EDITORIALS

By Dave Andrusko

Immensely Talented Candidate Plus Vigorous Grassroots Support = A Second Term for Bush

"I think if Kerry were to win this in a - - in a tight race, I think there'd be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. . . . I mean that the right wing is not going to accept it."

PBS's Bill Moyers, election night

"The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies."

Garry Wills, New York Times, November 4

"W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age.... Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality."

Maureen Dowd, New York Times, November 7

I will not belabor the obvious. Having worked themselves into a frenzy, and having persuaded themselves that the election was rightfully theirs, the only plausible explanation among Democrats for President Bush's re-election is that "W" represents the triumph of the worst strains in American politics.

Worse yet, the dread which fuels the hysteria in the Democratic Party and its minions in the "mainstream media" is compounded by an almost claustrophobic sense that the electoral walls are closing in.

It's one thing to paint Mr. Bush as evil incarnate. All you need is money and a compliant Media Establishment that passes your allegations along uncritically. No reality check required.

But it is quite another on November 3 to have to deal soberly with the inescapable numbers - - to admit that in winning by 3%, the President increased his percentage of the Hispanic vote by ten percentage points, and was assisted by a more modest, but electorally crucial, increase of 2% among African Americans.

Not that there aren't endless ways to slice, dice, divide, segment, and parse the November 2 results. But for all the many ways partisans spin the figures, they don't change the fundamentals. At the risk of boring you to tears, let me trot out a few statistics that undergirded the electoral college 286 to 252 victory. (Hint: you'll be refreshed by each piece of information.)

Mr. Bush's 59,645,158 votes meant he carried 51.5% of the vote compared to 48.5% for Sen. Kerry. This is no mean feat. As Bill Kristol has written, no presidential candidate had won more than 50% of the vote since 1988.

Bush was also (he wrote) "the first incumbent since 1964 to win reelection while simultaneously expanding his party's representation in both houses of Congress." President Bush had "coattails," added Kristol. "Republicans were elected to no fewer than six Senate seats that had previously been occupied by Democrats, for example, and in all six of those states, Bush ran well ahead of the rest of his party's ticket."

For single-issue pro-lifers the news ran the gamut from very good to great. The good news is that because he is pro-life, President Bush enjoyed a vitally important net advantage of 4% over pro-abortion Sen. Kerry among the voters for whom abortion was THE issue in deciding their vote. (See Dr. David N. O'Steen's story on page 5.)

The even better news, long-term, is that Mr. Bush's support in the overwhelmingly pro-life Hispanic community jumped from 34% in 2000 to 44% in 2004. Reporters went trawling for an explanation and caught this from Les Dorrance. "I voted for Bush based on his moral stance," Dorrance told the New York Times. "Bush is pro-life, I'm pro-life."

Bush also carried 52% of the Catholic vote and nearly 80% of the self-identified (and very pro-life) born-again Evangelicals. The President was a magnet for pro-life voters.

If you listen carefully to those hostile to President Bush, including Kerry pollster Stanley Greenberg, you make some very interesting discoveries. People like Greenberg are saying that there was a key constituency - - people whose support for Bush was soft ("wavers") - - who coulda/shoulda voted for John Kerry.

Greenberg's argument is that such voters were looking for a persuasive reason to "vote their pocketbook." What held these people, who were disproportionately rural, older, and in not-so-hot economic condition, in the Bush camp? Greenberg felt the cultural values message of the Bush campaign and organizations supporting him proved too strong in the last 7-10 days of the campaign.

That was, of course, precisely the time frame in which National Right to Life launched its all-out effort.

But the best news of all is we have Mr. Bush again as President. He is a redoubtable combination of political adroitness and principled conviction.

CNN's Carlos Watson was not exaggerating when he wrote, "Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, it is hard not to look at President Bush's re-election victory last week and conclude that he is probably one of the three or four most talented politicians of the last half of a century."

On top of that enormous political skill, President Bush is firmly in the babies' court.

What a day for the cause of unborn children.

Dave Andrusko can be reached at dandrusko@nrlc.org.