Excerpt:
For now Americans seem to be split 50-50 over the reelection of George W. Bush. Such a hotly contested election is hardly new. We saw races just as close in 1960, 1968, and 1976. Had Ross Perot not run in 1992 — and perhaps even in 1996 — Bill Clinton (who didn't receive a 50 percent majority in either of his presidential races) may well have found himself in the same predicament as Gore did in Florida, 2000 — struggling to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote to George Bush Sr.
There are a number of issues in this contest on which reasonable people can differ. If one is out of work or without comprehensive health insurance, then the economy is rocky, to be measured not by historically low unemployment figures but by the number of actual jobs lost or gained. For others more fortunate, by any fair measure of housing, transportation, or consumer goods, the United States has achieved a standard of living well beyond even that of Europe.
One can argue that the post-bellum reconstruction of Iraq was unforeseeably messy and fouled-up. Or, one can argue that it's striking that after a mere three years the United States has liberated 50 million and implemented democratic reform in place of what were the two most fascistic governments in the world — all without another 9/11 mass murder.
Furthermore, our troubles with Europe can be seen as either provoking tried and tested friends or lancing a boil that was growing for years as a result of our different histories, the end of the Cold War, and the utopianism of the EU. We could all disagree further about education, illegal immigration, energy policy, taxation, and a host of other issues.
But what is not explicable in terms of rational disagreement is the Left's pathological hatred of George W. Bush. It transcends all contention over the issues, the Democratic hurt over the Florida elections, and even the animus once shown Bill Clinton by the activist Right. From where does this near-religious anger arise and what does it portend?
Let's start with the admission that much of the invective is irrational, fueled by emotion rather than reason. Thus the black leadership uses slurs such as "Taliban" and "Confederacy" against Bush, even though no other president has selected an African-American secretary of State and national-security adviser or pledged so many billions for AIDS relief in Africa. Liberals talk of social programs starved, but domestic spending under Bush increased at annual rates greater than during any Democratic administration in recent history. Just read howls of conservatives who worry about Bush's Great Society-like programs.
On foreign policy, Kerry rips Bush apart — but can't say whether he would have gone into Afghanistan and Iraq and is unable to specify how he would have gotten pacifistic Europeans on board. It is common to caricature Ashcroft as some Seven Days in May insurrectionist, bent on overthrowing the Constitution; but given the almost daily arrests of terror suspects in the United States, Kerry cannot tell us how exactly the Patriot Act has eroded our freedoms, much less why it is unnecessary in hunting down potential mass murderers.
What is it about Bush that elicits such hatred, that galvanizes even usually mindless rock stars, self-indulgent Hollywood actors, lethargic ex-presidents and vice presidents, and hypocritical Democratic senators to embrace such canonical fury? Why was the Left content to make fun of Ford's clumsiness, Reagan's forgetfulness, and George Sr.'s preppiness, but now calls George W. a Nazi and worse still? Why are there forthcoming novels and plays that discuss the assassination of George W. Bush? Why did we not get a Reaganwacked, a Reaganworld, a Lies of Ronald Reagan — a similar vast industry of paperback pulp equating Reagan with evil incarnate?
THE SOUTHERN ALBATROSS
Bush is a southerner, with a drawl — but not one who is either liberal or Democratic. We forget just how rare that is.
In fact, we have not seen a twanged president or vice president who was conservative in over a half-century. The previous rule? A Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Edwards could serve or run for executive national office only on a simple triangulating premise — they offered moderate and regional balance to Yankee liberalism and yet did not in the slightest scare the rest of the country with images of a redneck South.
Any unrepentant conservatives from the south — former Democrats like a John Connolly or a Phil Graham — who sought the presidency quickly faded. Mr. Bush is unusual — an adopted Texan who reflects the attitudes and beliefs of most Southerners, and who counts on real political affinity rather than mere regional loyalty for support south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Nixon-Lodge, Goldwater-Miller, Nixon-Agnew, Ford-Dole, Reagan-Bush, Bush-Quayle, Dole-Kemp, Bush-Cheney — not a Southern conservative Republican to be found on any ticket, a trend that surely keeps Karl Rove's wheels spinning each night.
For the Left, Mr. Bush is automatically under a cloud of suspicion; he is an unapologetic twanger who likes guns, barbeques, NASCAR, "the ranch," and pick-up trucks. It matters little that George Bush's record on classical civil-rights issues is impeccable, without a hint of the deplorable racism of a younger Senator Byrd, a Lyndon Johnson, or an Al Gore Sr. Every statement Bush drawls out about religion, affirmative action, or abortion is forever suspect — sort of what would happen should a Germanic-sounding Arnold Schwarzenegger quite rightly lecture Californians about the need for greater order, efficiency, cohesiveness, and the willpower to regain pride and purpose. Necessary, yes — but for some, given his accent, Wagnerian and spooky all the same.
BIBLE THUMPING
Similarly, Bush's Christianity seems evangelical and literal. It comes across as disturbing to liberals of the country who see religion as a mere social formality at best, useful for weddings and funerals, perhaps comforting at Christmas and Easter of course, but otherwise a potential threat to the full expression of lifestyle "choices."
American politicos like their candidates to be Episcopalian, Unitarian, or Congregationalist, perhaps even mainstream but quiet Methodists or Presbyterians. Baptists of the southern flavor, or anything not found in a New England township, reflect a real belief in the literalness of the Bible — primordial ideas that religion is not a social necessity but a fire-and-brimstone path to eternal salvation.
Jimmy Carter came closest to the edge with his talk of being born again. Yet his liberalism, his close friendship with Walter Mondale, and his talk of American pathology convinced the Left that he was just a southern version of a Daniel Berrigan or William Sloan Coffin — a little weird, perhaps, but useful all the same in drawing the powers of Christianity into the liberal crusade. In contrast, if Bush evokes the name of God one one-thousandth as often as did Abraham Lincoln or Reverend Jackson, he is dismissed as an unhinged zealot eager to incite a Hundred Years' War with the Muslims.
MR. MANICHEAN...
RENEGADE ARISTOCRAT...
