Who's to Blame? You Are

Who's to Blame? You Are
Thursday, November 04, 2004
By John Gibson

You might have seen a sampling of the worst of European headlines reacting to the Bush victory.

"Four More Years" became an indictment for the United Kingdom's The Independent.

And the Daily Mirror in London — so anti-war that it would chew its own leg off before admitting it was good that Saddam was gone — asked how 59 million Americans could "be so dumb?"

The Daily Mirror also called Bush the "yellow rogue of Texas," and a "gibbon" — which is a monkey, as for as insults go.

The Guardian ran a headline, "Great Vote, Grisly Result."

Great Vote, Grisly Result
A Moving Demonstration of Democracy Brings the Prospect of a More Divided World
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday November 4, 2004
The Guardian

Never in the course of human history has such an inspiring election produced such a depressing result. "It's South Africa!" was my first thought, when I saw the endless queues of voters lining up across the country first thing in the morning, as they did in South Africa's first democratic election.

In one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Washington, just 15 minutes' drive from the White House yet reminding me strongly of Soweto, dreadlocked T'Chaka Sapp stood in front of the Ketcham Elementary School polling station accosting voters: "How're you doin', brother? ANC - I'm first on the list!"

Here ANC is short for Advisory Neighbourhood Commissioner, not African National Congress, but his adopted first name is, he told me, of Zulu origin. And all down Good Hope Road there was a furious hope of throwing out a hated regime.

"Vote or Die" proclaimed the T-shirt promoted by hip-hop's Sean "P Diddy" Combs and worn outside another polling station by 14-year-old Sareena Brown. What did it mean? I asked. "If you vote Bush, he's going to get us killed." And she means it literally, because it's the brothers of these poor black kids who are signed up in the recruiting station down the road to fight in Iraq.

"There were no weapons of mass destruction," said T'Chaka Sapp, "and it's our kids who are dying." And everyone here feels they are paying the price of Bush's policies in lost jobs and a faltering economy.

Everywhere I went "east of the river" - the Anacostia river, that is - in this impoverished, crime-ridden urban sprawl, originally settled by freed slaves, where I saw no other white face for hours on end, I heard the same energising story. Even before the polling stations opened, the voters were standing in line. Already by noon, the automatic ballot counting machines were showing record numbers on their digital counters. I met young people recently out of prison who would never have dreamed of voting, but were mobilised by P Diddy and some vague sense that the fate of the world would depend on it. Which, arguably, it does.

However, it was not just what another local activist called "the forgotten people" across the Benning road bridge who rocked the vote. Everywhere across the country, from sea to shining sea, they turned out in unprecendented numbers. For all the corrupting role of big money, the meddling by lawyers and the distorting effects of biased media, this was an overwhelming, heartlifting expression of the popular will. Here was one of those elemental moments, as in South Africa, as in Poland in 1989, as in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, when the great, tempestuous river of democracy breaks through all the barriers erected in its way. Yet with what a horrible result! I spent much of November 2 - a beautiful Indian summer's day in Washington - in the sunny conviction that the high turnout, including many new voters, was good news for Kerry. Why turn out for the first time unless you wanted a change? Many Democrats and, I gather, many back home in Europe shared this conviction. We were all wrong. For people were just as passionate on the other side. A decisive majority of American voters - a counted 58.5 million to about 55 million as this article goes to press - backed Bush rather than Kerry.

In the next few days, we'll learn more from the pollsters about exactly why. But here are two reasons that I learned east of the river from Mrs Ida Boyd, a spry grandmother ("I've been black for 84 years") going in to vote at the Benning library polling station. She was voting, she told my shocked companion, for Bush. "At least with this man you know he's a nut!" The others pretend they're not. She added: "I love Clinton. He looks so sexy " - and she swung her 84-year old hips with amazing grace. "But I wouldn't vote for him." His morals, you see.

