Posted on 09/26/2004 9:13:34 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
THE early results from the US election are in and I can report that it appears to be a landslide for John Kerry. Around the world, from New York eastwards, the Massachusetts senator is racking up massive majorities against the incumbent, George W. Bush.
A poll this month by the University of Maryland and GlobeScan gave Kerry a 59-point lead over Bush in Germany. In France, just 5 per cent of respondents supported the President. In Britain, Bush did little better with 16 per cent.
The only winning territories for the Republican seem to be The Philippines, Poland and Nigeria, although even there it is close. He still has an outside chance in India, apparently, and is a little way behind in China. But, even if we put those two demographic behemoths in the swing-state camp it would seem Bush has already lost the election for leader of the world.
Sadly for the French, the Germans and the rest, they don't pick the US president. If they did, I suppose, we would never have had Ronald Reagan; instead we would have had 16 years of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.
But the world's incomprehension is now palpable. Not only is Kerry not beating Bush by a margin as wide as the Atlantic and Pacific, he appears to be steadily losing.
An average of six national opinion polls taken since September 10 gives Bush a five-point advantage over his challenger, the most durable lead any candidate has had since the beginning of the year.
All the more bewildering for the rest of the world, and for Europeans in particular, is that Bush's gains seem to be solidifying even as the war in Iraq turns uglier. Car bombings, kidnappings, beheadings – and all the time Bush's appeal to Americans edges up. How can this be?
There are a couple of comforting explanations the world likes to reach for in these circumstances. The first is that Americans are stupid. There is not much one can say to this old prejudice except that, for a stupid people, the Americans have done some clever things over the years.
Little ones such as devising the separation of powers and defeating communism and Nazism. Big ones such as becoming the most successful economy in the history of the planet.
A second, only slightly less implausible, explanation is that it is all the fault of complaisant, patriotic US media too intimidated or too fawning to challenge the hated Bush. If only the Americans had the benefits of the clear-eyed perspicacity and guts of, say, the famously independent-minded French, German or Russian press, they would not be bamboozled into supporting the President.
This argument from false consciousness takes only a moment to measure against the objective facts: whatever else Dan Rather and CBS were doing this month when they used forged documents to accuse Bush of lying about his days in the National Guard it was not offering him fealty.
I think I can provide help for the nonplussed. There are at least two good reasons why Bush now enjoys a small but potentially decisive advantage over his opponent.
First, Americans are not eager to vote for a candidate of the studied fickleness of Kerry. Trying to figure out where he stands – not just on any issue, but the biggest issue of all, the Iraq war – is like trying to mould water.
He voted for the war but against the money to prosecute it. He said the US was safer without Saddam Hussein in power, but said the US was less safe as a result of the war. He said that even if he had known in 2002 there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq he would still have voted to use force, and this week he said that no one could possibly think, given what we now know, that it was right to have gone to war in Iraq.
No wonder the rest of the world wants this man as US president. There would be a vacancy for global leadership if he were to win.
A Kerry victory would not change that much in terms of US policy anyway. I have no doubt the Democrat is at heart a peacenik in the European mould, but his campaign, mindful of the views of most Americans, has done its best to hide that – hence the circumlocutions.
But, more important, far from being dumb or credulous, Americans see all too clearly what is at stake in Iraq. They understand that the war there is a necessary evil to remove a greater one.
They remember what Saddam's regime was really like; not the slightly distasteful but really rather stable and reliable one of popular European myth, but the terrorism-supporting, lawless thuggery whose ambitions were to be written in the blood of Americans, British, Israelis and anyone who co-operated with them.
And they see, even more clearly than before, the kind of people we are now fighting in Iraq. When police recruits are blown up and helpless hostages beheaded, Americans understand that the right response is not to blame their President but to take the war to the evil cowards who did it.
"Nah, make the Australian states and territorities into our 51st through 57th states..."
What we need to do upon disbanding NATO, quitting the UN, and throwing them out of the country, is to form a new alliance. The new alliance will be of freedom loving countries that are also coincidentally English speaking. Let me emphasize that Anglo ethnicity and the English language are not the point: it's the heritage of freedom guaranteed by a constitution and the willingness to fight for it that is important. The USA, Britain, Australia are charter members. And when they have come to their senses, the Canadians and New Zealanders. Later on, any nation that has risen and will adhere to our democratic ideals...likely candidates being Israel, South Africa and India. The idea is not to impose some kind of US backed empire, but to form an alliance that will keep the world safe and free *without* Kofi and the French.
Sorry to interrupt everybody's appreciation of Australia, but the author, Gerard Baker, is British, not Australian. He usually writes for the usually left-of-center Financial Times, and sometimes appears on The McLaughlin Group.
"No wonder the rest of the world wants this man as US president. There would be a vacancy for global leadership if he were to win."
EXACTLY, the rest of the world wants a weakend USA. Sure they will cry when 9/11 happens again, but they take to the streets in protest when we attpempt to stop the next 9/11.
I have heard that the ROK in Vietnam was absolutely ruthless!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.