Michael Coyne
THE MAN WHO LOST LIBERTY’S BALANCE Future generations may look back on the US presidential election of 2004 as the most crucial election in American history. Of course, it’s part of the hyperbole of the American political process that candidates make such inflated claims every four years; for once, the truth was, if anything, understated. We would have to go back to 1932 and the election of Franklin Roosevelt – or perhaps even to 1860 and the election of Abraham Lincoln – to witness a contest in which the stakes were so high. In those historic elections, nothing less than the survival of the United States was at stake. So it was, also, in the election of 2004. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was a dull, uninspiring candidate; but millions across the globe hoped he would win. He might have made a fine President – we’ll never know now. We do know that he would have been committed to preserving the United States as a free and democratic society. Yet he was never going to be President, and the Democrats ought to have recognized that from the outset. In the last century, only two incumbent Senators have won the Presidency: Warren Harding in 1920, and John F. Kennedy in 1960. US voters tend to favour the executive experience of Governors over the
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legislative background of Senators. Three of the last five Presidents came from the Governor’s mansion (Carter, Clinton, Bush II), while the other two had gubernatorial experience (Reagan, Bush I). Even more than John Kerry’s resumé, what really should have set warning bells screaming was that fateful conjunction of region and ideology. Since Franklin Roosevelt, only one Northern liberal has won the Democratic nomination and the Presidency. That was John F. Kennedy – the most charismatic, telegenic candidate the Democrats have ever had – and he only won by the narrowest of margins. Every other Northern liberal since World War II has lost: Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956; Hubert Humphrey in 1968; George McGovern in 1972; Walter Mondale in 1984; and Michael Dukakis in 1988. By contrast, the Democrats have won decisive victories when they have nominated Southern populists: Harry Truman in 1948; Lyndon Johnson in 1964; Jimmy Carter in 1976; and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. The lesson was clear for all to see, but still the Democrats went ahead and chose Kerry. Perhaps Tennessean Al Gore’s failure to secure a clear-cut victory in 2000 deflected attention from the need for a Southern strategy. Nevertheless, the Democrats probably made a catastrophic error
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by selecting Kerry over General Wesley Clark, a softspoken Southerner from Arkansas whose military experience would assuredly have confounded Republican attempts to smear him as ‘soft on terrorism’. So why did the Democrats choose Kerry? He was the most experienced contender, but he was even more a symbol of the ultra-liberal elite than the Kennedy clan. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was formidably rich, fiercely independent, abrasive – and likely to attract the same intense hatred as Hillary Clinton. But John Kerry had all the charisma of a wet dish-rag. What were the Democrats thinking of? They were thinking of that one brief, shining moment they just can’t seem to get over, and get beyond. They were thinking of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11 are the two great traumatic ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ events of modern American history. In the wake of 9/11, which the current Administration has relentlessly exploited, the Democrats were left reeling – and outflanked. By nominating John Forbes Kerry (same initials) of Massachusetts (same State), Democrats were invoking the talismanic memory of their fallen hero. Why not? In his youth, Kerry had actually known Kennedy. This talismanic invocation of JFK had worked before. In the 1992 election, footage of 16-year-old Arkansas youth leader Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden had all the resonance of a laying-on of hands. It evoked memories of Kennedy’s own phrase, ‘The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.’ It was in effect a celluloid endorsement all the way from Heaven – and it helped eject the ineffectual George Bush Senior from the White House. It’s quite possible the Democrats were relying on a little second-hand Kennedyesque magic to do the trick again. The Republicans, however, had appropriated tragic/talismanic associations of their own. Question: If 9/11 had never happened, what would Bush’s 2004 campaign have looked like? Prior to 9/11 Bush was (due to his dubious accession) widely seen as a national embarrassment, a distinctly unfunny joke at the expense of the world’s greatest democracy. The assumption was that, if they could just keep their heads below the parapet till 2004, he’d be ushered out in no uncertain terms. Then terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers. Everything changed. It was the defining moment of Bush’s Presidency – just as the Iranians’ seizure of the hostages had been Jimmy Carter’s. Immediately, the derision with which Bush had been regarded worldwide was supplanted by an international outpouring of goodwill. At home Americans naturally rallied round Bush enthusiastically. Yet it gradually became apparent that his
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Administration was exploiting the terrorist threat for partisan purposes, just as Joe McCarthy had seized on anti-Communism as a vote-winner half-a-century earlier. Soon after 9/11, Bush declared that this new war might ‘take years’. It sounded like a statement made with one eye on 2004. His father had learned, to his cost, that swift victory in the desert wouldn’t necessarily translate into electoral triumph if there were a significant time-gap. More troubling was the suspicion (screamingly obvious to many libertarians from the outset) that 9/11 would be seized on by politicians both sides of the Atlantic to force through legislation that would subtly erode civil liberties. To Bush partisans who would assert that their hero is the only man wholly equipped to defend America from the terrorist threat, the answer is stark and simple: he has already been found wanting. George W. Bush’s responsibility for the security of the United States began not on September 11 2001, after the attack on New York, but on January 20 2001, when he was sworn in as President. It happened on his watch, and his Administration was asleep at the switch when America’s enemies struck. After 9/11, an American tragedy was reconfigured as a neo-conservative opportunity; and that may yet prove to be the greatest American tragedy of all. Worldwide sympathy and goodwill has been squandered for an illegal, immoral war which is essentially a Bush family grudge match. No WMD. No exit strategy in sight. Over 1,000 Americans killed in action. Seventy-four British soldiers dead. Untold thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered. All for the glory of a self-styled ‘wartime President’, who avoided his chance to serve his country in battle, and who wasn’t legitimately elected to his office.