So, in spite of everything, even in spite of his being "a nut", people felt they knew where they stood with the folksy Bush, which they didn't with "flip-flop" Kerry. And they never warmed to Kerry, as they did to Clinton. "The lesser of the two evils - your mama told you that!" I heard ANC candidate Anthony Rivera shout to a clutch of young voters in another precinct. That summed up exactly the spirit in which so many voted for the lofty Boston brahmin.

Second, there was the gut reaction of so many American voters, like Ida Blair, to put moral, cultural and lifestyle choices before anything else, including their own economic self-interest. Family values. No gay marriage or abortion. Gun ownership. God, motherhood and apple pie. I just heard on the television that married women voted overwhelmingly for Bush, single women for Kerry.

Many Europeans will conclude from this result that George Bush is the true face of America. That would be a huge mistake. In fact, this election has shown that America is more divided than ever over essentials of politics and faith. It's one country, but two nations. On the map, it's the blue states of the west and north-east coasts against the red (meaning, confusingly to a European eye, conservative) states of the centre and south. In real life, it's at least 50 million individual American voters who have values and attitudes often very similar to ours, and just slightly more Americans who have different, or, at the evangelical edge, alien ones.

Bush can see he must try to reunite this divided nation, as he promised already at his first inauguration in 2000. Perhaps, like Margaret Thatcher after her election in 1979, we'll hear him quoting St Francis of Assisi: "Where there is discord, let me bring harmony ..." But it will be as hard for him as it was for her. It's not easy for the problem to be the solution.

He may also hold out a small olive branch to alienated Europeans. Back in the imperial leafiness of central Washington, that's exactly what senior officials in the Bush administration tell me he will offer early next year. If he does, there'll be a great temptation to refuse it, particularly if the olive branch is small and strangely equipped with thorns.

The potential sources of further transatlantic discord, from Iraq to Iran to China, are legion. Realistically, the chances of a divided America causing more divisions in the west and the world are much higher now than they looked, briefly, in the hopeful sunlight of Tuesday morning.

Yet in our own enlightened self-interest, and that of the world, we should - though the glass of wine politely raised at a diplomatic reception will taste of bitterest bile - try to respond in kind. This is not just for ourselves, and our own vital interests. It's also a matter of keeping faith with the other America: the half, or very nearly half, who think like us. And keeping faith, too, with Sareena Brown and the other "forgotten people" you meet across the river, in the American capital's own version of Soweto. They, even more than we, need and deserve a better president - and in four years' time, I believe they'll get one. (www.freeworldweb.net)

The sober and restrained Financial Times headlined one column, "Sentenced to Four More Years."

Sentenced to Four More Years
Quentin Peel / London November 06, 2004

With some obvious exceptions, other nations feel that with Bush as US president the world is a more dangerous place.

George W Bush’s victory over John Kerry is not the result the world wanted. The Democratic challenger was much the most popular US presidential candidate in nearly every country bar the US. But foreigners do not have votes. For a majority of American voters, the incumbent president was the man who made them feel safer in a world threatened by global terrorism after the events of September 11 2001.

With some obvious exceptions, notably Israel and Russia, most other nations feel the opposite: that with Bush as US president, the world is a more dangerous place. In Europe and Asia, Africa and Latin America, they believe the US-led war in Iraq has further destabilised the volatile Middle East. They see their economies threatened by the resulting rise in energy prices. They fear that the United Nations, overwhelmingly trusted as the best available institution for peacekeeping and conflict-resolution, has been undermined by America’s unilateralism. They mistrust the US inclination to pre-emptive military action.

Such views were apparently not shared by a majority of US voters when they went to the polls on Tuesday, although the country remains deeply divided. Bush and his team will see that as a vindication of their muscular prosecution of the so-called “war on terror”, lumping it together with the invasion of Iraq. The president’s absolute self-belief, and his dedication to the fight of “good” against “evil”, motivated a solid constituency of conservatives and religious evangelists in his support.

Bush’s victory presents a great dilemma for the outside world, including many of America’s traditional allies. The Bush administration’s ideological unilateralism has split Europe and widened the transatlantic divide. It was not just the ill-judged invasion of Iraq but also the underlying conviction that “coalitions of the willing” were to be preferred to the Nato alliance. Bush and his neo-conservative advisers seem hell-bent on reworking the international order that has kept the peace more or less successfully since the second world war.

