ANDREW SULLIVAN: Bush wins because people know what he stands for

Maybe now they’ll take him seriously. For the last 2½ years American Democrats and many Europeans have dismissed George W Bush.

When he wasn’t a cowboy, he was a fratboy. When he wasn’t a moron, he was unable to construct a simple sentence. When he wasn’t promoted beyond his abilities, he was a tool of corporate interests. When he wasn’t an unelected president, he was a cipher for the powerful people around him. On and on it went, and Bush didn’t do much to counter it. Why should he?

The president knew it helped him that his opponents in the media and Congress underestimated him.

Every now and again the truth slipped out, as when Tony Blair commented earlier this year that the portrait of Bush in the British press was a parody of the smart, calm, shrewd operator who had won the prime minister’s confidence.

So perhaps now, after a stunning electoral victory and an equally decisive United Nations resolution to disarm or depose Saddam the critics will finally remove their blinkers and take another look.

Two years ago Bush should have been buried by an incumbent Democrat vice-president after eight years of unparalleled prosperity. Most political scientists predicted a Gore victory in double digits. It ended up 50-50. This time he was running against history again. No Republican president had ever gained seats to win both House and Senate in his first mid-term. Moreover the economy was in a trough, giving the opposition party even more momentum.

Yet Bush bettered his 2000 performance — and the national vote tallies show a 53-47% split favouring his Republican party. Even in California, with a truly dreadful Republican candidate, the sitting Democratic governor won by a narrow 5%. In the American heartland — Minnesota, Missouri — the Republicans clawed back Senate gains. No sitting Republican governor lost. Democratic governor candidates lost in liberal states such as Maryland, New York and Massachusetts.

The president’s hand was evident in many of these races. He had handpicked candidates in places as remote as South Dakota, Minnesota and Georgia. He threw a huge amount of his political capital at the task and campaigned hard in all the tight races. This was a big risk. If he’d failed the Democrats and the media would have jumped all over his repudiation at the polls. But fortune favours the brave and the risk-taking Bush prevailed over the status quo Democrats.

Two policies made victory possible. The first, and most overlooked, is Bush’s tax cut. This was his first item of business when he assumed office. He put all his energy into it and won its passage. Politically it was a masterstroke. It meant that if the Democrats wanted to propose an alternative economic plan they would have to argue for raising taxes.

The honest ones argued exactly for that. The nervous majority countered that campaigning to raise people’s taxes is not exactly a good idea, especially in a weak economy. They prevailed. So the Democrats went into the election criticising Bush’s economic plans while proposing nothing of their own. They seemed negative, whiny, and irrelevant.

They also made Iain Duncan Smith look charismatic. You’ve barely heard of Democratic leaders Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt and wouldn’t know what they stood for. The same goes for many Americans. Only Bush’s old opponent Gore rose above the din, and reminded people of why they’d preferred Bush in the first place.

Then, of course, there was the war. Bush became a real president on September 20, 2001, when his war address to Congress rallied the nation. I sat in a room watching him, slack-jawed, as all the Democrats around me had tears in their eyes. That bond has stuck, and, in some respects, deepened.

Bush’s patient but ruthless execution of the Afghan campaign, his homeland security proposals, his “axis of evil” speech and his persistence in dealing with the Iraqi threat built on this achievement. Americans are not without their worries about the war; they are not gung ho warriors. But they grasp that we live in a new and dangerous world and they trust this president to defend them.

The president’s decision to involve the UN in September was the mark of a careful man. It married unrelenting determination to win the war with pragmatic deftness. This is a president, remember, who picked both the feisty Donald Rumsfeld and the cautious Colin Powell for his inner circle. He knows the importance of a good mix. And it was exactly this mix of brute power and artful diplomacy that gave him the UN triumph on Friday. In the end hardline Arab Syria went along. Even Syria.

Again his opponents abroad had underestimated him. They thought he was a cowboy: reckless, unilateralist, impulsive. This is and always has been hooey. He is a multilateralist who knows that no coalition will work unless guided and led by American power and will.

He knows how grave the danger to the West still is. He has been marshalling every possible resource — military, diplomatic, rhetorical — toward confronting it. His reaction to the election win was typical in this respect: he lay low for a day (can you imagine Clinton doing that?) and then gave a press conference with the telling phrase: “The election may be over but the terrorist threat is still real.”

This victory also reveals Bush’s mastery of domestic politics. You can see this most dramatically when you compare the Tories with the Republicans. Bush has united a once-fractious coalition. Bush would never have forced his party to split over an issue like gay adoption. His base in the dwindling religious right is still secure.

The Republican victory in Georgia — in the Senate and governor’s race — was a coup for Ralph Reed, the religious right strategist. At the same time Bush counts northeastern liberal Republicans among his closest allies installing Marc Racicot, a pro-gay moderate, as party chairman, and avoiding any difficult showdowns on the subject.

Ditto his subtle outreach on race both in backing popular policies among African-Americans, such as school vouchers, and appointing some of the most high-profile black officials in American history. One reason the Democrats lost was that their core support of black voters didn’t show up. They didn’t respond to the alarms that liberal Democrats have sounded about nefarious racist Republicans. Bush is one reason, perhaps the only reason, they don’t buy it.

The president’s main temptation now is hubris. Republicans, now in the majority in both houses of Congress, are already talking about banning partial birth abortion, corporate tax breaks, and the like. Bush should restrain them. The Republican majority in the Senate is still only 51-47 and long-term demographic trends favour the Democrats. The war is paramount — if Bush bungles Iraq his support will evaporate.

