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The Triumph of Hope over Reason
By Horace Cooper
September 28, 2004

The Democrats have once again nominated a politically flawed candidate - an East Coast liberal. And although it's almost six weeks until Election Day, they are likely to lose once again. Amazingly, in the wake of their "unexpected" loss they'll seek to rewrite history to explain it. Rather than take a candid look at why their party has had so little success nationally (winning only three times since 1968), more likely they'll do what they usually do after a loss, dismiss their opponents ideas and agenda while simultaneously feigning outrage over the campaign tactics of their GOP opponents. And like a battered wife enabling her abusive husband, their amen choir in the establishment media will join them in their condemnations.

If this myth-making were isolated it wouldn't be noteworthy. However, the revisionism often is the rallying cry used to stymie and stall enactment of the GOP agenda. It's a familiar pattern that has happened after every successful Republican victory since 1980. Apparently, the axiom that "to the victor go the spoils" does not cover victory in the democratic process. Mere electoral success - even by sizeable margins - does not come with it the right to define the terms or bases for this success.

Barely more than a week after George W. Bush's inauguration in 2000, political commentator and erstwhile Republican historian Kevin Phillips proffered his polemic "His Fraudulency the second? The illegitimacy of George W. Bush. Its thesis: "the dubious elements of Bush's victory are so numerous that questions regarding his legitimacy are appropriate--even urgent." A swarm of critics joined Phillips over the next six months challenging the Bush Administration and its policies at every turn claiming they lacked popular support and shouldn't advance due to "extensive election irregularities." Were it not for 9-11 it's likely that this challenge may very well have succeeded in not only stymieing President's Bush first term agenda but also his record for posterity.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan upset President Jimmy Carter with an astonishing 489 Electoral College blowout so extensive that the United States Senate - heretofore not thought to be even in jeopardy - shifted from Democrat to Republican control. Wasn't this election a decisive rejection of Carter's failed policies? That would be too simplistic. As the Los Angeles Times noted in its obituary of Ronald Reagan, he had no real campaign philosophy, he had merely "preached optimism. If he were elected, America would stand tall again, he said, and competence would return." But instead "his term also saw a busted budget and record deficits, which made America a net importer and tripled the national debt." Along with a repeat of the ephemeral optimism/"Great Communicator" depiction of Ronald Reagan, the New York Times' obituary manages even to mention the long discredited conspiracy claim that the Reagan campaign negotiated to delay the release of the hostages until after the election."

As it happens, the sleights and mischaracterizations of Reagan's first election success were only exceeded by those that followed his successful re-election. Critics claimed that Mr. Reagan was the Teflon candidate who could say or do no wrong but whose record up to that point was essentially to cut social programs and create international instability through reckless acts of militarism. This after an election that Reagan had won by the largest electoral margin in U.S. history. It couldn't have been that Walter Mondale's promise to bring back the New Deal policies of Carter, Johnson, and Roosevelt - with higher taxes to pay for them - was believed by the public and rejected decisively. Nor could it be that the unprecedented economic growth that people could see in their pocketbooks was important, it had to be the smoke and mirrors campaign of a Hollywood actor.

Of George Bush senior, the Nation reports as fact that Republicans "used the racist 'Willie Horton' ads and 'card-carrying member of the ACLU' issue to defenestrate Michael Dukakis, a decent and capable governor." The New Republic weighed in with their assertion that "the Bush's campaign consisted of a campaign commercial showing Dukakis riding sheepishly in a tank, [that] helped to seal this image of Dukakis as a weak liberal -- insufficiently tough on crime, soft on the military, unpatriotic." In the view of these critics, Dukakis' seven-point margin loss (which made George Bush the first incumbent vice-president to be elected since Martin Van Buren in 1836) occurred not because Dukakis' views on taxes, crime, and defense were rejected by the American people but because of divisive campaign tactics.

As the soulless campaign of U.S. Senator John F. Kerry wraps up it is critical that this pattern not be allowed to continue. Before a consensus develops that President Bush and the Swift Boat veterans illegally or unethically conspired to steal this election from Kerry - an election that liberal pollster John Zogby claimed was Kerry's to lose - take a look at what contemporaries are saying.

The LA Times' Jonathan Chait observed that "the main thing people will remember about his campaign is how utterly bizarre it was that a major party nomination could have been captured by a man so staggeringly devoid of political talent."

And US News and World Reports' Gloria Borger reports, "Contrary to popular opinion, John Kerry's problems are not all about his lack of response to the anti-Kerry Swifties in August. The real problem is deeper: John Kerry is not making the case for himself to voters who don't like Bush but haven't jumped yet... In general elections voters look for real reasons to fire incumbents."

But wait there's more. Liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asks, "Who is John Kerry? He doesn't seem to want to let on. More than anything else, he presents himself as someone who fought in Vietnam. But that was more than 30 years ago. Who is he now?"

Even anti-Bush blogger Andrew Sullivan notes, "Kerry's campaign hawkishness on Iraq is in stark contrast to his long record of dovishness. He made his name opposing the Vietnam War; he opposed every Reagan intervention in the 1980s and was a stern foe of the contras in Nicaragua; he was in favor of the nuclear freeze; he opposed the first Gulf war; he voted to cut intelligence funding and many weapons systems over the years. And he tried to overcome this impression not by telling people why 9/11 had changed his perspective, but by emphasizing his own military service in Vietnam."

If Democrats are able to successfully explaining away this next national election loss as an example of mere style overwhelming substance they will truly have accomplished what former Majority Leader Dick Armey calls the triumph of hope over reason. When even liberal supporters say that you've got no message, you don't connect with voters, and your agenda doesn't connect with the electorate it's very possible you're incoherent and don't have a message.

Rather than blaming your Republican opponent for distortions, divisions, and distractions during the campaign, maybe, just maybe you could remember that when you're an East Coast liberal with a lifetime record of supporting defeastist military policies abroad and counter-cultural causes at home you can't win in a national election.

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Horace Cooper writes a regular political analysis column for United Press International and GOPUSA.com. He was praised as a key Republican strategist in Elizabeth Drew's New York Times bestseller "Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House" and extolled as a "poster conservative" by Michele Mitchell in "A New Kind of Party Animal."

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.