‘Misunderestimated’ Once Again
by Ken Bell

Yes, it took the Red Sox 86 years to win the World Series again. But consider this: until November 2, 2004, it had been 104 years since an incumbent Republican president, Republican Senate and Republican House had been simultaneously re-elected.

Earlier in the election season, in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic national convention in Boston, an article in the Review expressed some astonishment that the Democrats had unequivocally and deliberately declared their intention to attempt a ‘direct frontal assault’ against what was widely perceived to be the greatest strength of the Bush administration, the war on FascIslamic terrorism. At the time, it seemed an act of hubris. As the denouement decisively proves, it was.

George W. Bush, and the Republican party, profited from being ‘misunderestimated’ yet again.

Let’s be sure that we don’t misunderestimate the consequences. The election of 2004 was decisive, and its results will not be trivial.

In purely political terms, Bush has now become the first president to be elected by a popular majority in 16 years. Every election since his own father’s defeat of another Massachusetts liberal in 1988 has been decided by a plurality (or minority) of the electorate—in two of the three elections only with the decisive aid of a third party (Perot in 1992, Nader in 2000). While the margin in ‘04 was just under 3 percent of the vote, that is significantly less important than the fact that more than 61 million Americans—6 million more than Ronald Reagan’s record vote in 1984—favored the incumbent’s re-election in a year in which turnout rose by nearly 9 million, to another record of almost 120 million.

Equally as important, Bush brought a net of four new Senate seats and what will probably prove to be 5 to 7 new House seats (depending upon whether you count vacancies prior to the vote, and upon the results of two runoff elections scheduled in Louisiana for December) into the Republican column along with him. This is no small accomplishment. Neither Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 nor Ronald Reagan in 1984, nor, for that matter, Richard Nixon in 1972, accomplished anything similar. In fact, you’ve got to go back 68 years to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s annihilation of Kansas Governor Alf Landon in 1936 to find anything comparable. (Lyndon Johnson’s crushing of Barry Goldwater in 1964 also brought more Democrats into the House and Senate. But less than a year after the Kennedy assassination, LBJ was hardly an incumbent seeking re-election. He was, however, the last Democrat to receive more than 50 percent of the vote.)

The Republican party has clearly become, however narrowly, the majority national party.

This election is a mandate, and an imperative obligation to act.

Moreover, from the conduct of foreign policy through tax reform and social security renovation to the federal judiciary, the ramifications of the 2004 vote are enormous. Several articles in this issue of the Review will consider each of these important areas, among others. But for the moment, let’s focus exclusively on the political dimension.

In significant ways, Karl Rove may fairly compare the fruits of his labor to those of Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s political confidant and architect of a Republican hegemony that endured until the disastrous policy errors that created the Great Depression. But Rove’s successes were predicated upon Bush’s decisions and actions. And those presidential choices were grounded in the most salient fact of contemporary American politics: the Republican party has become the party of ideas, the party of innovation and dynamic change. It is because of his unique position as both heir and agent of those ideas and that change, that George W. Bush has the opportunity to change the course of American political history as much as FDR.

It wasn’t merely symbolic that the Democratic party and its surrogate media, entertainment and academic elites chose to pretend that all the most significant issues of the 2004 elections centered upon the Vietnam War. Since the ignominious end of that forlorn conflict, they haven’t had a single new idea. They have become intellectually moribund and, increasingly, politically sterile. It’s as if they have become a grand coalition of the Know Nothings, the Do Nothings and the Think Nothings. That ever greater numbers of Americans perceive their intellectual and ethical bankruptcy is at the core of their rising frustration, anger and surreality.

Worse, they have simultaneously transformed themselves into a peculiar institutional coalition of manipulative elites and their dependent constituencies, the latter of which are more frequntly victimized than aided by the very policies those elites pursue. This is the most remarkable irony of our present democracy.

As the radical disconnect between the Democrats’ rhetoric and the Democrats’ reality becomes ever more apparent to ever greater numbers, maintaining the illusion has begun to require an extraordinary degree of self-delusion.

They speak of themselves as “progressives,” though they stand athwart the path of progress in fields as diverse social security, education reform and tax simplification and reduction. Rather than propose, they oppose. Their collective stance in the war against FascIslam is irresponsible and indefensible. Surrender, retreat and isolation are prescriptions for disaster, not safety.

How much longer can the Democratic party pretend that its Kennedys and Byrds and Kerrys are not hollow men? And how much longer can it endure mendacity, pretense and hypocrisy while hoping against hope for a demographic rescue by its own victims? How long before the Democrats become the 21st century’s Whigs?

–From the November 2004 Austin Review