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Never in American history has a President been as despised and reviled by the rest of the world as George W. Bush. Not even Richard Nixon inspired such widespread personal loathing. Much, but by no means all, of this concerns the circumstances of Bush’s ‘victory’ in 2000. In the United States alone, opinion polls showed 35-40% of Americans did not recognize Bush as a legitimately elected President. In 2004, the Democrats were poised to deploy 10,000 lawyers in key States in the event of new disputes. There were intimations of another foul-up in Florida, where Bush’s brother Jeb is Governor. Polling started in Florida two weeks early to avoid complications of the type that bedevilled the process in 2000. Yet there were citizens claiming they’d been deprived of their voting rights. There had been computer crashes. Districts largely populated by African-Americans (mostly Democratic voters) were insufficiently provided with new electronic polling booths (designed by corporations contributing to the Republicans) – which, in the event of a recount being necessary, conveniently left no paper trail. The campaign to elect George W. Bush in 2004 (notice I do not say ‘re-elect’) was one of the most scurrilous in American history. First, Republican partisans tried to smear Kerry by suggesting he had had an affair with a female intern, à la Clinton and Lewinsky. When that didn’t work, a photograph appeared of Kerry the antiVietnam War campaigner, sharing a platform with that perennial hate-figure of the Right, Jane Fonda. Then it emerged that the pics of Kerry and Fonda were taken at two separate rallies a year apart. The ‘incriminating’ picture had actually been ‘morphed’. The ‘Bushies’ then attempted to disparage Kerry’s military service, courtesy of the ‘Swift Boat Veterans
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for Truth’, whose own candidate, of course, went nowhere near Vietnam. (This had a strange, sour historical echo: in 1852, the presidential race between Franklin Pierce and General Winfield Scott had degenerated into a spitting match over their respective military records during the Mexican War of 1846-48.) Theirs was the McCarthyite ploy of self-appointed ‘super-patriots’ impugning an opponent’s patriotism. Kerry should have shut this down with seven words: ‘I was in Vietnam. Where were you?’ John W. Dean, former Counsel to Richard Nixon, himself a witness to chicanery at the highest level of US government, observed in his recent book Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, that whenever dirty tricks are perpetrated to aid a candidate, they are always executed with that candidate’s knowledge and tacit approval. So when Bush piously distanced himself from the excesses of his partisans by paying muted, belated tribute to Kerry’s genuine valour in Vietnam, it was an empty gesture. By that time, the damage had already been done, and both candidates knew it. This brouhaha over Kerry’s service in Vietnam was microcosmic of the entire campaign. One of the reasons Bush won was that he and his supporters set the parameters of debate and never wavered from them. A truly focused opponent would have flayed Bush on the 2000 election, the negligence that resulted in 9/11, the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. Yet, for much of this election, it was the challenger who was on the defensive. Kerry tried to talk about the economy and domestic affairs; Bush hammered relentlessly on the war on terror – his sole issue, on which Kerry at times seemed woefully indecisive. Bush and his acolytes were terrifyingly focused, whereas Kerry often appeared catastrophically disconnected. He galvanized the faithful at the Democratic convention, but his ‘John Kerry, reporting for duty’ and that accompanying salute, consciously evoking his military past, was asking for trouble.