Many of the European nations that have contributed to the “coalition forces” in Iraq have done so because they feel they must stick close to the superpower come what may, and not out of conviction that its policies are right. Other friendly countries, such as Turkey and India, were appalled at the invasion. “It is very sad. They wanted an international coalition against Iraq, and they ended up by getting virtually an international alliance against America,” says Jaswant Singh, India’s former foreign minister. “I do hope they have learnt an extremely costly but very necessary lesson.”

There was no sign of that from Mr Bush on the campaign trail. Yet the danger of a descent into chaos in Iraq will greatly raise the pressure for dissenters, such as France and Germany, to get involved. Both have repeatedly rejected the idea of sending soldiers there but neither wants to see a failed state emerge. Whatever they may think in Washington, neither Paris nor Berlin wants to see the US humiliated. They need to work out a new modus vivendi.

Iran follows hard on Iraq’s heels as a potential source of friction between Bush and his allies. The European Union (including members of the Iraqi coalition, such as the UK and Italy), Russia and India all believe that a policy of carrot and stick is needed to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. They recognise that the country has genuine security concerns in a region where both Israel and Pakistan already have nuclear weapons, while neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan are profoundly unstable. They fear that a powerful lobby of hawks in Washington might persuade the re-elected president to launch missile strikes against presumed nuclear facilities in Iran, ending any hopes of peaceful reconciliation.

There are hopes, not least in London, that a Bush-2 administration will be altogether more heedful of international concerns, just as the second term of Ronald Reagan produced a more sensitive foreign policy. Yet the opposite could well be true. Bush’s electoral success was gained on an unashamedly hawkish policy platform. Colin Powell, his most moderate adviser, seems certain to quit as secretary of state at the end of the year. His successor is unlikely to be so sensitive to international alarm.

The more positive view is that two perceptions may finally percolate through to the White House. One is that dividing America into fiercely partisan camps may help re-election but it will not help in the history books. The other is that Iraq will never be stabilised without a far broader coalition, to give any future regime the legitimacy US occupation forces so clearly fail to provide.

A triumphant Bush may not be inclined to hear such messages. But there is another view gaining credence in an increasingly despairing international community: that only after another four years of muddle and mistakes by an ideologically driven administration will enough people realise that even the sole superpower cannot remain deaf to its allies forever. Only then will the lesson be learnt. It may be a very expensive price to pay.

In fact, the Financial Times' Amity Shlaes, an American writing from New York, informed her readers in the U.K. and Europe that Bush's victory undermined a common notion that Euros hold about the U.S.: "the American right is essentially marginal and contemptible."

The Rise of a More Conservative America
By Amity Shlaes
Published: November 4 2004 02:00 | Last updated: November 4 2004 02:00

The outcome of the US election may look similar to that of 2000. But in reality, 2004 is fundamentally different.

The lessons of 2000 involved process - ballots, campaign finance, judicial rulings. The lessons of the 2004 election involve policy - or, to put it more precisely, the unpredicted victory of Republican and conservative policy. This victory has undermined some of the assumptions about the country that dominated election year, including the idea that the American right is essentially marginal and contemptible. And it is a victory that has been won on three fronts - foreign policy, social policy and economics.

Start with the breadth of the result. Mr Bush collected millions more votes than his opponent. He won more votes even than Ronald Reagan, until now the biggest vote-getter in presidential history. The Grand Old Party locked in its control of the House of Representatives, picking up seats in the south as old Democrats retired. Republicans also gained crucial seats in the Senate, defenestrating Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader. Those Democrats who did win office often did so with relatively conservative messages. And both Democratic and Republican voters backed numerous Republican or conservative ballot initiatives.

