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2004 Presidential Race Prediction Onward and upward. This year, I’ve got it right. John F. Kerry is going to lose badly to George W. Bush in November. I realize that the race for president is almost even in the polls, but I think the American people just aren’t paying attention yet. America works because our Founding Fathers created a system that requires its citizens to pay attention to all the idiocies of its political class only occasionally. People spend most of their time concerned with their own lives rather than with running the lives of everybody else. Almost grudgingly, Americans start to look at candidates and issues in late October, and then decide quite quickly who will get their vote. The country is now evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans because both parties are so obnoxious on various issues that half the people feel the Democrats must be stopped before they completely screw everything up – and half the people hold the same view of the Republicans. Voting has become a matter of choosing the party you don’t hate rather than choosing the party you love. The Democrats have become a party that can field only two types of candidates: those who have no principles (Clinton, Gore, Mondale, etc.), and those who have principles that don’t make sense (McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Dean, etc.). The principled Democrats aren’t going to win any presidential elections in the near future -- and when and if they do, I’m getting out of here. Republicans have had plenty of candidates who had no principles (Nixon, Dole, George H. W. Bush, etc.). But twice in my lifetime they have found men of principle and great vision who have changed the course of history. For these two men, I would consider using a machete if necessary to get into the polling booth, and I believe a great many voters feel as I do. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are the only Republican presidential candidates I have voted for in what will my 10th eligible presidential election, (although I wish I could have made it 27 million and 1 in 1964 for Barry Goldwater. Unfortunately, I was only 20 at the time, and principled Republicans didn’t have a chance in those days.) The great issue of our day is freedom, as it has been in each election I have observed. I don’t agree with Reagan or Bush on many personal (what are called the “social”) rights issues, like abortion, religion in the public domain, and matters of sexual liberation. But the trends currently on these issues are toward freer choice. Each succeeding generation views these issues from a more libertarian perspective. Republicans can only slow things down a little. In 10 or 20 years, women will still have the right to an abortion, and gay people will be able to marry with essentially the same rights as straight people. But in our time, the status of political and economic freedom are much more tenuous. To our good fortune, two of history’s great champions of freedom – of freedom both economically and politically -- came on the scene just a short generation apart. Both looked at the world, saw that there needed to be a completely different approach to the economy and to international relations, proposed bold policies to turn things around, and implemented their policies with remarkable consistency and courage. And both men were hated by everyone but the public for doing so. I want to correct one totally false impression left by the press since the death of Ronald Reagan. Everybody did not love Reagan when he was President. It wasn’t that some people merely had slight policy differences with him. Half the people viscerally HATED him and contemplated what they now call his “winning smile” with teeth-gnashing and trembling. To these people, his economic policies were deliberately written to enable the rich to crush the poor, and to gleefully watch babies slowly starve to death. They felt that his policies toward communism and his relationship with our allies were certain to leave upon the earth only a few remaining species of plant and insect life. Now the level of vitriol thrown at George Bush has reached Ronald Reagan proportions. And that is as it must be, for George Bush has reached the level of greatness that Ronald Reagan achieved. It is only a matter of time until history realizes it, and until small minds with no vision will announce, at his funeral, that they always knew it. Ronald Reagan turned a stagnant, declining economy into the envy of the world. He created the entrepreneurial explosion that made possible astounding new opportunities for all people, rich and poor, and made possible the golden 80’s and 90’s of wealth creation. Reagan knew what would happen if the economic might of a free economy were unleashed. The federal government’s income doubled during the 1980’s, but the deficits built into the economy by the spendthrift congress of the 70’s and 80’s, combined with Reagan’s military buildup, produced enormous deficits. However, these were turned into the surpluses of the late 90’s by more controlled spending and by the explosive growth set in motion by his economic foresight. George Bush’s presidency was born in a light recession, which was followed by the horror of 9/11, by the anthrax terror, the Internet bubble collapse and the resultant devastation of the NASDAQ market. With his tax-cut plans enacted (Al Gore would have called them ‘schemes” if he had been awake), we had to suffer only a slight downturn for a few quarters, then start a slow recovery that has turned into the biggest boom since. . . well, since the Reagan years. Both Reagan and Bush knew their economic history, and had noted the positive results of tax-cut policies in the Coolidge and Kennedy administrations. Both men understood the dynamic effect on economic growth of lowering tax rates; both men were convinced of the importance of free market economics. In Reagan’s case, decline turned into prosperity within a few years; in Bush’s case, calamity was avoided and turned into