Wankery. Pure wankery. Let me count the ways.
America's Choice
Can Bush reshape policy and politics like Lincoln and FDR did?
BY MICHAEL BARONE
Saturday, November 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
We have just come through a historic election. In 1864, a year of hundreds of thousands of Union casualties, voters in the 25 of 36 states that voted that year re-elected Abraham Lincoln by a popular vote margin of 55% to 45%. In 1944, another year of hundreds of thousands of American casualties, voters in 48 states re-elected Franklin D. Roosevelt by a partisan majority of 53% to 46%. The margin would have been greater if Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress had acted to enable millions of servicemen to vote. This year, after two years in which we have suffered a thousand deaths and several thousand injuries, Americans voted by what now appears to be a 51% to 48% majority for George W. Bush. That majority may be increased if the military votes are counted, contrary to what Democrats attempted to do in Florida in 2000 and what Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell has been doing this year.
Iraq is not a struggle for national survival and at this pace will lead to the same number of casualties as the wars Lincoln and FDR fought sometime in the early twenty-sixth century, if I'm doing my math right. It's not even remotely analogous to the Civil War or WWII. Nor are there nearly enough active duty military personnel overseas to add any substantial number's to Bush's final total in the popular vote. If I recall correctly, the Army had more men in Europe in 1944 than there there are servicemen in the entire armed forces today.
The victories of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Mr. Bush came despite the vigorous and outspoken opposition of media elites. The New York Herald in 1864, the Chicago Tribune in 1944 and the New York Times and CBS News in 2004 led the opposition to the wartime presidents, highlighting casualties, lobbing accusations of administration incompetence and obfuscating evidence of American success. But most Americans saw through them. They understood that war is a chancy enterprise, rife with error and missteps, subject to reversals and heartbreaking tragedies. But they also understood that American success was necessary to the advance of human freedom. They knew that their commanders in chief were embarked on noble enterprises, no matter the cost in human life or the frustration of temporary setbacks.
Lincoln would have lost, and probably lost badly, if Sherman hadn't been so kind as to deliver the biggest "October Surprise" in American political history by capturing Atlanta. Ditto Roosevelt if the D-Day landings had gone badly.
Lincoln also had plenty of support in the press, notably the
New York Times, as did Roosevelt.
And of course, this whole comparison falls apart when you consider Bush voters largely feel the war is going badly, but felt he was better on other issues that were more important to them. Can you imagine a voter in 1944 going, "Well, I think Roosevelt has done a bad job on the war, but Dewey will cut farm subsidies, so I'm voting Roosevelt."
Lincoln's, Roosevelt's and Mr. Bush's victories were all won on party lines. These wartime commanders in chief were not the unanimous choice of the American people. Millions were chagrined at the results--Civil War Democrats who did not want full rights for blacks, anti-New Deal Republicans who opposed labor unions, and cultural liberals with disdain for religion and patriotism.
Oh please. The Copperheads were Southern sympathizers, but their opposition to the war wasn't because they gave a shit about civil rights. And of course, let's just ignore the fact that the pro-Union Democrats actually ended up in coalition with the Republicans, and Lincoln's vice-president in his second term was Andrew Johnson, a Democrat (from Tennessee, of all places).
By the way, douchebag, care to demonstrate Kerry voters have "disdain" for patriotism and religion? Would you care to see the number of black churchgoers who not only voted Democrat, but were encouraged to do so by church leaders?
The 2004 election was fought after nearly a decade of deadlock between the two parties. Bill Clinton was re-elected with 49% of the vote; the presidential race of 2000 was a 48% to 48% tie; the popular vote for the House was about 49% to 48% Republican in 1996, 1998 and 2000. In 2002, when Mr. Bush's job approval was much higher than today, but when the economy and the stock market were in much worse shape, the Republicans won the House vote by a margin of 51% to 46%. Mr. Bush's popular vote margin and the House results look to be in just the same neighborhood as the 2002 results. But they are majorities. They are similar to the 51% to 47% margin by which William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan in 1896--Karl Rove's favorite election, because it led to a 34-year dominance of American politics by the Republican Party. A majority, albeit not a big one, can be a powerful force in American politics and policy. The question is what Mr. Bush and his party--fortified by gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives--will make of it.
Hmm, my already creaky analogy breaks down completely here, so let's just talk about William McKinley and hope nobody notices that the Republicans had previously dominated American politics, with the exception of the two Grover Cleveland terms, since Grant's election in 1868. Oh, and I hope they don't remember Woodrow Wilson.
Lincoln and Roosevelt set their parties on the course to become majority forces in American politics and public policy even as their wars raged on. Lincoln's Republicans passed the homestead and land grant college laws, authorized construction of the transcontinental railroad and passed civil rights acts which, alas, proved ineffective at guaranteeing the rights of black Americans. Roosevelt's Democrats passed the G.I. Bill of Rights, which subsidized college education for returning veterans, and the FHA and VA home-mortgage guarantees, which transformed America from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners. All of these policies encouraged, subsidized and honored upwardly mobile behavior on the part of millions of Americans for a generation or more--and in the process enabled Lincoln's Republicans and Roosevelt's Democrats to become, for a long generation or more, America's majority party.
It probably didn't hurt the Republicans that the South was excluded from participating in the electoral process for ten years after they were crushed. in the war. Perhaps Mr. Bush plans on doing the same to the blue states. He could start with Delaware. Nobody would miss it.
During the 2000 campaign and during this campaign year Mr. Bush has set forward proposals to reshape public policy and, in the process, to reshape American politics. He has already had some success. On education he has called not just for spending more money--on that framing of the issue Democrats always win--but for insisting on achievement and accountability. That has become law, thanks in part to Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, who are genuinely dismayed by the low achievement levels of their low-income constituents: We measure not just inputs but outputs.
Hurray for that staple of conservatism and small government, the unfunded Federal mandate! Remember, it's only bad when Democrats do it.
Say, has anyone actually proven that stnadardized test performance is an accurate measure of how much students are actually learning?
On taxes Mr. Bush has, with the indispensable help of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas--a community college professor a quarter-century ago, now a major policy maker; such is the upward mobility possible in American politics--enacted massive tax cuts that free up the private sector to provide the economic growth indispensable to the success of the millions who start off behind.
Yes, lovely. Then he took Congress to task for runaway discretionary spending that's jeopardizing the country's long term economic standing in exchange for short term gains for politicians. Oh, wait...
This year Mr. Bush laid out, late in the campaign in my view and too sketchily for the taste of policy mavens, domestic policy reforms as ambitious and capable of reshaping America as Lincoln's and Roosevelt's. He has called, as he did in 2000, for personal retirement accounts in Social Security.
Hell will freeze over first.
His opponent John Kerry, the darling of the self-regarding intelligentsia, called for the brain-dead policy of no change in a Social Security regime that any sensible person understands is in the long run unsustainable.
For once, no disagreement here, though Kerry has to know the growing problem Social Security is becoming. How much of that was what he actually believes and how much was pandering to the AARP is an open question.
Mr. Bush wants something better. Mr. Bush has also called for an expansion of market-based health-care reforms like health savings accounts. And he has called, in exceedingly vague terms, for broad-based tax reforms, freeing up savings from taxes to encourage investment and wealth accumulation.
And no plan at all to check spending. None. So either me or my kids get to pay for today's pork after Bush and those 535 ballot whores who shoveled it out are dead.
Snip the rest because it's not relevant.