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Kerry’s moment of glory lasted only until the consummately staged Republican convention in New York, located and manipulated to exploit 9/11. Predictably, and deplorably, the central thrust was ‘9/11 this, and 9/11 that’. It was shrewd, it was cynical, it was pure George W. Bush – and it worked. Bush was riding high in all the polls, while Kerry droned irrelevantly on the sidelines; but then came the first debate – and, suddenly, Kerry was back in the race. Kerry’s answers were crisp, concise, focused and intelligent. Above all, he looked presidential. Bush, by contrast, was vague, vexed, vulnerable and vacuous – and he seemed less like a President than an arrogant princeling, annoyed to be subjected to questions. Bush was more comfortable in the second debate, but neither could rightly claim clear victory. Everything hinged on the final debate, on domestic affairs, where the Bush Administration’s record is as woeful as – well, the first Bush Administration’s. By rights, Kerry should have wiped the floor with Bush in the final debate. If he really wanted to win the election and be the next President of the United States (and, as Al Gore knows, the two don’t always go together), he had to land a killer KO punch to stop Dubya Bush in his tracks once and for all. The answer was right in front of Kerry. He should have borrowed Ronald Reagan’s simple but devastating votewinning question from 1980. Reagan had clinched his landslide victory against Jimmy Carter by asking the voters: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ Kerry talked about the Bush tax cut favouring the richest 1% of Americans,
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himself included. He told the American people he had ‘a plan’ (on Iraq, on Medicare), but he did not deliver a knock-out blow that would convince voters Bush had already failed them and accordingly didn’t deserve four more years. Result? Four more years. And even if Kerry had asked Reagan’s question, it might not have made any difference. Bush never shirked from playing the 9/11 ace. If he had been as valiant at the time of Vietnam as he has been vocal about the war on terror, he might have wound up as America’s most-decorated Vietnam veteran. It’s folly to characterize Bush as an idiot, as many of his detractors have done. This is a shrewd man. Kerry made a disastrous slip in the first debate when he spoke of ‘the global test’ that Bush failed to meet in making a legitimate case for war, and Dubya pounced on it right away. As a result, there was an entirely specious controversy about whether or not a President Kerry might cede US sovereignty on vital issues affecting national security. It was disingenuous, but Bush spotted his opportunity instantly. Similarly, Bush is not a mere puppet of the ‘neo-cons’ – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle. It’s Bush who struts round the world as the Global Imperator, Bush who calls himself a ‘wartime President’, Bush who had such a lack of faith in US democracy he considered postponing the election, in case of a terrorist attack in November. Notably, Kerry was ahead in the polls when this was mooted. Would he have us believe the terrorists planned to blow up every voting-booth in the country? During the Civil War, there was some talk of postponing the 1864 election. Lincoln firmly overruled it, declaring, ‘We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to to have already conquered and ruined us.’ Dwight D. Eisenhower, another Republican, a genuine war hero and twice legitimately elected President, famously warned Americans of the dangers of an unchecked US military-industrial complex. Even in the midst of the Cold War, Eisenhower realized threats to freedom and democracy could come from the Right, or the Establishment, as well as from the Left. On another occasion he remarked: ‘Only Americans can hurt America.’ George W. Bush may be just the man to make that prediction come true. The man who has wrapped himself in the Stars and Stripes and posed as the great champion of liberty is, in this instance, the man most likely to undermine it. This President has polarized the United States, alienated most of the globe and stirred up a hornet’s nest of terrorism in Iraq and vehement anti-Western passion in the Middle East. Do the terrorists want that kind of man gone? If Al Qaeda had had a vote on November 2, they would have voted to keep George Walker Bush just where he is right now. So they must be pretty pleased with themselves now. More people voted for George W. Bush than for any other presidential candidate in American history. The Democrats’ greatest campaign asset, Bill Clinton, was largely incapacitated due to a heart operation. Bush’s greatest campaign asset, Osama bin Laden, came through with an immaculately-timed video appearance the Friday before polling day.