dynamic growth in an even shorter period. Thanks to Bush’s prescience, and barring a nuclear or biological tragedy, we have several more good years ahead of us, no matter who is elected our next President. Ronald Reagan came to Washington in 1981. The Soviet Union had an unbroken string of successes in its efforts to “persuade” the world of the benefits of communism. Their latest adventure in Afghanistan had finally made Jimmy Carter angry, we are told, although he had no idea what to do about it. Reagan changed the terms of the entire debate. No longer was the West going to be bosom friends with Russia and attempt to “contain” the Soviet threat. We had a new goal. Sixteen years earlier, Goldwater wrote a book called, “Why Not Victory?” Obviously, at least one man besides me had read it. First, Reagan did something that always infuriated his enemies; he identified the problem. The Soviet Union was an “evil empire,” he said. Then, really enraging his enemies, he proposed the solution: throw the evil empire onto “the ash heap of history.” He followed this with the truly unforgivable: he took action. He increased defense spending from about 4% to about 6% of GDP. The panicky Russians found they had to spend over 25% of their GDP on their military -- and were still falling farther and farther behind. Rubbing salt in their wounds, Reagan told the world that the debate was not between two different points of view over how to organize society. It was between freedom and slavery, between economic prosperity and unspeakable poverty, between the conviction that every human life had value and the belief that we were human cattle who could be led to slaughter. At the end of Reagan’s first term, about three months before the election, so great was the outcry against him that Walter Mondale led in the polls. In November, Ronald Reagan won 59% of the vote and the greatest electoral landslide in our history, carrying 49 of 50 states. George Bush came to the presidency in 2001 and was met by 9/11. He quickly assessed the new world that we all woke up to on September 12, and he proceeded to redefine American policy and goals. He recognized that the world of the terrorists required not only fanatical fundamentalists eager to die on the sacrificial pyres they themselves lit; it required governments that either openly helped them or at least allowed them to flourish. Hence, we were at “war” with “terrorists and those that harbor them.” The war against terrorism required Bush to have an exceptional breadth of vision. He began by taking aggressive action against Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. The Russians had been bogged down for a decade in a losing struggle in Afghanistan. The US invasion was essentially triumphant in a matter of weeks. Bush defined a revolutionary new goal: He ended the insanity of the era of detente and mutually assured destruction by declaring America’s right to defend itself -- an unforgivable stance to many of his political foes. He observed the twenty-two countries of the Middle East, where Israel is the only democracy and our only ally – and told the world what it well knew but had refused to admit; that Yassar Arafat was a terrorist. America was finished with the pretense of negotiating with Arafat. And Bush proposed the only possible lasting solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: the creation of a Palestinian state. However – and now comes “that vision thing”, as his poor father who didn’t have it had referred to it: the Palestinian state must be a democracy. Bush’s goal was a democratic Middle East. He gave the United Nations a chance to be relevant. He said that we live in a new world where we can no longer wait to be attacked and then retaliate. Technology has made it possible for fanatics, in partnership with tyrants, to kill thousands and perhaps even millions of innocent people. And the United States is the prime target of this madness. Now we must, when necessary, take aggressive action to defend ourselves. The UN didn’t get it, naturally. The war in Iraq has been a masterful victory for America. It has been a difficult time, and I expect it will remain difficult for a long time. But what is the alternative? Our message to the dictator of Iraq -- that we will not back away from his threats -- may have to be our message to Iran. Or Syria. Or North Korea. But because the message was delivered so successfully to Saddam, the chance are great that we can avoid a more gruesome confrontation later. And who can deny that our continuing aggressive stand against terrorists on foreign soil is the reason that the United States has been spared another 9/11? It is this, much more than homeland security, that has so far kept the enemy at bay. In little more than three months, the American people will stir from their slumber and begin to focus on Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry. George Bush has principles. He will set the terms of the debate. John Kerry is from the “no principles” wing of the Democratic Party. He will claim that he has always stood for important principles when, in reality, he has never stood for anything. Americans will choose principles and action over promises and evasion. No, this time that feeling in my stomach is not a combination of whiskey sours and wishful thinking. George W. Bush is going to win. The American people will see to that. And remember that Reagan’s greatest accomplishments came during his second term. If Bush gets hit by a bus tomorrow, he will go down as a great President. But his second term may remind us of Reagan’s famous line during the 1984 election: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” And perhaps that will be only the start of the good news. Amazing new medical break-throughs are occurring every day. Perhaps during the next four years the cure for atherosclerosis will be found. And in January 2009, Dick Cheney, who will be younger than Reagan was when he started his first term, will raise the torch of freedom even higher.
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