Why Dubya will win - he's the tortoise in this race and Gore is the loopy rabid hare.
Mark Steyn
National Post
September 14, 2000
Panic is a hard temptation to resist, especially when you're one of those spineless wussies who make up the Republican party's Washington establishment. Your man is staggering from one "gaffe" to another, embroiled in a thousand trivialities from Dick Cheney's stock options to the rectal characteristics of certain reporters to this week's burning topic: whether the single-frame, non-discernible-to-the-naked-eye flash of the word "RATS" during a Bush campaign ad was an attempt to subliminally influence the electorate by brainwashing them into thinking that your opponents are -- stand well back, children --"rats." Let me be the first to say that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman are not rats. The only rats in this game are those "senior Republicans" diving off the sinking ship and giving quotes to the media as they disembark.
But I've got news for the rodents: The ship isn't sinking. If you'll forgive me switching species in mid-metaphor, contrary to surface perceptions, Bush is the tortoise of this race, Gore is a rather loopy, rabid hare. He has spurts, one of which has just ended. Dubya, meanwhile, just plods on placidly: He never sacks anyone, he never retools his image, he never does anything very dramatic. Sometimes he tries out a new catchphrase: He was a reformer with results for a while, then he went back to being a uniter not a divider. During the spring, when poll after poll showed Bush with a small single-figure lead, the media consensus was that the race was "neck and neck." In the summer, when Dubya's lead went to double-digits, the press was forced to concede that he was, indeed, ahead. Now the polls really are neck and neck, and the new media consensus is that Dubya is a loser and Gore is streaking ahead.
But the real question is this: Why isn't Gore ahead? For the last month the Vice-President has done everything right. He's the standard-bearer for the party that supposedly brought us the booming economy, full employment, unprecedented prosperity and world peace. And he's running against a guy who, by common consent, has spent a month doing everything wrong and is, according to taste, a slacker (won't stump enough), a lightweight (scared of debates), a potty-mouth (insults reporters), an evil brainwashing madman bent on world domination (RATS, foiled again), or any combination thereof. Plus he's a lousy kisser. If Gore can't open up even a small, sustained, measurable five-point poll lead after the last four weeks, there's something pretty fundamentally weak about his candidacy.
I'm not saying the current polls are wrong. But they're not measuring anything that matters. The U.S. presidency is decided by 51 different winner-take-all constituencies, in which the electoral-college votes accorded to each state are determined not proportionately but by adding together their House representation plus their two Senators. Thus, smaller, harder-to-poll states are disproportionately represented, and even ostensibly similar neighbours have significantly different weights: Vermont has three electoral-college votes while New Hampshire has four, which means that, per capita, the individual Vermont voter has a bigger slice of the electoral-college pie than the individual New Hampshire voter. Or to put it another way: On November 7th, a presidential vote on the west bank of the Connecticut counts for more than a presidential vote on the east bank -- especially in a close race.
I don't believe it's possible to call a thousand registered or likely voters nationwide in any kind of pattern which accurately reflects the electoral college. The pollsters were mostly way out of whack in '96, and not much better in '98. As for state-by-state surveys, the New Hampshire primary has the most exhaustively polled electorate in the world, and guess what? Only two polls got within 10 points of the actual result on February 1st, one of The Boston Herald's (an eight-point error), the other by the state's Franklin Pierce College (nine points). The big boys performed abysmally: Reuters and CNN were out by 14 points, The Boston Globe by 16, CBS (true to form) was out by 26. OK, 10 points sounds close-ish, but it's the difference between the triumphant third Clinton term and the restoration of the Bush dynasty. In fairness, polls are generally correct about the broad trend, but right now the only broad trend is that there's no broad trend, except for the sluggish performance of an anointed successor who ought to be a shoo-in.
But, I hear you cry, what about the rule that the guy who's ahead on Labour Day always wins? Phooey. Here's my rule: Democrats have great difficulty getting elected president, except in extreme circumstances -- vote-buying (1960), assassination (1964), Watergate (1976) and strong showings by third-party candidates ('92 and '96). In the last 30 years, only one Democratic nominee has cracked 50%: In 1976, Jimmy Carter got just 50.6%, even with the help of Nixon's pardon and Ford's assertion that there were no Commies in Eastern Europe (ah, those were the days, gaffe-wise). In '96, Ross Perot was much diminished and Bob Dole was a dud, and yet even then Bill Clinton couldn't manage 50%. No president has ever been re-elected with a smaller share of fewer votes -- and this was pre-Monica. Though Clinton's routinely hailed as a popular, charismatic, irresistible, unbeatable campaigner and was way ahead in the polls at this point four years ago, fewer Americans (proportionately) have been willing to pull the lever for him than for any other president. Meanwhile, Democratic representation in Congress, the governors' mansions and state legislatures has dwindled continuously throughout his administration.
Granted, there are "new left" parties in power throughout the Western world, but Gore's running on a platform that's actually to the left of Jean Chrétien, Tony Blair, Germany's Gerhard Schroeder, New Zealand's Helen Clark, you name it. Now it may well be that we're on the brink of a seismic shift -- that, despite the remorseless decline of the Democratic party in the last eight years, the American electorate has suddenly decided that for the first time in history it's more left-wing than Canada. But, if Al Gore is really the beneficiary of such an unlikely scenario, how come -- aside from one screwy Newsweek poll -- he hasn't yet opened up any lead over Dubya?
So here's my prediction: Bush will survive the debates, in whatever form, and win on November 7th. Of the 538 electoral-college votes, he'll get at least 378, including Florida, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia, Bill Clinton's Arkansas and maybe even Gore's Tennessee. (Prod beneath the polls, and you'll find that rural Democrats are one part of Al's base he hasn't yet solidified.) Even in New England, Dubya will take Maine, New Hampshire and I wouldn't be surprised, given the turnout in the state's Republican primaries on Tuesday, if he didn't sneak in Vermont, too. Now a lot could happen between now and November, including various "October surprises" from Slick Willie. But I figure my prediction can withstand pretty much anything this side of a Third World War. So to those pathetic Republican rats running around like headless chickens high on media hogwash, I say: Cheer up -- and get back on board the non-sinking ship.
nationalpost.com |
