On November 2, a record number of Americans turned out to vote in the presidential election. President George W. Bush was reelected, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry lost, and Libertarian Michael Badnarik and independent Ralph Nader each got around 400,000 votes.
So what did the election mean?
How Big a Margin of Victory?
Republicans tout Bush’s 3.5 million popular vote margin as a mandate, and in some ways it was. The election marked the first time since 1988 a president was elected with more than 51 percent of the vote, and it has now been 40 years since a Democrat candidate for president reached that milestone, suggesting Democrats have indeed become the “permanent minority party” in the U.S.
On the other hand, Bush’s margin of victory as a percentage of votes cast was the smallest for a sitting president in the history of the U.S. Due to higher voter turnout, more people voted against Bush in 2004 than in the 2000 election, when he lost the popular vote.
And the biggest difference between 2000 and 2004 seems to be an unprecedented GOP get-out-the-vote effort on election day–they spent $125 million, three times what they spent in 2000, about the same as Democrats spent.
The tie-breaker, in my opinion, was Republican gains in the U.S. House and Senate–net gains of four seats in each house–and in the number of governors’ seats in the Republican Party’s column–from 28 to 29. Republicans apparently lost their slight edge, though, in the number of state legislators, going from 64 more seats than Democrats before the election to 12 fewer afterwards, out of a total of some 7,382 seats. Republicans retained control of 50 chambers, Democrats 47, and one chamber is tied. (Nebraska’s legislature is nonpartisan and unicameral.)
A Divided Nation?
The closeness of the race has led pundits to repeat ad nauseam the refrain of a “divided nation.” A million gallons of ink has been spilt claiming Bush and the Republicans have no mandate, that the nation is “deeply divided,” and that the onus is on Republicans to “begin the healing.”
Pardon me for not sharing the liberals’ grief. I do not recall similar displays of sympathy for the losing side after Carter’s victory with 50.1 percent of the vote in 1976, Clinton’s 43 percent win in 1992, or Clinton’s 49 percent win in 1996. I also do not recall the New York Times printing stories of voters running, weeping, from supermarkets when the vote totals were announced, as it did this year on November 3.
Had Kerry won by the same margin as Bush’s, there would be little talk of a divided nation today. Newspapers probably would be filled with stories describing how the nation was uniting behind President Kerry and all is well with the world. After all, only a few racists, bigots, and “ultra-right wingers” would still be fuming over the “stolen election,” and who cares about their feelings, right?
Loss of Civility?
In a recent column, my friend John Baden echoed claims that this year’s election was less civil and more divisive than those of the past–“eroded civility and confidence … mean and nasty election … the strident, vitriolic, permanent campaign and the rigid ideologues,” in his words. Some of the attacks on President Bush were indeed all these things, and they ran nonstop from the “stolen election” of 2000 to today, some weeks after the 2004 election.
I believe the more important point is that politics is never civil or polite. It can’t be, because it’s about taking or losing power that an ethical and free society would never give to any group or individual. People will do anything and say anything to take or keep that power.
This year, ruthless and often unethical tactics were more fully on display than in the past because liberal journalists indulged their bias to almost ridiculous extremes while Republicans, armed with new media outlets of their own such as Fox News, Web bloggers, and talk radio, were able to attack Kerry and defend their candidate just as loudly.
If you want to learn something about “mean and nasty” election tactics, talk to the many good and honest first-time and third-party candidates were harassed and defamed by politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and reporters. This year was no less civil for them than any previous year. Discourtesy and hard-ball tactics have always been there. The only difference is that this year, they appeared on the front page of the New York Times.
No Change on the War in Iraq
The election was not a referendum on the war in Iraq. Bush apparently won a large share of voters who were highly concerned about safety and “strong leadership,” but both candidates spoke brazenly about “killing terrorists” and promised a military victory in Iraq. Would a Kerry administration have waged the war in Iraq and on terror much differently than Bush II will do? I doubt it. Only the narrative would have changed. Kerry probably would have asked for no less than the $70 billion Bush wants to spend on Iraq in 2005.
(As a quick aside, I should mention that my October Heartlander essay titled “What’s Really at Stake on November 2?” was not meant to imply, as one person wrote, that “once we get our troops out of Iraq, terrorism will no longer be an issue.” Terrorism was a major threat before Iraq and will continue to be after U.S. troops are withdrawn.)
Now that the election is over, it would be nice if the conversation shifted to (a) an exit strategy from the Mideast (not just Iraq) that doesn’t leave things worse than before; (b) how to secure our borders against terrorists without turning the country into a military garrison; and (c) how to choose counter-terrorism measures that are effective but don’t threaten our civil liberties or bankrupt the country.
Red Is Stupid, Blue Is Smart?
Lying just beneath the surface of much of the liberal commentary on the election is the belief that smart people voted for Kerry and stupid people voted for Bush. Perhaps more than in any past election, liberals could not imagine anyone with an IQ higher than a guinea pig voting for the Republican nominee. The guy’s an idiot, they say. Didn’t voters watch the debates? Didn’t they see Fahrenheit 911? Don’t they read The New York Times?
