From Gore to Bush
Blogs for Bush
Floating around the blogosphere the past day or so has been this little gem from ABC News' The Note:
Forget the fact that that we still can't find a single American who voted for Al Gore in 2000 who is planning to vote for George Bush in 2004. (If you are that elusive figure, e-mail us and tell us who you are and why: politicalunit@abcnews.com.)
Well, Jeff Harrel of The Shape of Days has stepped up to the plate to help The Note out...
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, stand back now and prepare to be amazed. I had no idea that I was such a rare specimen, but apparently you guys "still can't find a single American who voted for Al Gore in 2000 who is planning to vote for George Bush in 2004." Let me help you out with that.
I turned 18 in 1990. In 1992, I voted for then Governor Clinton. I voted for him again in 1996. In 2000, I voted for then Vice President Gore, despite being a resident of the great state of Texas. I wasn't thrilled with the outcome of the 2000 election, but once it was all said and done I threw my support behind our President and waited to see how he did.
He didn't get much of a breaking-in period.
After 9/11, the whole country seemed to wake up. It was as if we all were blinking away our long national slumber. The murmur went out across the land: "It's time to make the doughnuts." We knew what we had to do, and we did it. As one nation, with one will.
Then, gradually, little by little, my fellow Democrats began to go insane.
I started to notice it in the spring of 2002. We had delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban the previous winter—hand over the terrorists or suffer their fate—and when they refused to comply, we did what we had to do. In the spring of '02 we delivered the same ultimatum to the corrupt, tyrannical, megalomaniacal leader of Iraq—disavow your support of terrorism and call off your quest for weapons of mass destruction—and just like the Taliban he refused to comply. But from way, way, way out there to the left, a distant cry was heard: no. Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism, they said. Which struck me as odd because you had to have been living under a rock not to know about Saddam's support for Abu Nidal and other infamous terrorists. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, they said. Which made me wonder if my fellow Democrats considered the score settled after the fall of Kabul. It's just a pretense, they said. As if we needed a pretense to take out a dictator who had been telegraphing his defiance to the world for more than a decade.
I disagree with the Republican party on some key issues: school choice and capital punishment, for instance. But I can no longer throw in my lot with a party that venerates Michael Moore. I can no longer throw my lot in with a party that thinks the war on terrorism is just a metaphor, like Johnson's war on poverty or Reagan's war on drugs. I can no longer throw my lot in with a party that thinks that the insane ramblings of a Jim McDermott constitute rational public discourse, or that the breathless appeals to international mediators of an Eddie Bernice Johnson are anything other than a national embarrassment.
As late as mid-May, I was still tentatively planning to vote for Senator Kerry in November. His key platform planks seemed to be more or less identical to the President's, and a change of leadership at the top would do a lot to heal the schism that's divided our country. But then I started listening to what he was actually saying. I heard him pound the podium over new initiatives—energy independence, counter-proliferation—that the President had announced a year ago or more. I heard him flip-flop on the Iraq invasion. I heard him promise to RAISE my taxes. I heard him propose a trillion dollars in new spending with no plan at all to pay for it. And I never, ever heard him say that he considers our country's interests to be above the interests of France, Germany and Russia.
That's when I started listening to the Bush campaign. Measurable improvements in reading and math scores. A whole new kind of school accountability: schoolresults.org. Medical savings accounts. A tax plan that favors small-business owners. A reasoned and measured approach to the sticky ethical dilemma of stem cell research. It started to add up. It started to make sense.
So I'm voting to re-elect the President in November. Not only that, but I'm campaigning for him. I didn't have much extra money in my pocket this year, but I gave what I could to the President's campaign, because I don't want a party that is united by nothing but bitterness and bile to win the White House.
And you know what else? I know lots of folks who feel exactly the same way.
So enough with the "we can't find a single American" stuff, huh? 'Cause if that's how it is, then it seems to me that you folks haven't been looking very hard. |