On foreign policy, the result tells us that Americans, like Europeans, are concerned about the world and America's actions in it. But that concern does not translate into the sort of large-scale doubt about Mr Bush's leadership that observers had predicted. It is obvious but still must be said: voters would not have turned out in record numbers for Mr Bush if they had thought his efforts to foster democracy in the Middle East were insane. And they would not have voted for him if they had thought he was the principal source of global instability. In the weekend before the election, American television aired two taped threats from al-Qaeda, one delivered by Osama bin Laden himself. The general expectation was that citizens might react as the Spaniards did to the terrorist attacks just before their election - by heading left. But, as in last month's Australian election, there was no backlash (Tony Blair, who is considering the timing of a British election, might take note). Instead, voters rallied around Mr Bush.

What about social policy? Many observers had suggested over the course of the year that conservative social values were not merely wrong but were also - perhaps fatally - passé or limited to the Christian right. Recently the New York Times published an 8,000-word article built around the thesis that the gay family had come of age and that the country was ready to formalise acceptance of gay families through legal structures.

On Tuesday, however, the electorate rejected that notion, voting, in all the states that took up the question of gay marriage, to ban or outlaw it. The states concerned were not all rural backwaters - one was oh-so-middle-of-the-road Ohio. This outcome leaves those who had assumed that a national shift to the left was taking place looking "coastal" and isolated themselves.

On race, conservatives and their ideas did well. Take Barack Obama, the Democrats' candidate for the Illinois Senate seat. Mr Obama, who is black, trounced his opponent not with the traditional Democratic line on race (colour and ethnicity matter a lot) but with a centrist or even Republican message: America must be "one nation", colour blind.

Finally, there is economic policy. Throughout the campaign, economic woes were emphasised: the pressures of globalisation, the uncertainty of a shift from an industrial to a service economy, and the attendant job losses. These are bitter problems. Still, by supporting Mr Bush, voters acknowledged that he had got many fundamentals right. After all, "four more years" sounds a good idea if it means an unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent and annual growth of 3.7 per cent.

More intriguingly, voters made clear their position on how such results were achieved. Republican culture has a side that abhors government debt. But Republicans did not slay Mr Bush for his failure to veto big spending projects. Nor did they shy away from him because he talked of reforming Social Security, America's pension system. And they endorsed his focus on making the economy relatively competitive by cutting taxes and taking other supply-side steps. In North Carolina, home state of John Edwards, the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate, voters handed a Senate seat to Richard Burr, a tax-hating Republican who defeated Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton's thoughtful and much-admired former chief of staff. Commentators repeatedly remarked on their surprise that Louisiana had voted in David Vitter, its first Republican senator since the civil war. But what is genuinely notable about Mr Vitter's victory is that he is likely to strengthen the southern tradition of tax cutting.

Before they voted for Mr Bush on these issues, many Americans had already voted with their feet. In the 1990s and since then, the population of the US has migrated to low tax, small government, socially conservative states. Because their populations are growing, red states are getting more electoral college votes. All this meant that Mr Bush could win the same states in 2004 as he did in 2000, yet collect more electoral college votes.

This is not to say that the US will not shift left again. The point is that the general surprise at the extent of Republican success is important: the America that decided this election is one many of us overlooked - and one worth getting to know better. amity.shlaes@ft.com

Contemptible? Ms. Shlaes is right: That is how they think about the "red state" people over there: So wrong they are contemptible.

Consequently the horror of the Kerry loss is simply devastating. Here these nice Brits and Euros have been earnestly lecturing Americans and the Americans refused to listen.

Don't they see their president is a dope?

Don't they see he is a war-mongering thug who has to go?

Don't they see how he stubbornly and stupidly won't go along with very good ideas hatched by the Euros, like the global warming treaty?

It's one thing to have to endure Bush, but 60 million other Americans just like him? It's just too much.

My friend Peter Roff at United Press International sent out a little story Thursday about the county in Ohio that The Guardian newspaper targeted with earnest letters from Brits explaining to poor, thick Americans in a backwater like Ohio why Bush should be sent to Crawford.

Guess what? That Ohio county went for Bush.

You know what this means? The Brits and Euros are through blaming Bush. Now, it's your fault! You re-elected him, stupid.

That summer vacation in Orlando is looking better, isn't it?

That's My Word.