He has far too much faith in international institutions, like the corrupt and feckless U.N., in the tasks of global management. He got the Cold War wrong. He got the first Gulf War wrong --"

If he were Jane Monheit on her excellent new CD, he'd conclude:

"I love him because he's --

I don't know --

Because he's just my Bill."

But, in this case, the point seems to be:

"I love him because he's --

I don't know --

Because he's just not Bush."

Sullivan's big idea is that the best way to force the Democrats to get serious about the war is to put them in charge of it. That's a helluva leap of faith -- and, in John Kerry's case, it's at odds with a 30-year track record of not being serious on the Cold War, Grenada, Central America, the first Gulf War, etc. As Dr. Laura would advise, you should never marry a man in hopes of reforming him.

In that respect, the Qaqaagate story is fascinating. What happened and when in Saddam's al-Qaqaa facility is somewhat murky. Had the shameless gang at "60 Minutes" had their way, the missing explosives story would have aired 36 hours before the polls opened, with no time for anybody to put the alternative to the Bush incompetence scenario -- i.e., that the stuff was moved to Syria before the war began. But never mind that. And never mind that the source for this story is a discredited U.N. official, Mohammed el-Baradei, on whose watch the IAEA not only missed entirely Libya's WMD program but has proved remarkably accommodating of Iran's.

Forget all that. The main problem with this story is that it makes no sense in terms of the Democrats' own narrative. For a year and a half, they've told us there were no WMD, Saddam wasn't a threat, and "BUSH LIED!!!!!!!!!" about it all. I happen to disagree with that, but there's no doubt that simply by hammering it home all day and night the Dems had some effect. Now they're saying whoa, let's back up, yes, as it happens, these non-existent weapons that Bush lied about the non-threatening Saddam having he did, in fact, have -- and that fool Bush let the non-existent weapons get away.

My version of this story -- they were smuggled out to Syria pre-invasion -- fits the Bush view of the war. But Kerry's version of this story undermines the Kerry view of the war -- or, at any rate, the most recent Kerry view of the war. That's the best clue as to the resolve he'd show as President: He has no internal conviction of his own, and so his campaign has run on incoherent reflex oppositionism, as, indeed, his Senate career has -- if America had followed the positions advocated by John Kerry, there would have been no Reagan arms build-up, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would have lingered on, and their clients in Grenada would have destabilized the rest of the Caribbean, and Latin America would not have been democratized, and Saddam Hussein would still be in power and still controlling Kuwait. Kerry's lovebirds at the Washington Post et al. are dreaming of a transformation in their unlovely swain that would be at odds not just with his last three decades but with his last three weeks.

It's only a day or so now till the chad-dangling round of Campaign 2004 begins but, when the lawsuits are over and the bloodletting begins, serious Democrats need to confront the intellectual emptiness of their party, which Kerry's campaign embodies all too well. The Dems got a full tank from FDR, a top-up in the Civil Rights era, and they've been running on fumes for 30 years. Their last star, Bill Clinton, has no legacy because, deft as he was, his Democratic Party had no purpose other than as a vehicle for promoting his own indispensability. When he left, the Democrats became a party running on personality with no personalities to run. Hence, the Kerry candidacy. Despite the best efforts of American editorialists, there's no there there.

From washingtonpost.com

Reelect Bush, Faults And All
by George F. Will

"THEODORE! with all thy faults -- "

-- The New York Sun's 1904
endorsement of Teddy Roosevelt

This column has expressed abundant skepticism about the grandiosity of George W. Bush's foreign policy. And about his passivity about spending (he has vetoed nothing), his enlargement of the welfare state (the prescription drug entitlement), his expansion of inappropriate federal responsibilities (concerning education from kindergarten through 12th-grade, through the No Child Left Behind Act) and his complicity in vandalizing the Constitution (he signed the McCain-Feingold bill, which rations political speech). Still, this column prefers Bush.

Reasonable people can question the feasibility of Bush's nation-building and democracy-spreading ambitions. However, having taken up that burden, America cannot prudently, or decently, put it down. The question is: Which candidate will most tenaciously and single-mindedly pursue victory? The answer is: Not John Kerry, who is multiple-minded about most matters.

Tuesday's winner will not start from scratch but from where we are now, standing with the women of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Back in Washington recently, Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said those women were warned that Taliban remnants would attack polling places during the Oct. 9 elections. So the women performed the ritual bathing and said the prayers of those facing death. Then, rising at 3 a.m., they trekked an hour to wait in line for the polls to open at 7 a.m. In the province of Kunar an explosion 100 meters from a long line of waiting voters did not cause anyone to leave the line.

