Posted on 09/30/2004 5:40:21 AM PDT by Better to Be Lucky Than Good
The Democrats have once again nominated for presdent a politically flawed candidate -- an East Coast liberal.
And although we're almost six weeks away from election day, Kerry is almost certain to lose. And when that happens a familiar pattern will ensue: his party will proclaim the loss "unexpected" and will seek to rewrite history to explain it.
You'd think the Democrats would understand the smart play would be to regroup and take a candid look at why their party has had so little success nationally winning only three times since 1968. You'd be wrong.
More likely they'll do what they usually do after a loss, dismiss their opponents' ideas and agenda while simultaneously feigning outrage over the campaign tactics that defeated them. And like a battered wife enabling her abusive husband their "Amen corner" in the establishment media will join them in their condemnations.
If this myth-making were isolated it wouldn't be noteworthy. However, the revisionism often is the rallying cry used to stymie and stall enactment of the GOP agenda.
It's a familiar pattern that has happened after every successful Republican victory since 1980. Apparently, the axiom that "to the victor go the spoils" does not cover victory in the democratic process. Mere electoral success -- even by sizeable margins -- does not come with it the right to define the terms or bases for this success.
Barely more than a week after George W. Bush's inauguration in 2000, political commentator and erstwhile Republican historian Kevin Phillips proffered his polemic "His Fraudulency the second? The illegitimacy of George W. Bush." Phillips' thesis was that "the dubious elements of Bush's victory are so numerous that questions regarding his legitimacy are appropriate -- even urgent."
A swarm of critics joined in over the next six months challenging the Bush administration and its policies at every turn claiming they lacked popular support and shouldn't advance due to "extensive election irregularities."
Were it not for Sept. 11, it's likely that this challenge may very well have succeeded in not only stymieing President Bush's first-term agenda but also his record for posterity.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan upset Jimmy Carter to win the White House with an astonishing 489 Electoral College blowout. So extensive that the U.S. Senate -- heretofore not thought to be even in jeopardy -- shifted from Democrat to Republican control.
Wasn't this election a decisive rejection of Carter's failed policies? That would be too simplistic. As the Los Angeles Times noted in its obituary of Ronald Reagan, he had no real campaign philosophy, he had merely "preached optimism. If he were elected, America would stand tall again, he said, and competence would return." But instead "his term also saw a busted budget and record deficits, which made America a net importer and tripled the national debt."
Along with a repeat of the ephemeral optimism/"Great Communicator" depiction of Ronald Reagan, The New York Times' obituary manages even to mention the long-discredited conspiracy claim that the Reagan campaign negotiated to delay the release of the hostages until after the election.
As it happens, the sleights and mischaracterizations of Reagan's first election success were only exceeded by those that followed his successful re-election. After winning an election by the largest margin in U.S. history, critics claimed Reagan was the Teflon candidate who could say or do no wrong but whose record up that point was essentially to cut social programs and create international instability through reckless acts of militarism.
This version dismisses the idea that the voters themselves rejected out of hand Walter Mondale's promise to bring back the New Deal policies of Carter, Johnson and FDR -- paid for by higher taxes. Nor could the unprecedented economic growth that people could see in their pocketbooks have had any effect; no, it had to be the smoke and mirrors campaign of a Hollywood actor.
Of the first President George Bush, The Nation reports as fact that Republicans "used the racist 'Willie Horton' ads and 'card-carrying member of the ACLU' issue to defenestrate Michael Dukakis, a decent and capable governor."
The New Republic weighed in with their assertion that "the Bush's campaign consisted of a campaign commercial showing Dukakis riding sheepishly in a tank, (that) helped to seal this image of Dukakis as a weak liberal -- insufficiently tough on crime, soft on the military, unpatriotic."
In these critics view, Dukakis' 7-point margin loss (which made George Bush the first incumbent vice-president to win the White House since Martin Van Buren did it in 1836) occurred not because Dukakis' views on taxes, crime, and defense were rejected by the American people but merely the result of divisive campaign tactics.
As John F. Kerry's soulless campaign wraps up it is critical that this pattern not be allowed to continue. Before a consensus develops that Bush and the Swift boat veterans illegally or unethically conspired to steal this election from Kerry -- an election that pollster John Zogby claimed was Kerry's to lose -- take a look at what contemporaries are saying.