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The ‘Bushies’, not least Karl Rove, presented the election as a choice between ‘Retro America’ and ‘Metro America’: ie. the small-town, church-going, flagwaving, God-fearing, gun-owning, white-picket-fencepainting America of Norman Rockwell versus the bigcity, latté-sipping, wife-swapping, smack-injecting, same-sex-cohabiting, abortion-procuring urban sinkhole of Robert Mapplethorpe. The 2004 presidential election was presented on the issues of ‘God, guns and gays’, a phrase reminiscent of the AllAmerican alliterative allusion of 1884’s ‘Rum, Romanism and Rebellion’. With its first breath, the United States of America repudiated hereditary dynasties and religious tyranny; and now the Republic is in thrall to a dynast idolized by fanatics who won’t allow Christianity to interfere with their fundamentalism. If Christ did return to Earth He might be far too busy with AIDS patients or impoverished Black teenagers in abortion clinics to shoot the breeze with GWB and friends. The Republicans have their own version of the Truth. Bush styled himself the champion of US security after the worst terrorist attack in American history – and people bought it. An oil-rich snake oil pedlar convinced America’s poor he was the populist candidate best equipped to protect their economic interests – and they bought it. A clip from Fahrenheit 9/11 showed Bush in white tie and tails, stroking ‘the haves and the have-mores’, quipping: ‘Some people call you “the elite”. I call you my base.’ Some populist. But why weren’t the Democrats running this clip in campaign ads all the way to election day? Because the Democrats have been on the defensive ever since the Reagan era – consumed not so much by liberal angst as by angst about being liberal. ‘Liberal’ has been a dirty word in US political discourse since the 1980s. Studs Terkel pointed out that Michael Dukakis made a ridiculous mistake by trying to shake off the epithet during the 1988 campaign; what he should have done, Terkel suggested, was point to the dictionary definition, which includes ‘generous’, ‘nobleminded’, ‘broad-minded’ and ‘a person who advocates greater freedom in political institutions’ – and call himself a liberal with pride. If Democrats shuffle awkwardly, feel guilty and apologize for being liberal, Republicans will let them. Bush and Karl Rove have gleefully demonized liberals and liberalism, and there’s no denying that their
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strategy was devastatingly effective. Rove was determined to capture the votes of four million evangelical Christians who had stayed home during the 2000 election; consequently, he packaged Bush as the candidate of the faithful, the fearful and the poor – in short, All Who Hope In The Lord. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, in the last few weeks of the campaign, they had help from an unexpected quarter. Global interest in this American election was sky-high, with a majority of the world’s citizens fervently hoping the Americans would eject Bush from the office he had so questionably occupied four years earlier. The outcome of this election will affect everyone on the planet, but only around 5% of the world’s population had a vote. What about the rest of us? The Guardian, tapping into this widespread frustration, came up with a scheme whereby British readers could write to voters in Clark County in the key swing State of Ohio, in the hope this might have some bearing on their decision come election day. The Guardian did warn potential letter-writers their campaign could prove counter-productive. The result was disastrous, prompting responses such as, ‘Get lost, limey asshole. Thanks for reminding us why we had a revolution in 1776.’ Given that it was Ohio which finally put Bush over the top, after an unprecedented turn-out, it would be galling, indeed, if it turned out to be ‘The Guardian wot won it’. The Guardian’s campaign was a well-intentioned but ill-conceived attempt to intervene in the affairs of a nation which has, since the era of George Washington, guarded jealously against any threat of foreign interference. It was doubly disastrous because it exacerbated xenophobic isolationism; and it cast Kerry as the European Candidate, choice of ‘the rest of the world’, in stark, unflattering contrast to Bush, who was thus explicitly confirmed as the One True, Evangelical, Apostolic American Candidate. In large part due to 9/11, Bush was able to make significant inroads into traditional Democratic constituencies. Jimmy Boyle, leader of the Firefighter’s Union in New York, had voted for Democratic presidential candidates in every election from 1960 to 2000. After the death of his fireman son in 9/11, he responded enthusiastically to Bush’s handling of the crisis, and later referred to him as ‘my leader, my Churchill’. In The Right Man, Bush partisan David Frum recounts that, after 9/11, ‘The bitterest
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Bush hater I knew at the time of the Florida recount emailed me to ask how he could help organize a Manhattan chapter of “Democrats for Bush” in time for 2004.’ While 9/11 and the high profile given to ‘moral values’ helped Bush to woo Democratic voters, disaffected Republicans were not afforded the same prominence. They were around, though. Ex-Nixon aide John Dean and conservative, libertarian journalist James Bovard each wrote scathing accounts of the unwarranted growth of governmental power under Bush, respectively titled Worse Than Watergate and Terrorism and Tyranny. Former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips weighed in with his none-too-flattering American Dynasty, which exhaustively detailed the Bushes’ routes to power and prominence. So there were conservative Americans troubled about the direction in which George W. Bush is taking their country. However, in the 2004 election, they were not many – and, clearly, they were not vocal enough. In years to come, they may wish they had shouted louder. The sweeping powers of the Patriot Act are an authentic, insidious and far-reaching threat to the civil liberties of American citizens. This issue was the unseen, virtually unmentioned spectre in the 2004 election. It is astonishing that the Democrats did not make more of it. Kerry was not so much the great hope as, possibly, the last chance. George W. Bush, complete with that slack-mouthed, patronizing grin, talks of ‘freedom’, as if he alone understands its value and he alone can be trusted to preserve it in America. Four more years of George W. Bush means more Americans perishing in far-off lands, more Americans living in poverty at home – and all Americans under threat of increased surveillance and greater governmental intrusion. Two examples will suffice for now. The United States government now has the power to access the library records of all Americans. So if I were a US citizen I might be considered subversive because I have read the conservative but anti-Bush books cited a couple of paragraphs back. Not scary enough? How about this? If a natural-born American endorses even a legitimate act by a terrorist group – if, for example, Al Qaeda offered to negotiate a peaceful settlement and said citizen agreed with such a move – said citizen might conceivably, legally be stripped of citizenship and deported from the United States. Bush has reconfigured the American consensus in
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favour of a potentially lethal combination of aggressive hyperpatriotism, fervid fundamentalism and corporate fascism. This, too, is the achievement of a very shrewd man. Nothing’s too shrewd for the man who lost liberty’s balance. I fear it’s a tragedy in the making; and this time it can’t be blamed on suspicions of jiggery-pokery in cyber-space or Poppy Bush’s appointees on the Supreme Court. If Dubya’s continuance in power becomes a tragedy, it will be one the American people have brought on themselves, just as President Eisenhower had anticipated. Gore Vidal, novelist, essayist, and a cousin of the man robbed of the Presidency in 2000, wrote in Life magazine: ‘I have often thought and written that if the United States were ever to have a Caesar, a true subverter of the state, (1) he would attract to himself
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all the true believers, the extremists, the hot-eyed custodians of the Truth; (2) he would oversimplify some difficult but vital issue, putting himself on the side of the majority, as Huey Long did when he proclaimed every man a king and proposed to divvy up the wealth; (3) he would not in the least resemble the folk idea of a dictator. He would not be an hysteric like Hitler. Rather, he would be just plain folks, a regular guy, warm and sincere, and while he was amusing us on television storm troopers would gather in the streets.’
make on the day he died. It might be too much to hope, but it would be fitting if Kennedy’s words, intended for delivery in Texas, were carefully pondered by the Texan now in the White House: ‘America today is stronger than ever before. Our adversaries have not abandoned their ambitions – our dangers have not diminished – our vigilance cannot be relaxed. But now we have the military, the scientific and the economic strength to do whatever must be done for the preservation and promotion of freedom. ‘That strength will never be used in pursuit of aggressive ambitions – it will always be used in pursuit of peace. It will never be used to promote provocations – it will always be used to promote the peaceful settlement of disputes. ‘We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchman on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility – that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint – and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men”. That must always be our goal – and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain”.’
Vidal did not write those words with George W. Bush in mind. Those words were published in June 1961, when the current President was not quite fifteen years old. Yet we ignore them at our peril. George W. Bush has his own ‘hot-eyed custodians of the Truth’ in his neo-conservative and his Christian fundamentalist supporters. The war on terror is his own ‘difficult but vital issue’, which risks being oversimplified, as when he implied the critics of the Iraq war must consequently be in sympathy with Saddam Hussein. Bush is, by all accounts, ‘just plain folks, a regular guy, warm and sincere’. The American people had their opportunity to ensure Vidal’s prediction should not come true the rest of the way. Any chance that The Star-Spangled Banner might be replaced by Midland, Midland, Über Alles?
Well – The Watchman Waketh.
Michael Coyne is author of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (published by I. B. Tauris, London).
The Democrats, naturally enough, now have one eye on the 2008 election. However, they will do their country a greater service if they prioritize vigilance in defence of American civil liberties over the next four years. As for 2008 and beyond, if the Democrats wish to recapture the White House, they must avoid the self-evidently limited allure of Northern liberals. To put it bluntly, they should forsake the talismanic but essentially irreplaceable appeal of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – and look to the future. The current President of the United States, on the other hand, would do well to think long and hard about both the heartfelt responsibility and the admonition implicit in the speech John Kennedy had planned to
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