Which candidate can be trusted to keep faith with these people? Surely not the man whose party is increasingly influenced by its Michael Moore faction. Surely not the man whose most important vote in his 20 Senate years opposed using force to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. Iraqi forces had crossed an international border to eradicate a sovereign nation, but Kerry does not regret voting to oppose the forceful reversal of this aggression.

However, his career is one of multiple tepid regrets. Carefully parsed, his rhetorical ambiguities, which seem designed to discourage deciphering, suggest that he regrets not only his vote for Justice Antonin Scalia but also votes for the 2002 Iraq resolution, for No Child Left Behind, for the Patriot Act.

When he intimates that medical marvels will quickly follow his termination of a nonexistent "ban" on stem cell research, his dishonesty exceeds even his philistinism. His synthetic alarm about possible conscription would cost him his reputation for honesty, had he one after warning seniors that Bush will cut Social Security benefits up to 45 percent.

Regarding entitlements, Kerry's campaign has been of breathtaking banality. Some great challenges arrive without preambles -- the Depression, Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11, 2001. Others are precisely predicted. One such is the baby boomers' coming retirement. America's economy cannot retain its dynamism during this demographic deluge if it must support the welfare state as currently configured.

But Kerry is dismally believable when he vows that nothing will be done about this during his presidency. He promises no increase in Social Security taxes and no cut in benefits, and he shows no interest in original thinking about other ameliorative measures.

He is even banal in the fright-mongering that is his substitute for thinking about the problem. It is fair for him to warn about substantial transition costs associated with Bush's plan to allow Americans to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in a few approved equities funds. But his more characteristic response is to cry "Enron!" By which he means either that American capitalism is too corrupt to invest in, or most Americans are too obtuse to competently invest, or both.

A defining difference between the candidates and their parties concerns Americans' aptitudes for navigating modern society and for setting social policy through representative institutions. Which brings us to the next president's role in shaping the federal judiciary.

Kerry is more than merely comfortable with liberalism's preference for achieving its aims through judicial fiats rather than political persuasion -- by litigation rather than legislation. That preference for change driven by activist judges rather than elected representatives expresses liberalism's condescension about the normal American's capacity for thriving without government tutelage.

Bush sometimes confuses certitude with certainty, but he understands that to govern is to choose, and that some choices must make one lonely. Kerry constantly calls to mind a three-time Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan: "The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later."

So this column's conclusion is: "GEORGE! with all thy faults."

georgewill@washpost.com

Even a disappointed Yankee fan can read this and appreciate what the Boston victory has meant to so many people. It's a part of what makes baseball the best game of them all.

After decades of longing, generations can rejoice
by Bella English, Globe Staff

At 11:33 a.m. yesterday, in a mist of rain and confetti, a boy and his father watched history being made. The boy was 45 years old, his dad 77. They wore identical Red Sox jackets and caps. Over the years, the old man had held his son's hand many a time as they traipsed through Fenway Park together to see their beloved team.

Yesterday, it was the boy's turn to throw a protective arm around his father in a crowd of Red Sox fanatics whose day had finally -- finally -- come. At the corner of Tremont and Bromfield, Bill Culhane at last put to rest the ghosts of games past, the years of Yankees-induced torture, the scores of unanswered prayers. The decades of wishing and hoping had dissolved, thanks to an unlikely band of characters named Pedro and Manny and Papi who made the old man smile and lift a fist into the air.

''Outstanding," was all he could manage as the duck boat passed by bearing Johnny Damon, his favorite current player. ''I didn't think I would live long enough to see this."

Added his wife, Dolly, 72: ''It's time to put Babe Ruth's picture away and don't worry about him anymore. He's history."

And so was the parade that drew millions of fans to Boston on an overcast, raw morning. Forget the raucous, beer-soaked college kids whose history with the Red Sox extends a month or two and who couldn't tell you who plays center field. It was the veteran fans, the generation who prayed for a World Series win before they died, who brought new meaning to the words, ''once in a lifetime."

It was as if they had, decades ago, made an internal vow: to love the Sox for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do they part. And at long last, their love had been requited.

These veteran fans are the folks who witnessed Ted Williams's very last hit. They were there when Johnny Pesky hesitated. They remember when bleacher seats and beer cost 50 cents. They know Babe Ruth's stats by heart. And they can recite the starting lineup for the 1946 World Series, both the St. Louis Cardinals and the Red Sox.

