I still think Bush will win

Mark Steyn says the President's chances of victory improve every time John Kerry appears on television

New Hampshire

There was an interesting headline in the International Herald Tribune the other day: 'FrontRunner Is Leading In Presidential Race.' It turned out to be an analysis of the Indonesian election, but I think the general principle applies over here as well. It seems safe to say the front-runner is leading in the US presidential race and that, if the frontrunner can maintain that lead up to and including election day, he's likely to win.

The only point of disagreement is over who's the front-runner. The media, said Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, in a unusual moment of candour the other day, 'wants Kerry to win' and so 'they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic ... that's going to be worth maybe 15 points'. In Fleet Street, if memory serves, an assistant managing editor is the bloke who orders the office furniture, but on Newsweek's bulked-up masthead Mr Thomas is quite the bigshot and, just to prove his point, the magazine's cover this week features a beaming John Kerry and a beaming John Edwards over the headline 'The Sunshine Boys'.

The only thing Thomas got wrong was that 15-point bounce. There was no discernible Edwards bounce outside his hair. The reality of this race was summed up by the bumper sticker I saw on some smug Vermont granolamobile the other day: 'Someone Else For President'. That's what matters to Democrats — that Bush ceases to be President and Someone Else takes over the job. And, as long as they think of John Kerry as Someone Else, Dems are buoyant and confident. Unfortunately, every so often, they'll linger by the TV a little too long, Senator Someone Else will start to talk, and his party will remember that he is, indeed, John Keny, and it's too late to get another Someone Else.

So the question is whether the base's strong anti-Bush motivation can survive its non-existent pro-Kerry motivation. Key demographics — such as blacks and Hispanics — are reported to be antipathetic to the candidate and difficult to corral. Even the fawning press has a tough job talking him up. This is how Jodi Wilgoren began a recent puff piece in the New York Times: `Like a caged hamster, Senator John Kerry is restless on the road. He pokes at the perimeter of the campaign bubble that envelops him, constantly trying to break out for a walk around the block, a restaurant dinner....'

Why couldn't he have been a caged tiger? Isn't that what she's getting at? A noble beast, restless and prowling? A caged hamster's never struck me as being that interested in poking the perimeter. He's happy on his little hamster wheel, going round and round and getting nowhere, occasionally pausing to chew his nuts. But he's not constantly trying to break out, unless he happens to be at a Hollywood fundraiser and a certain male movie star asks him back to his pad for a nightcap. Perhaps Ms Wilgoren thought the tiger was too haughty and aristocratic, and that the rodent imagery would humanise Kerry. Or perhaps, like Sinatra, the Senator has his very own Hamster Pack of buddies for when he breaks out of the bubble and gets to that restaurant.

Bush, meanwhile, is like some indestructible lab rat. They keep tossing some lethal new poison in there every week and he digests it all and keeps on going. The economy's a bust! Iraq's a quagmire! There are no WMD! But Bush just ploughs through it all, and in the end the dynamic of the race seems barely affected.

Some readers think I'm being a little fainthearted this campaign season, noting that I predicted a Bush victory months ago but seem to have gone a little quiet on the subject. Well, I still think Bush will win. As I said before and after the 2000 election, the Democrats' biggest problem is their lack of appeal to white rural males. That's why Al Gore isn't President. He lost hitherto Dem states like West Virginia, Bill Clinton's Arkansas and his own Tennessee. Do you reckon a Botoxicated Brahmin from Massachusetts with some pretty-boy ambulance-chaser is going to reverse Gore's fortunes? I don't. The Michael Moorification of the Democratic party boosts their numbers where they don't need any more support — Boston, New York, plus Berkeley and a few other crazy college towns. But it doesn't do anything for them in states where they could use a bump.

So I'd say West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee are staying in the Bush column. The 2000 census brought about, yet again, a further draining of electoral muscle from the Democrat north-east to the Republican south and west. This means that even if Bush won only the states he won last time round, instead of a squeaker, he'd beat Kerry by 278 electoral college votes to 260. I think it will be a little bigger than that. With the exception of Florida, the Bush bloc of states is pretty much secure. The battlegrounds this year are all Gore states — Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin. At the minimum I'd look to Bush to peel away a couple of those from Kerry — most likely some twosome out of Iowa, New Mexico and Wisconsin — and hold on to Florida. That would give Bush 290-295 electoral college votes over Kerry's 243-248. If the Massachusetts senator is on TV too often and his insufferable pomposity becomes impossible to hide, the President may pick up three or four more states — plus, under the Pine Tree State's goofy split-take rules, half of Maine's electoral votes, too.

That's my reading of the electoral college. But the other reason I'd bet on Bush is more basic: he tends not to lose. In 2002 Michael Moore gloated that the midterms would be the shot heard round the world — a massive repudiation of the moron warmonger — and instead the President had a great night of significant incremental gains in the Senate and House. If he's a moron, he's the luckiest moron who ever lived. A few months ago the Democrats were jeering about 'the Bush recession'. Then the recession ended. So they started jeering about 'the jobless recovery'. Then the jobs kicked in. So now they're moaning that the jobs 'don't pay enough'. Get the feeling this whole economy thing just isn't going anywhere for them?