Well, Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but butter knives don’t get to be president of the United States … or fighter pilots, for that matter. If being the son of a president were a free pass to high office, where are all the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter legacies?
No, when liberals say only stupid people could have voted for Bush, they really mean only stupid people vote Republican. You know, beer-drinking, NASCAR-loving, born-again, Confederate flag-waving rednecks who mysteriously oppose government programs that would benefit them, such as universal health care, higher taxes on the rich, and handgun bans.
Conservative commentators correctly denounce liberal Democrats for their elitism, but it goes deeper than that. People who think they are smart are drawn to activist government like moths to a candle. They see social and economic problems and envision governments solving those problems, if only they ran the government and were given sufficient power and resources. They identify opposition to their vision with ignorance of the problems needing to be addressed or a selfish refusal to share personal wealth with those in need.
Actually, people who don’t think of themselves as being particularly smart see social and economic problems quite clearly, often closer up and more personally than the largely urban and coastal elitists. They aren’t selfish individualists: Red county voters contribute more to private charities, as a percent of their incomes, than blue county voters. But they can’t envision government solving problems without creating even bigger problems such as dependency on public aid, long waiting lines for health care, a depressed national economy, and higher crime rates.
Call it a failure of imagination or, more likely, just plain common sense. Either way, it ends up predicting the same results as Nobel Prize-winning economists have for years, and those guys aren’t dummies.
Most people, smart or stupid, resent the implication that a small group of experts can do a better job spending the money they earned than they can. If you want to spend my money solving a problem, ask me for it, don’t take it from my paycheck without my permission. This is where liberals misjudge the character of Americans. Two-and-a-quarter centuries after the country’s founding, we’re still a nation of self-governors.
Where’s the Ideology?
This year’s focus on foreign policy only partly obscured the very dramatic differences in the domestic policy visions of the Republicans and Democrats. Bush was clearly the anti-tax, pro-life, and pro-business candidate, while Kerry was plainly for higher taxes, pro-choice on abortion, and anti-business. Kerry, according to even liberal vote-counters, really was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. Bush really did stake his presidency on lower taxes and opposing many of the liberal’s favorite causes.
Probably the biggest change in politics in my lifetime was the acquisition of “philosophical gyroscopes” by the two political parties, with Republicans moving right since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The 2004 election has made the distinction even clearer, with conservative Republicans replacing liberal and conservative Democrats in the U.S. Senate.
A cynic might say the massive federal debt (which now stands at about $7.4 trillion, excluding unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare) proves otherwise, but that kind of sweeping reasoning doesn’t survive closer inspection. Check out, if you can, the “Project Vote Smart” rankings of members of Congress at http://www.vote-smart.org. It reports 17 “key votes” and rankings by 17 liberal and conservative interest groups for every member of Congress. The correlation of votes, rankings, and party affiliations are extremely high: In other words, candidates who vote conservative, for example, are ranked that way by the interest groups and are nearly all Republicans, and vice versa. It’s dueling gyroscopes, captured in votes.
We used to say “there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties,” but that’s no longer true.
Voters are increasingly sorting themselves out, too. The percentage of voters calling themselves “moderates” fell from 50 percent in 2000 to 45 percent in 2004. Those opting for the “conservative” label rose from 29 percent to 33 percent, while “liberals” rose from 21 percent to 22 percent. Republicans are being smart by claiming the conservative brand (even if their actions don’t always live up to the label’s promise) and insisting that Democrats wear the liberal brand.
As a libertarian who prefers less government across the board, I’m not entirely pleased with this evolution. I want government out of the bedroom and out of my wallet. Neither major party, at least at the national level, is serious about limiting the size of government in either department, let alone both.
What Bush Should Do
“Mr. Bush would do well to focus now on pragmatism over ideology,” write the editors of The Economist, the British newsweekly that endorsed Kerry before the election. The president, they say, “will need all the friends he can get to tackle America’s fiscal problem.”
You would think, after all these years, that the British would understand American politics and the character of the American people better than that.
In 2004, voters chose ideology over pragmatism. They gave the president the majorities he needs to fix the deficit, reform the tax system, and save Social Security. With “friends” like Kerry, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, and other unrepentant leftists on the other side of the aisle, why should Bush invite them into the room to obstruct, demonize, and compromise?
I hope that in his second term, President Bush cuts the budget deficit not just in half, as he has pledged to do, but to zero in his final year in office. I hope he makes the estate, capital gains, and dividend tax cuts permanent and eliminates the alternative minimum tax. I hope he succeeds in giving young people the option of putting part of their Social Security taxes into individual retirement accounts. And I hope he puts two or three more judges just like Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Naive hopes? Yes, probably. But this year’s presidential election at least raises the possibility of them coming true. A Kerry victory would have put these and other hopes on hold for at least four years.
