It’s a good rule of thumb that so-called “moderate opinion” is several degrees to the left of popular opinion. You can test this for yourself easily enough: Pick a subject such as, say, illegal immigration and compare the position of every Democratic senator, the majority of Republican senators and 90 percent of the media with that of the American people.
That’s why the press were befuddled by last week’s polls. A month of Richard Clarke, the September 11 Commission, Bob Woodward, Sheik Moqtada al-Sadr, Fallujah and Basra, and a constant drip-drip-drip of conventional wisdom on the president’s “vulnerability” from the Beltway to Hollywood to the Ivy League to that brave radio station in Plattsburgh, N.Y., that’s now the flagship of Al Franken’s Air America “network” — and what happens? George Bush’s numbers go up, and John Kerry’s go down.
Another six weeks of Dick Clarke’s book tour, of snotty network reporters condescending to Mr. Bush at his press conference, of the sneering Richard Ben Veniste and emotionally unhinged Bob Kerrey badgering Condi Rice at their hack hearings, of Bob Woodward and his unreadable book filling slabs of CNN’s primetime nightly with irrelevant arcana about what Prince Bandar knew and when did he tell Mr. Woodward he knew it, another six weeks of things that make Mr. Bush “vulnerable” and he would be heading for a 49-state blowout over Mr. Kerry.
Don’t get me wrong — America’s still a 50-50 nation. That’s to say, 50 percent of the nation backs Mr. Bush, and the other 50 percent either loathe him, or are undecided, or aren’t yet paying attention to Campaign ’04.
I think the president’s numbers should be higher. But the problem for Mr. Kerry is that he and the networks and the New York Times find it all but impossible to make any dent in the Bush half. If it is a 50-50 nation, one side’s 50 percent is pretty solid and the other’s a lot softer.
How can this be? Well, let’s turn to our senior political analyst, the late Osama bin Laden. In his final video appearance 2 years ago, Osama observed that, when people have a choice between a strong horse and a weak horse, they go with the strong horse. But, to take that a stage further, the strong horse doesn’t have to be that strong when the other fellow’s flogging a dead horse.
The September 11 Commission? Nobody cares. You can’t drive the car when you’re staring in the rearview mirror. And, as those polls showed, if Americans are forcibly plunked in front of that rear-view mirror, they lay more blame on eight years of Clinton administration policy than eight months of Bush administration policy.
Weapons of mass destruction? Another dead horse. Whether you were prowar or antiwar had nothing to do with WMDs. Bush thought Saddam had ’em, but so did the French, Germans and Russians, and they were all antiwar. For most pro-war Americans, the need to whack Saddam was more important than the pretext on which he was whacked. He was unfinished business from September 10. All the rest is footnotes, more rearview mirror stuff.
That’s why even the old quagmire scenario now playing 24/7 on the cable channels doesn’t work for Mr. Kerry. Visiting foreigners often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan, usually found below the Stars and Stripes: “These Colors Don’t Run.” To non-Americans, it seems a trifle touchy.
But for a quarter-century the presumption of the country’s enemies was that those colors did run — they ran from Vietnam, from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, from Mogadishu. Even the successful campaigns — the inconclusively concluded Gulf war and the air-only Kosovo war — seemed designed to avoid putting those colors in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, these colors ran from the African embassy bombings, and the Khobar Towers, and he pretty much expected them to run from September 11, too.
A narrow majority of Americans get this: being seen not to run — or, if you prefer, being seen to show “resolve” — is now an indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. So, when four contractors get lynched and hung off a bridge in Fallujah, poor, foolish Sen. Robert Byrd may think it’s time for an “exit strategy,” but most Americans want to see the thugs who did it hunted down and killed. One day it will not be necessary to sell “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts. But it is as long as Mr. Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore et al. are twitching to add Iraq to the pockmarked pantheon of Vietnam, Iran and Somalia.
The left resists this analysis. “Resolve,” they say, may sound macho, but it’s also simplistic. Not necessarily. In today’s phony-baloney world, nuanced inertia is the simple choice, the default mode of international diplomacy, of the U.N. and the European Union. When you dig into what’s holding up American resolve on Iraq, the people seem to be making more subtle distinctions than their elites.
Thus, the president’s numbers aren’t affected by the sob sisters of CNN’s Baghdad bureau filing their heart-rending reports on how thousands of Ba’athist apparatchiks haven’t been paid since they were laid off from Saddam’s Department of Genital Mutilation and Electrode Clamping last April. U.S. public opinion is hardheaded about this: The welfare of the Iraqi people is a bonus, but the welfare of the American people is the primary objective. That’s why the U.S. went to war.
That’s the problem for the Democrats. If “resolve” is the issue, can you beat it with “nuance”? If I had to name the definitive Kerry campaign headline it would be this, from Britain’s (left-wing, Kerry-backing) Guardian last week: “Kerry says his ’family’ owns SUV, not he.” That Chevy Suburban in the yard has nothing to do with him. Who you gonna believe? A respected senator or your lying eyes?
His statement is true in the sense his “family” (ie, Teresa) also owns the house and the grounds, and indeed a big chunk of his presidential campaign. But it’s hard to claim your powers of diplomatic persuasion would have won over the French and Germans when you can’t even win over your “family.” And do Americans want to hand over responsibility for Iraq to someone who won’t even take responsibility for the car in his driveway?
Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain’s Telegraph Group, North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
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