It's the same with Iraq. If you'd wanted to, you could have landed some serious blows on the administration. There are aspects of post-war reconstruction that were not handled well, and some military decisions that were questionable. But by insisting that Iraq was on the brink of civil war, and the Shiites were on the verge of a mass uprising, and Bush 'lied' over the uraniumfrom-Niger story, and one lousy jailhouse was entitled to 99 per cent of the Iraq coverage for weeks on end, the Democratic party and their chums in the mainstream media ruled themselves out of making any credible contribution to the debate.

There was an almost touchingly bewildered piece in the Boston Globe this week: 'Media coverage of President Bush has been largely unflattering this campaign season, but there's little indication the bad press has affected the country's view of him, according to a survey being released today.... Despite months of tough coverage, the Pew poll found that "the strongest associations people have with President Bush are positive". The Bush characteristics most frequently cited by the public are that he is tough and won't back down (53 per cent) and that he is strong and decisive (48 per cent), although 44 per cent did describe him as stubborn. Conversely. only 18 per cent selected Kerry as the candidate who most epitomises strength and decisiveness, and only 15 per cent saw him as the one who is tougher and more tenacious. . . .

'The only theme that more of the public saw as best describing Kerry rather than Bush was that he was a flip-flopper.'

Why did 'months of tough coverage' have such little impact on Bush? Because of blowhards like bigshot Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV. Last week, in his additional remarks to the Senate intelligence committee report, Senator Rockefeller accused the administration of being 'fundamentally misleading' in basing its case against Iraq 'on the argument that we knew with certainty that Iraq possessed large quantities of chemical and biological weapons, was aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons, and that an established relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa.eda would allow for the transfer of these weapons for use against the United States.'

That was all 'fundamentally misleading', says Rockefeller, today. Here's what Senator Rockefeller said in October 2002: 'There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years.... Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America. now. . . . And he could make those weapons available to many terrorist groups which have contact with his government, and those groups could bring those weapons into the US and unleash a devastating attack against our citizens.

What a sad hack. Virtually every Democratic heavyweight from Al Gore down has the same kind of amnesia, accusing Bush of 'lies' and 'deception' for saying exactly the same things they were saying. My view of Iraq and the war on terror hasn't changed since 2002. Nor has Bush's, or Cheney's or Condi's. But Democrats have stood their own arguments on their heads so often that they now stand for nothing.

That's Kerry's and Edwards's problem. Ask them about Iraq and they drone on about getting the UN back in there and bringing France and Germany on board by giving them 'fair access to the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts' plus 'a leadership role' in exchange for some troops. But all the UN's done for Iraq is rip off its people in a $10 billion Oil-for-Food scam that's bigger than Enron, Worldcom and every other corporate scandal combined. And bribing France and Germany with US tax dollars and Middle East meddling rights in exchange for vague promises of military resources they don't have isn't so smart, either. If the object is to cosy up to foreigners disenchanted with Bush, Patricia Hewitt is closer to the mark: Kerry-Edwards trade protectionism will offend far more allies than Bush ever did on Iraq.

The truth is that blathering about the UN and France is the equivalent of having no policy, no ideas. It's the default position for sonorous phonies. And, as that survey suggests, that's all anyone knows about Kerry. For example, the Senator recently flipped his position on abortion. He now says that he 'personally' believes life begins at conception. But he votes non-stop for abortion every chance he gets because he doesn't believe in inflicting his deeply held personal beliefs on the country.

Huh? This is a first: a candidate who boasts that his conscience is at odds with his voting record. If you believe that abortion is the taking of a life, you vote against it. If you lose the vote, then you say, well, I personally believe life begins at conception, but I respect the will of the legislature, blah blah. But to say that you believe in voting against what you believe because you don't believe in believing in your beliefs is as close as you can get to admitting that the flip-flop perception is true: you stand for nothing; there's no there there.

Well, the Dems have a problem on this issue. The base is fanatically pro-abortion while the broader electorate isn't. And, in fairness to Kerry, asked if he too believed that life begins at conception. John Edwards just froze and ducked the question. twice. The trouble is that the Senator is applying his meaningless abortion 'conscience' to the war. One pictures too easily a President Ken)' in 2001 saying that while he 'personally' believes in removing the Taleban, he doesn't believe he has the right to inflict his deeply held personal beliefs on Jacques Chirac, or Gerhard Schroder, or whoever the Belgian guy is.

This has been a strange election season, even before any al-Qa'eda October surprise. It's like watching Sheffield Wednesday take on Middlesex. If the crowd decide this is really a cricket match, Wednesday look like a bunch of dummies. If they figure it's footie, Middlesex are in trouble. Likewise, if the voters think this election is about the small print on your credit-card statement or ten-year-old girls without winter coats or any of John Edwards's other bizarre obsessions, they'll ditch Bush and Cheney. But if they think it's about American resolve in dangerous times, Kerry and Edwards look way out of their league.