Journalists smell a Bush victory
David Frum
National Post
You can still find journalists willing to speculate that Al Gore might yet win the presidency, but even the most intrepid of them is taking the precaution of booking his Election Night hotel room in Austin. The Four Seasons? Full. The Hyatt? Full. The Capitol Marriott? Full too. Radisson, Renaissance, Day's Inn, Doubletree, Holiday Inn? Full, full, full, full, full. There are plenty of rooms available in Nashville, though.
The press is voting with its feet, or rather with its seat. Seats on flights from Washington to Nashville are going begging: There's room on the 6:45 a.m. flight, on the 8:20, on the 9, on the 10, etc., etc., at bargain prices of as little as US$538. But a journalist who hasn't yet purchased his ticket to Austin had best prepare for an uncomfortable session with his expense-account manager: The airlines are charging more than US$1,600 for their last precious seats.
No journalist wants to report a concession speech. He may hope (he almost certainly does hope) that the Democrats will win. But he can read the polls, he can feel the mood of the crowds and he's not going to let party loyalty trap him in a ballroom full of despondent liberals while the camera cuts brutally away to the cheering throngs surrounding the president-elect. The cameras follow the winner. The journalists covet a place in front of the cameras. And so, however they cast their ballot, their travel itineraries commit them to Bush.
But it's not just the journalists who smell a Bush victory. So does the Gore-Lieberman election team. There's a fevered hysteria that grips the final hours of a doomed campaign, a frantic determination to go everywhere, say everything, make every last possible mistake. On Thursday night, the campaign dropped down in Rochester Hills, Mich., a town just west of fabled Macomb County, home of the blue-collar voters who helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan because they no longer trusted the party of FDR and Hubert Humphrey to champion their values. So how did Gore reassure them? By sending his wife and daughters to a rally headlined by singer Melissa Etheridge -- who is now best known as the lesbian who had her girlfriend artificially inseminated by legendary protest-singer and drug abuser David Crosby. Now that's the way to prove one understands working-class America!
Meanwhile, Gore himself was dropping into Chicago, home to one of the very worst public-school systems in the United States, to pledge to fight to the utmost against the school-choice plans that might rescue Chicago's kids. Gore's days begin at five in the morning on the East Coast, end at midnight on the West Coast, and he rockets all day long from city to city, exhausting himself so everyone can hear his voice, cheerfully ignoring the evidence that the more the voters hear him, the less they like him.
The floundering of Gore's campaign does, however, relieve Democrats of a nightmare scenario that worried some of the cannier of them a couple of weeks ago. Back then, the polls were pointing to a narrow Bush presidential win combined with a Democratic recapture of the House of Representatives. From the point of view of the Democratic party, this would have been an absolutely catastrophic result. While the Democratic caucus in the Senate is dominated by rational and presentable politicians, the Democratic caucus in the House is led by wild-eyed fanatics who have learned nothing since they were plunged into cryogenic suspension back in 1974. If the Democrats took the House, the Judiciary Committee would be chaired by John Conyers, whose highest priority is taxing white Americans to pay blacks reparations for slavery. The most powerful committee in the House, Ways and Means, would come under the gavel of Charlie Rangel, the free-spending, high-taxing representative of Harlem. Bill Clinton's greatest accomplishment was to re-establish the Democrats as a credible party of government. It would take Charlie Rangel only one session of Congress to blight that accomplishment for a generation.
Fortunately for the longer-term prospects of the Democratic party, Al Gore's decline has pulled the congressional Democrats over the cliff-edge with him. Gore's malperformance is threatening to depress Democratic turnout and doom candidates all the way down the ticket. The GOP will maintain their present 54-46 lead in the Senate, and will probably expand that margin by at least a net gain of one, with pickups in Nevada, probably Virginia, and maybe also New Jersey. Republicans also look likely to enlarge their present 222-209 majority in the House of Representatives by at least four seats, quite possibly by as many as 10.
If the Democrats lose, they will of course make Gore their scapegoat. But it wasn't Gore who stained the Democrats as the party of sleaze ethics in a year when voters declared ethics and morality their top concern. Nor did many Democrats protest when Gore decided to run a 1948-style, anti-corporate campaign in a decade in which three times as many Americans own stock as belong to unions. This election was decided not by one man's awkward demeanour but by his party's tainted morals and obsolete statist policies. Will the Democrats figure it out? Let's hope not. The more assiduously Democrats blame Gore, the more certain it is that Austin's hotelkeepers can look forward to another sell-out season in November, 2004.
nationalpost.com |
