by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
There was one person sweating out Ohio even more than John F. Kerry, and that was Hillary Rodham Clinton.
For Kerry, winning the state’s 20 electoral votes meant survival as a presidential candidate.
Hillary needed Kerry to lose in Ohio to have any chance herself of becoming a presidential candidate.
By bowing out graciously and soon, Kerry helps her aspirations. Minus the rancor that engulfed Florida on both political sides in 2000, the political battlefield after Ohio is now purified for Hillary.
She is spared pro forma appearances at Kerry’s side and in television interviews during a long crusade of lawyering over Ohio. Or she is not at his side and suspected of disloyalty.
Wound-licking Democrats are calling for President Bush to “reach out to the center.”
We would ask, however, what “center” is he supposed to be reaching out for?
In racking up the highest presidential vote in U.S. history, topping even Ronald Reagan’s number, Bush proved clearly that he has found the center of his own party.
Reaching into the current Democrat “center” looks more like grasping in a snake pit. It is heavy with the rants of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Roger Moore, Paul Begala, James Carville and others, none of whom seem likely to lay aside their savagery as electing Hillary in 2008 now becomes Job One.
Good luck, too, with reaching to soothe the angst of the gay lobby, various Social Security reactionaries and the anti-war activists. We think the president will extend a hand for reconciliation. But he will likely draw back a bloody stump.
On other fronts, one would hope this election – finally – will lay to rest the myth of George W. Bush’s “stupidity” as alleged by east and left coast liberals. This would end five years of chatter about Karl Rove and Dick Cheney playing puppet-masters to Dubya’s dunce.
The Democrats might follow a business maxim, namely, that it’s a pretty sharp CEO who surrounds himself with department heads more expert in their specialties than he or she.
We’re not likely to see George W. Bush attempting to command troops down to the company level half a world away as Jimmy Carter attempted with the ill-fated try to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in the late 1970s. Or aping John Kerry on second-guessing our military in Iraq over how best to deal with ammunition dumps.
Laying aside the issues of a president who once learned to control an F-16 fighter jet and earned better college grades than two supposedly brilliant opponents, we’d argue that a man who can handle the best these opponents can throw has some spark of intellect. This goes right down to election day 2004 with those addled exit polls seeming to show Bush a clear loser during all of last Tuesday’s daylight hours.
If that wasn’t a Kerry-Edwards dirty trick, it looked mighty like one. The result was to depress and suppress the Bush-Cheney vote at the worst possible time.
The stunning Bush-Cheney victory was a vindication of the values of average Americans. All those red states, “Flyover Country” as the left’s derisive phrase goes, seem to have won after all with their duty, honor, country sentiments and Zell Miller beliefs.
Bush territory respects directness in a leader, disdains the P. Diddy gyrations of mind and body, and prefers a First Lady who admires and adores her president, as Laura Bush obviously does. She compares in demeanor favorably with Teresa Heinz Kerry, whose joint appearances with her husband seem often to feature a “Can’t I puhleeeeze get out of here” look.
One reason that John Kerry was slow to leave the family mansion to concede the election was because he suspected “She’d change the locks” behind him, one sideman on the Don Imus show joked.
Bewildered Democrats appearing on television election night seemed overcome with the spirit of a phrase attributed to the Nixon-era film critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker magazine. One even quoted her directly.
In reaction to Richard Nixon’s landslide win over George McGovern in 1972, an unbelieving Kael was said to have asked a friend: “How can this be? No one I know voted for Nixon.”
Exactly!
Substitute George W. Bush for Nixon and the same could probably be said of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw.
Where the Bush campaign excelled was in peeling off significant numbers of Jewish voters on issues rooted in Middle East policy and Bush’s record of dependable support for Israel.
It didn’t hurt that New York City’s Jewish former mayor Ed Koch campaigned for Bush-Cheney in Florida, even branding as lies some Kerry comments on the Iraq War.
Unusually large numbers of Catholic and black voters seemed to have deserted Kerry over his ambiguous stands on issues of abortion, gay marriage and religious values.
Ambiguity itself had a bad time Tuesday.
Majority Leader Tom Daschle fell to John Thune in South Dakota. Voters in our neighboring state to the north seemed finally to tire of Daschle’s conservative pose at home while voting and acting as a Bush-obstructing liberal in Washington.
With the House Republicans even more in control than before and the Senate apparently firmly Republican at 54-44-1, it looks good for the Bush agenda on conduct of the war on terror, including Iraq, and the president’s cherished reforms for Social Security and health care.
Being able to fill the probable two, three or four Supreme Court vacancies coming up in Bush’s second term is worth several armies in America’s showdown with activist judges.
Well before Bush first took office, the Midlands Business Journal editorialized that this onetime carousing youth, like the young man who was destined to grow into England’s great king, Henry V, would himself become a man of destiny.
And so he has.
November 2004
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