You could tell them by the white hair that peeked beneath Red Sox caps. You could tell them by the patience with which they waited for their team. (After all, they'd been waiting for decades). You could tell them by the quiet reverence they showed as the duck boats rumbled by, oblivious to the vulgar chants of much younger fans. It was fitting that they came with their children, to whom they had passed their love of the Red Sox, and with their grandchildren, the newest generation of fans.

''That was Johnny Pesky, Dad!" exclaimed Pete Culhane, who was 45 going on 5 for a few minutes yesterday. His father has had heart problems, and his son was very grateful for the day. Though the elder Culhanes retired to Colorado years ago, they flew in Wednesday night to watch Game 4 of the World Series with their son, who lives in Walpole. Yesterday, the three of them caught an early commuter train into town, arriving at 7:30 a.m. From South Station, it took them nearly two hours to make it to the Common; Bill Culhane walks slowly these days, stopping often to get his breath.

''I became a Red Sox fan because of my father," Pete said. ''That's why this is so special to me. I was hoping they'd do it before he died."

It was a refrain echoed all along the parade route.

Pat Salvador, 73, and her husband, Bussie, 72, took the 7:05 a.m. train from Kingston with their three daughters. The couple had seen Mickey Mantle's last at-bat in Fenway Park. They'd seen Ted Williams's last hit, too. And they were there the day in 1965 when Dave Morehead pitched a no-hitter.

Almost genetically, they passed along their Red Sox fever to their daughters. In 1975, they woke their children when Carlton Fisk hit his famous home run off the foul pole. The five of them had cried together in 1986 when the Sox lost to the Mets. They cried again Wednesday night, when their team finally delivered the goods.

''In 1986, we had the champagne all ready," said Pat Salvador. ''The kids wouldn't let me buy it this time. They were too superstitious." Instead, they celebrated the long-awaited win with Sprite.

From here on out, she declared, all Boston obituaries will include the mandatory line: ''Lived long enough to see the Red Sox win the World Series."

Those who did live to see it were thinking about loved ones who didn't. Bussie Salvador was remembering his parents, long dead, who first took him to Fenway Park in 1947 to see the Sox play the Detroit Tigers. ''Whenever the team was out of town, Jim Britt, the Red Sox sportscaster, would read the play-by-play that came over the teletype," he recalled. As the bells peeled from the nearby Park Street Church and the crowd chanted the familiar, ''Let's Go, Red Sox," Salvador released a long sigh that seemed pent up from generations past.

''I feel happy in my heart," he said. He even credited the Red Sox with his good health. ''My immune system is strong right now because I'm so happy," he said. ''I will not catch a cold today."

Bill Fitzgerald was 6 years old when he attended his first Red Sox game in August 1941. Yesterday, the 69-year-old brought his 27-year-old daughter to the parade. ''Frankly, I did not think I would live long enough to see this," said Fitzgerald, who lives in South Boston. ''And I did not think my daughter would, either."

Eileen Fitzgerald said she flew up from her home in Virginia to attend the parade with her father, who took her to Fenway Park when she was a girl. ''Every time I think about this, it makes me want to cry," she said. ''It's more for my dad than anything."

She had tucked her arm inside her father's as they walked back to the T. ''I'm weak in the knees at all of this," he explained.

Lloyd Hill, 76, was there with his son, Rich, 24, who is a pitcher in the Chicago Cubs' farm system. ''I've waited my whole life for this," said the elder Hill, who lives in Milton. ''I hoped to see it, but it was a long shot. The way they won it, it's absolutely miraculous.

''Thank you," he added, to no one in particular.

Barney Farley, 73, was also there with his son, Michael, 27. ''To be able to come here with my dad, it's huge," said the younger Farley. ''My dad coached Little League for years, and I've been going to Fenway with him since I was little." Friends had invited him to a party during Game 4, but he declined, instead watching it with his father.

As he waited for the duck boats, the elder Farley was still pinching himself. ''The Red Sox to me were always the bridesmaid. They didn't know how to become the bride. They finally figured it out."

At the corner of Tremont and Bromfield, where he'd been waiting for two hours, Bill Culhane watched as his heroes rolled by. He chewed his gum steadily and took it all in silently: the legends he'd loved as a young man and the current crew of characters who finally got it done. Johnny Damon and his flowing mane, Pedro and his huge grin, Curt Schilling and his thumbs up.

''It's the thrill of a lifetime," he said quietly.

Bella English can be reached at english@globe.com.