The LA Times' Jonathan Chait observed that "the main thing people will remember about his campaign is how utterly bizarre it was that a major party nomination could have been captured by a man so staggeringly devoid of political talent."
US News and World Reports' Gloria Borger reports, "Contrary to popular opinion, John Kerry's problems are not all about his lack of response to the anti-Kerry Swifties in August. The real problem is deeper: John Kerry is not making the case for himself to voters who don't like Bush but haven't jumped yet ... In general elections voters look for real reasons to fire incumbents."
But wait! There's more. Liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asks, "Who is John Kerry? He doesn't seem to want to let on. More than anything else, he presents himself as someone who fought in Vietnam. But that was more than 30 years ago. Who is he now?"
Even anti-Bush blogger Andrew Sullivan notes, "Kerry's campaign hawkishness on Iraq is in stark contrast to his long record of dovishness. He made his name opposing the Vietnam war; he opposed every Reagan intervention in the 1980s and was a stern foe of the contras in Nicaragua; he was in favor of the nuclear freeze; he opposed the first Gulf war; he voted to cut intelligence funding and many weapons systems over the years. And he tried to overcome this impression not by telling people why 9/11 had changed his perspective, but by emphasizing his own military service in Vietnam."
For Democrats, successfully explaining away this next national election loss as an example of style overwhelming substance will truly be what former Majority Leader Dick Armey calls the triumph of hope over reason. When even liberal supporters say that you've got no message, you don't connect with voters, and your agenda doesn't connect with the electorate it's very possible you're incoherent and don't have a message.
Rather than blaming your Republican opponent for distortions, divisions and distractions during the campaign, maybe, just maybe you could remember that when you're an East Coast liberal with a lifetime record of supporting defeatist military policies abroad and counter-cultural causes at home you can't win a national election in the United States.
Horace Cooper writes a regular political analysis column for UPI and GOPUSA.com
But don't forget about the DemocRats attempts at massive vote fraud! Keep your eyes open...
read later
Those three elections were from GA and AR (carpet-bagging not withstanding). Kerry is the classic Democratic ....LOSER.
My favorite line:
And like a battered wife enabling her abusive husband, their "Amen corner" in the establishment media will join them in their condemnations
The democrats are in trouble and they have been for the last 25 years. They keep using the same playbook from 40 years ago and it doesn't work anymore. We are smarter than they think we are and that is their real problem.
The main problem for Dems is that their die-hard base is so leftist that anyone capable of winning the primary is totally unacceptable to the nation as a whole.
A good example is the 2002 election. After taking a drubbing in the election and loosing the U.S. Senate unexpectedly, the response was 'We just didn't get our message out'.
I don't think that excuse will fly this next time.
A good example is the 2002 election. After taking a drubbing in the election and loosing the U.S. Senate unexpectedly, the response was 'We just didn't get our message out'.
I don't think that excuse will fly this next time.
Said differently, the victory of an incumbent VP depends greatly on the popularity of the president he served under. In that sense the election of a sitting VP is analogous to election of the sitting president to a third term - an honor accorded only to Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan (and, of course, FDR literally ran for and won a third term).Of course John Adams was elected as a sitting VP too but - before the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment - he was not the running mate of George Washington when elected to the vice presidency.
I'm all for an apologetic amen corner. If they want to lie to themselves, all the better. It keeps them (the left) from finding a real solution and gets them that much closer to irrelevancy.
I don't know if Dick Armey was aware of Johnson's comment, but either formulation works for what the Democrats want the American public to do.
Democracy is the road to socialism. Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. V.I. Lenin
The U.S. is and SHOULD BE a Constitutional Republic..
What were the Democratic bigwigs thinking when they decided that this man best represented the values and philosophy of their party?
Grover Cleveland never served in the U.S. Senate. When he was elected President he was Governor of New York (which he carried in the election by only a thousand votes or so...if it had not been for the "rum, Romanism, and rebellion" remark by one of Blaine's supporters, Cleveland probably would have lost NY and the election).
Truman didn't lose in 1952; he didn't even run. General Eisenhower, a hero of the previous war, creamed Truman partisan Adalai Stevenson (Governor of Illinois).
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