All this points to a cautious but determined two years. He’ll be able to shift the judiciary decisively away from liberal activism and has now won enormous leverage in foreign policy. If he continues to conduct the war well, does not allow Hans Blix to turn inspections into another charade, and the economy revives with record low interest rates, then Bush will be extremely hard to beat in 2004.

But this vote wasn’t about 2004. It was about today and the terrible decisions this young but gifted president has to make in the coming months. What Americans were telling the world last week is that they like him and support him. Whatever the pundits and cynics say, this isn’t, in the end, Bush’s war. It’s the American people’s war. And they intend to win it.

This burns me when the Dems use this tactic. And that's what it is a tactic...or maybe denial. It also burns me when (as Andrew does here) it's repeated as if it was a statement with any sort of fact or meaning behind it in the first place.

The Dems have no counter to the arrows hurled at their weak ideology other than to dismiss the attacker as stupid.

Thanks for the article.

I expect Bush to continue as he has been - promoting his agenda. I don't expect him to swamp the congress with ultra conservative issues. I expect him to steadfastly do what he thinks is best for America. His moves will be very well thought out and will have far-reaching effects on this country. Many conservatives will complain - but, when they look back at what he has accomplished, they will see the far-reaching moves and how effective they have been for conservatism.

Two years ago Bush should have been buried by an incumbent Democrat vice-president after eight years of unparalleled prosperity.

BULLSPLATTER the unparalleled prosperity clinton and gore had nothing to do with other than destroying it by sitting on their hands and overvaluing the dollar in the marketplace and leaving bush with a faultering and failing economy

The blow 9/11 put on the economy is another rarely connected dot. This is how foreign policy and domestic health for the economy are intertwined. Had sinkEmperor conducted foreign policy effectively, the economy would have faded somewhat but the deep recession we now have (with a too low interest rate designed to fuel consumerism but which takes a bite out of savings empowerment for the little guy) would not have materialized. Democrats cannot see the connections because they've a blind spot in foreign policy. Never forget that it was x42 who first declared war on international terrorism but did zero to prepare this nation or conduct even a shade of effective war on same. Democrat foreign policy is as hollow as clinton's cruise missile messages ... all expensive noise with no useful effect. Thank God for our patriotic military and a man now worthy of their allegiance.

Why not gloat? Hey--go ahead and gloat. It's great fun.

It's OK for us because we are under the media radar; no one will be quoting us on the New York Slimes editorial page or on the stump by some other democrap hellraiser. We won't be posted on the other team's locker room bulletin board.

But it's a luxury our leadership cannot publicly indulge. And it isn't GW's style.

On and on it went, and Bush didn’t do much to counter it. Why should he?

The president knew it helped him that his opponents in the media and Congress underestimated him.

Bush is a humble master and Commander-in-Chief. Thank God he is our President.

Is the most important thing about a Senatorial candidate his party alignment? Does the GOP only nominate persons who are fit for public office, or at any rate more fit than their opponents?

There were other things that mattered as well. Tim Hutchinson, a sitting Republican Senator, lost, because he had not lived up to his pro-family platform.

But party-lines were a bigger issue than usual this time. Because the Democrats made it so. The Democrat party "leadership" has been hijacked by scoundrels, who are putting their own political future ahead of the nation. I'll take a good Democrat, like say Zell Miller, over a bad Republican. But the current Rat party leadership must be removed from power.

Ivan-it really has been a glorious week for everyone over here on this side of the big pond who loves the very foundations of this nation. Who would fight the good fight to preserve those marvelous words that have come to mean so much more since the insidious corruption of the klintonian reign of terror and assault upon our nation and then the horrendous attack upon our nation on 9/11.

And Ivan-I thank God first and with full trust, and hard, hard work on the part of our President and all of the volunteers who supported him in this most MARVELOUS UPSET of historical mid election yr trends.

I was here 4 years ago and I remember the black, black days of Clinton's apparently triumph. I remember when Elian was seized and temporarily losing my mind with rage at the images of the seizure. I remember how smug those pompous arses in the Democrat party were.

So right now is rather like a dream. What has involved me in all this is what has offended me - the Democrats simple inability to tell the truth. It feels like the truth is coming back to punish them, and punish them hard. But the fight is neverending - as a friend of mine once told me, evil never dies, it merely goes to hell to regroup. Until Hillary and Bill are done, finished, flushed out of the body politic along with their minions, I don't think any of us are safe.

Regards, Ivan

Or you could judge Senate candidates by the judicil candidates they'll give a fair hearing to, and the tax legislation they'll support.

Oops, I think that puts you back to voting by party affiliation!

Republicans, now in the majority in both houses of Congress, are already talking about banning partial birth abortion, corporate tax breaks, and the like. Bush should restrain them. The Republican majority in the Senate is still only 51-47 and long-term demographic trends favour the Democrats.

Good column by Andrew Sullivan, but I have to disagree with him on Partial Birth Abortion. Over 75% of the country agrees with the Republicans on this issue. The only reason it hasn't been banned is because when it passed in the 90's, x42 vetoed it. Then when Dubya got into office, and the Dems took over the Senate, they wouldn't let it get to the floor for a vote because they KNEW the Ban would pass and he would sign it! The Repubs. have NOTHING to lose going for this one!

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