Landslide!
by James Kilbourne
I now believe that the 2004 President election will be a landslide victory for George W. Bush. I am defining “landslide” as a victory in which there are ten percentage points between the two major candidates. From the beginning, we have heard that Bush and Kerry are tied. Several polls still show Kerry as even or a point or two ahead, although most of the “experts” now see Bush with about a five point lead. But I see two facts at work on Bush’s behalf.
The first is that the absolutely absurd claim that the Eastern establishment media are even-handed in their treatment of Democrats and Republicans is finally crumbling. I remember coming to the conclusion that this group was highly biased towards the Democrats when John F. Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon in 1960. The American public has increasingly known of this bias for at least 25 years, and has been steadily abandoning the major networks as their source for political news. Now, with Rathergate, the bias is undeniable to all but the most “religious” of Democrats.
The second fact is that the American Democratic Party has been taken over by its extreme left wing, which philosophically is somewhere near the political consensus of western Europe. This wing has controlled the party since the nomination of George McGovern, and is not capable of winning a U.S. election unless a very strong third party splits the normal Republican base. People tend to forget that President Clinton only won because the Republican base was split by Ross Perot; Clinton failed to get 50% of the vote in either 1992 or 1996. Once again, Republicans have been able to define this election as being between the “European” Kerry and the “American” Bush. John Kerry has now decided to make the war in Iraq the issue, and after weaving drunkenly all over the political road, is trying to convince everyone that words don’t have any meaning; that it is everyone else who has been drunk. Why, everyone should know that he has always been a “Jacques Chirac” Democrat!
The result of this, in my opinion, will be a landslide for George W. Bush. Two wonderful results might arise from a Bush landslide:
The victory could be seen as a solid defeat for the position that our battle with terrorism is a fight against a criminal element. It could firmly establish the “War on Terror”, and thereby insure its eventual victory, just as the early years of the Cold War established containment as the right approach to insure the eventual collapse of communism.
It is possible that if Bush brings with him a few senators and a handful more congressmen, important progress can be made on reforming Social Security, Medicare and our tax system. I am sure it won’t be enough to satisfy most libertarians, but it could establish a trend that would push the 21st Century into a gradual march towards libertarian positions, just as most of the 20th century was a gradual march towards socialist positions.
One result of a Republican landslide could also be a complete political realignment by the year 2008. The Republican right will insist on some social legislation regarding gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, or some other position that will split its uneasy coalition between its religious right and its more libertarian moderate center. True political realignment has only occurred a few times in our history. We may be approaching one of those times, and that is a possibility that I hope to visit in detail after the election.
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