Issue: 13 November 2004	PAGE 1 of 2 next >>

On the Sunday evening before the election, with not much more than 48 hours to go, I announced to family and friends that, being a near life-long student of American politics, especially presidential elections, I thought that President Bush would win. On election night, and into the early hours of the Wednesday, before either exit polls or real results, I announced that Senator Kerry would win.

Family and friends had a right to be irritated. One of them said that on the strength of the detailed analysis he had heard on Sunday night, he had gone to his office and assured his superiors of a Bush win. Now he was confronted with a complete change of heart. Don’t worry, I counselled, there were no office hours until just after breakfast time. If Mr Bush won, his bosses would see my young relative as especially wise. If Mr Kerry won, they would be so busy trying to work out what, if anything, was in it for them — theirs being a City institution — that they would not remember a youthful subordinate’s wrong forecast.

Though an opponent of the Iraq war, I wanted Mr Bush to be re-elected. I did not think that either he or Mr Kerry, as president, would differ on Iraq. Both would withdraw as quickly as possible, probably leaving random warlordism to flourish. But it would be better if Mr Bush presided over that outcome. It would make it harder for the neoconservatives — whose project for imposing democracy on the Middle East I regard, being a traditional Conservative, as dangerously left-wing — convincingly to claim that a liberal president lost his nerve. That is what they would have said about a President Kerry, thus giving themselves a lease of life in which to plague some other Republican presidency.

My successive beliefs that Mr Bush and Mr Kerry would win were therefore disinterested. Most leftists and liberals had for some time believed that Mr Kerry would win, but their wish was father to the forecast. The more rational of us had wavered during the long campaign. For long, we thought Mr Bush would win because Mr Kerry was so unconvincing. What kind of a candidate was it who, trying to win Middle America, allowed himself to be photographed, mid-campaign, windsurfing off the rich liberals’ holiday island, Nantucket? In contrast, the then Governor Clinton, in the middle of the 1992 primaries, allowed it to be known that he had flown back to Arkansas to be in his state, as tradition dictated for its governor, on the night of an execution.

Then came the Bush-Kerry debates. If the truth be known, many of us who thought that they were the making of Mr Kerry also thought that he came over as just a decent, dull compendium of academic pieties about the economy, the environment, and everything else. True, he was convincing on Mr Bush’s partiality towards the wealthy, but we could not banish from our minds the knowledge that he himself had married an embodiment of wealth. But the polls the next day said that Mr Kerry had ‘won’. That seemed to lift him for the campaign’s last stage. Then he seemed rather to fall back again, and over that last weekend we once more thought that Mr Bush would win. Until the last day, that is, when the polls so narrowed as to make Mr Kerry’s victory look likely.

There is a pattern here: we were at the mercy of the polls. Because of the polls, most of us, in the matter of elections, tend to say the same thing. But, the election over, what do we say now? For most people, the same thing; since the election, the new Same Thing is that the only way the Democrats can win the presidency is to, as the old phrase has it, get religion.

The Wall Street Journal quoted John Podesta, Clinton’s former chief of staff, as thinking that ‘the party must recalibrate its positions on religion’. Religion is here treated as something on which to have a ‘position’ rather than a belief; moreover, a position which can be ‘recalibrated’.

Thus Our Lord is assumed to have promised his first Apostles, on meeting them by the Sea of Galilee, ‘Come with me, and I will make you recalibrators of votes.’ The Democrats should forget this tactic. If they embrace it for 2008, hardly anyone will believe them, especially a Christian who voted for Mr Bush. Mr Bush is a convincing Christian: the sinner that repenteth. He is plausible as someone whom Christianity rescued from drink and various other debaucheries. Mrs Clinton, the senator for Babylonian New York, would never admit to being a sinner needing repentance, and in any case the sin of pride sits too triumphantly on her. Her manner is self-righteous rather than righteous.