Still a Majority?
SCOTT W. JOHNSON
Jim Geraghty’s awkwardly titled new book takes a timely look back at the elections of 2002 and 2004. As the subtitle points out, these elections inaugurated “an era of Republican leadership.” In the 2000 presidential election, the Republican nominee lost the popular vote, even as Republicans were losing four seats in the Senate and two in the House. But in the 2002 midterm election, Republicans defied historically grounded expectations of further losses and instead regained two Senate seats while holding their own in the House. Standing for reelection in 2004, George W. Bush not only won a narrow majority of the popular vote, but also increased his vote total by more than 11,000,000; Republicans picked up four seats in the Senate and two in the House. The era of Republican consolidation, if not dominance, seemed to have arrived.
In this book Geraghty sets out to explain why. He finds the answer in Republican leadership on the issue of national security. He argues that 9/11 altered the psyche of the average American voter, attuning him to the mortal peril posed by the enemy who showed his face to such devastating effect on that day. “While the intensity of the post-9/11 emotions will fade to a certain extent,” Geraghty writes, “something in the American consciousness changed permanently that day.” In making his case, Geraghty tells the story of the elections of 2002 and 2004 mostly from the outside — thematically, drawing on the contemporaneous words of participants, pollsters, consultants, observers, commentators, journalists, and bloggers.
Perhaps most striking is Geraghty’s account of how quickly Democrats reverted to form following 9/11 — to a style Rich Lowry had defined in the context of the Clinton administration as “McGovernism without the conscience.” Geraghty notes the initial, twisted post-9/11 reactions of such far-Left figures as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. Geraghty points out, for example, that within 24 hours of the 9/11 attack, Michael Moore was imputing guilt to the United States for “taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador)” and suggesting that some kind of cosmic payback was at work. Geraghty mordantly writes that “neither additional years nor the passage of weeks seemed to temper the reaction of those farthest to the left.”
On the contrary, Geraghty shows that the intemperance of the far Left worked itself into the heart of the Democratic establishment as Senate minority leader Tom Daschle and Democratic party chairman Terry McAuliffe attended the 2004 Washington, D.C., premiere of Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. (Ironically, Daschle was himself a subject of Moore’s scorn in the film; by Moore’s lights, Daschle had demonstrated inadequate opposition to the war in Iraq.) Geraghty devotes a chapter to the proposition that Moore became a symbolic face of the Democratic party in 2004 and concludes: “The party that has the more appealing faces wins the elections.” Beauty is famously in the eye of the beholder, but Geraghty is on solid ground in intimating that there aren’t many faces less appealing than Moore’s.
Geraghty places the ascendance of national security as an electoral issue in the context of events since 1972, and especially of the rise of McGovernism as the practical foreign-policy doctrine of the Democratic party. The wider context explains the Democrats’ post-9/11 electoral weakness — but one can also observe in this context a striking deterioration of Republican electoral strength at the presidential level. Contrast President Bush’s 2004 performance with that of his recent Republican predecessors who ran for a second term. (Leave aside the case of George H. W. Bush: It was surely highly specific circumstances in his first term — the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War — that enabled the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.)
As an unloved wartime president in 1972, Nixon defeated George McGovern with more than 60 percent of the popular vote and a crushing Electoral College margin of 503 votes. Seeking a second term against a solid Democratic opponent in the person of Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan likewise won 59 percent of the popular vote and a crushing Electoral College margin of 512 votes. Facing an incredibly weak Democratic nominee in 2004 — an unlikable liberal from the only state McGovern carried in 1972 — George W. Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote and an Electoral College margin of 34 votes over John Kerry, securing victory only as the result of his narrow defeat of Kerry in Ohio.
In this broader context, the trend at the presidential level seems anything but encouraging for Republicans. In the blink of an eye states such as California, New York, and Illinois appear virtually to have slipped beyond the grasp of Republicans at the presidential level.
Of all forms of human error, George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, prophecy is the most avoidable. Geraghty does not hesitate to predict that Republicans stand to gain on the issue of national security in the upcoming midterm elections. It is a prediction that defies the gloom that has dogged Republicans in the spring and summer of 2006. In the book’s closing pages, however, Geraghty acknowledges the existence of “difficulties in Iraq,” suggesting that they may detract from the Republican edge on national security; but he asserts that in light of internal Democratic divisions the problems in Iraq “are not necessarily good news for the Democrats.”
To win in 2008, Geraghty bluntly asserts, “the Democrats need a hawk.” I wonder if a slightly camouflaged dove might not be enough to do the trick. On the horizon Geraghty sees a “hawkish Hillary Clinton” and betrays no doubt that she will be the Democrats’ 2008 nominee. He considers her a serious threat to Republicans because of her hawkishness. Contemplating a second Clinton presidency, Geraghty consoles his readers with the prospect of a silver lining: “All of this — Afghanistan, Iraq, and any future battlefields — would finally become their fight too.” I doubt that Hillary Clinton is a hawk, any more than Bill Clinton was or is. Nevertheless, Geraghty’s observation that “many on the left, including the shrilly whining harpies of the media,” have performed a kind of moral blackmail — basically, obstructing prosecution of the war unless and until they themselves are returned to power — seems to me to strike the mother lode. It provides a sobering conclusion to a book that is by turns good-humored, optimistic, and shrewd.
Mr. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and a contributor to the weblog Power Line (powerlineblog.com).
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