Bush Hatred Flops Big
Two great new Mark Steyn columns:
A COUPLE of weeks ago, Michael Moore was touring the US offering unregistered voters incentives such as free “clean underwear” in return for a promise that they would show up at the polls. I’m not sure whose underwear he was giving away - his own or someone else’s - but, if it was the former, the grateful recipients evidently accepted a pair, went and camped out in them up in the Rockies, and forgot to return to town for election day.
The swollen turn-out on Tuesday — the biggest since 1968 — killed one of Moore’s most cherished myths: that if only more people voted, the natural “liberal” “progressive” nature of the American people would manifest itself. “Slackers are going to rise up in this election,” he predicted. “The slacker motto is: Sleep till noon, drink beer, vote Kerry.”
Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
A catastrophic night for the Democrats.
How about that? Alas for the Republican party, Lady Antonia and her chums never got round to writing to New Jerseyites and Pennsylvanians and Oregonians, or we’d be looking at a Bush landslide. Instead, Republicans had to settle for a little less. But, despite the best efforts of the US media, the Guardian, some even phonier than usual ‘exit polls’, Bruce Springsteen and ‘Rock The Vote’, Puff Daddy and the ‘Vote Or Die’ rap-the-vote movement, George Soros and Steve Bing and the million trillion bazillion dollars they poured into Ohio, respected foreign leaders like Yasser Arafat and Kim Jong Il, the Arab street, an attempted ‘October surprise’ by the UN’s Mohammed al-Baradei and the New York Times, and a late intervention by the late Osama bin Laden (which seemed awfully close to ‘Vote Kerry or die’), it was still a Republican night.
You might not have gained that impression from the BBC or even from my friends at the Telegraph, who claimed in Tuesday’s issue to be detecting last-minute swings to John Kerry. But just to run through what happened: in the House of Representatives the Republicans have picked up five seats; in the Senate they’ve picked up at least three, maybe four, including David Vitter winning a Louisiana seat that’s been Democrat since post-Civil War reconstruction; it looks like they’ve knocked off their chief obstructionist in the Democratic caucus.
And, oh yes, the most hated man in the world has become the first President since 1988 to win over 50 per cent of the popular vote.
