Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Steadfast

Rich Galen

Friday November 05, 2004

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A reporter for the Dallas Morning News, David Jackson, called Wednesday morning and asked me what I thought was the principal attribute separating President Bush and Senator Kerry.

"Steadfast," I said. "The President is steadfast."

Later in the day as the guest of Craig Helsing at a luncheon hosted by BMW in Washington, I expanded on that concept. I told the guests there were four axes on which the President's "steadfastness" could be measured.

The first axis is values. If there is a principal difference between the world view from Crawford, Texas and the view from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, then values is how it is measured. The President is clear about what he believes to be right and wrong on the values front.

The second plane is Security. Since 9/11, the President has been laser-focused on security generally and the war on terror in particular. There is no nuance in the President's position nor fine distinctions between good guys and bad guys. In an article published in the New York Daily News I was quoted as saying,

"You really have to go back to the day that President Bush first went to Ground Zero. That set in stone the guy who this President is. Everything else, to borrow a musical term, is just a grace note."

Eloquence, in my case, appears to be the handmaiden of exhaustion.

The third axis on which the President has been steadfast is the economy with an emphasis on taxes, "The taxes axis," I said (proving that even in exhaustion, eloquence has its limits). There is ample evidence that the tax cuts put the US economy back in forward gear and, despite political rhetoric, actually made the post-9/11 recession the least damaging to poor people of any in recent history.

Finally, there is the matter of political strategy. Following the 2000 squeaker, the President's team devised a plan to win a second term which was, awesome in its scale and breathtaking in its effect. As I said to Jackson, "The Bush turnout operation will be studied by the Harvard Business School for decades."

John Kerry's campaign outsourced - how satisfying it is to turn that phrase here - his election-day efforts to George Soros and his MoveOn.org collaborators. While Soros was craving headlines, the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee were quietly putting into place the mechanics which would, when it was all counted, turn out some 60 million voters.

I, of course, cannot keep a secret and insisted on asking reporters: If you have one group - the Soros Democrats - who are using crack cocaine as an inducement to register people with names like Mary Poppins and Pinocchio; and you have another group - the GOP - which is registering real people who live at real addresses, whose registrants are more likely to show up at the polls?

3,594,119 more real people showed up (according to the tally as of 6 pm Wednesday night).

A word about the exit polls. At mid-day the first round of exit poll numbers came out and showed that John Kerry was winning just about everywhere.

Anyone who tells you they were unmoved by the mid-day numbers - Republicans who say they were not dismayed and Democrats who say they were not buoyed - is lying.

I made two points to cover my anguish: First, every incumbent who suffers from a late-cycle slide has seen that slide begin about a week out. And the slide is inexorable. That didn't happen here.

Second, there were some numbers which indicated that in North Carolina Bush was leading Kerry by about one percentage point, while the Republican candidate for US Senate, Richard Burr was leading the Democrat, Erksine Bowles by a large margin. Neither I nor anyone else believed Congressman Burr was stronger than President Bush in North Carolina, so there was obviously something wrong with the numbers.

In the end, Burr beat Bowles 52-47. Bush beat Kerry in North Carolina 56-44.

To quote myself one last time: There's a reason we actually hold the elections and actually count the votes.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the newspaper articles noted above. A Mullfoto from New York City on Tuesday night, and the last cheap-shot Catchy Caption of the Day of the 2004 campaign.

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