THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!
There are not enough morons to vote Gore into the White House, says Mark Steyn, so get ready for President Bush
New Hampshire A week and a half to go in a race the US media say is still `too close to call'. CBS and the New York Times even managed to conduct a four-day poll which claims that Al Gore is benefiting from 'day-to-day upticks' to the point where he now has 'a bare edge over Mr Bush'. The Texas gov- ernor, according to the Times's analysis of its polling data, 'still inspires discomfort'. Hmm. Not half as much discomfort as he'll be inspiring on the morning of 8 Novem- ber in the Times's collective bottoms.
On the assumption that Al Gore is not as blithely optimistic as his buddies in the press, what should he do? Jumping the gun on the post-mortems, many Democrats and sympathetic pundits are offering dif- fering versions of what's wrong. Bill Clin- ton let it be known that he thinks the Gore campaign is suffering from a lack of, well, him. More Clinton, that's what's needed. Gore hasn't mentioned the guy's name since the convention, leaving the President prowling restlessly in the Oval Office, wait- ing for the call that never comes. Mr Clin- ton's cure for the Gore fizzle is simple: `But enough about Al, let's talk about me.' Get Clinton out there side by side with Gore, and the winning team will deliver their third victory.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it'll make no difference. Maybe it'll make things worse. Nobody knows. Al says he wants to be his own man. That's what Nixon told Eisen- hower in 1960. Stalled in the polls, he was only persuaded at the last minute to let Ike stump for him. The old man nearly turned things around, and probably would have done if he'd been allowed to start a week earlier. Of course, it's more difficult here, in that Al doesn't have the breezy natural charm and warmth of Tricky Dick. And, in any case, you don't really want to be exper- imenting at this stage in a campaign. It's likely correct that Clinton is more popular than Gore, but he's not that popular. Thanks to Ross Perot splitting the Repub- lican vote, Clinton managed to win with 43 per cent in 1992 and 49 per cent in 1996. This time round, that won't be enough. Perot's out, and the only vote-splitter is on the Democrat side of the ledger: Ralph Nader. So, if Gore were to become as pop- ular as Clinton, he'd still lose. He needs to be more popular. Indeed, for Gore to win, the combined Gore/Nader non-Republi- can vote needs to be around 53 per cent, which would be the biggest left-of-centre vote since the Johnson landslide of 1964, which wasn't really a left-wing vote anyway since LBJ still had all those southern con- servative Democrats on board, none of whom will be giving Al a second glance this time round.
So Bill can't save Al. He has somehow to destroy Bush. His preferred tactic was `It's the stupidity, stupid', since this plays to Gore's great strength: condescension. So, in the run-up to the second debate, his boys tagged Dubya as a bumbler who could barely string a sentence together and would be an embarrassment as head of state. This ploy backfired horribly. 'I'm especially pleased that Mr Milosevic has stepped down,' said the governor the other day. 'It's one less polysyllabic name for me to remember.' That seems a reasonable indication that the issue has been, as they say, 'neutralised'.
So the Gore team has moved on to the `what a dope' argument's more upmarket cousin: 'It's the experience, stupid.' In other words, we're not saying he's dumb but his policies are certainly ones that no informed person could possibly support. Bush gave the Gore team a helping hand a few days back by saying he wants US forces out of the Balkans — Kosovania, Croatica, Bosnanarama, and so forth. The Gore crowd could hardly contain their glee what an isolationist bozo! Doesn't he realise the Europeans are already provid- ing most of the manpower? When he calls for our troops to be pulled out of Haiti, doesn't he know we've only got 34 men on the island?
Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn't. But one thing he does know that Gore doesn't is that it's broad philosophical themes that win elections, not the small print. And in this case Dubya's point is well taken: even if it's only 34 guys, what the hell are they doing? And what exactly are a far larger number doing in Kosovo? Bush's point is that the US military is overstretched due to open-ended commit- ments to situations in which the nation has no great interest and no identifiable mis- sion. He's not an isolationist; he's in favour of a strong military that's capable of waging war, blowing up targets, killing the enemy, etc. What he's not in favour of is using them as global lollipop ladies, turning them into (as he put it) a 'nation- building corps' trying to build nations where there are none to build. Most Americans will agree with him. 'Peace- keeping' is highly corrosive of military effectiveness: in 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy was the fourth largest in the world; today, after over a generation of nancying about in blue helmets, the Canadian armed forces still put in a nominal appear- ance for the Gulf War and Kosovo but can't be trusted to do anything except mind the store while the big boys are out bombing. Draft dodgers like Clinton and draft disdainers like Pierre Trudeau seem to get a thrill out of castrating their mili- tary. Dubya is right to say it's wrong.
In the second debate, Bush dared Gore to make an issue of foreign policy by men- tioning out of the blue, en passant, one former foreign leader, Viktor Cher- nomyrdin. Gore let that one alone, curi- ously reluctant, all of a sudden, to repeat his boast that throughout the Clinton administration he was in charge of Ameri- ca's Russian policy. In practice, what this meant was that his chum Viktor was in charge of America's Russian policy, using the top-level Gore-Chernomyrdin Com- mission to hoover up billions of dollars for his Mafia pals. The chief fruit of this unique Russo-American co-operation was that Al agreed to let Viktor keep selling arms to Iran and nuclear materials to other rogue states and, just to avoid any unhelpful publicity, promised he wouldn't squeal to anyone, least of all Congress. The vice-president has told so many lies about congressional bills he claims to have written — from campaign finance to the strategic petroleum reserves — that it's worth pausing to salute one of the few pieces of legislation he really did co-spon- sor: the 1992 Iran-Iraq Arms Nonprolif- eration Act. Oddly enough, Al never seems to mention this impressive addition to his résumé, perhaps because his con- spiring with Chernomyrdin is the most flagrant violation of it. If that's an exam- ple of what happens when you let Mr Smarty Pants run foreign policy, bring on the dummy.
But, if the vice-president's much-vaunt- ed 'experience' doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny, there's always the old Clinton reliable from 1996: Mediscare — i.e., terri- fy the old folks into believing the Republi- cans are going to derail Medicare, social security and the rest of the geriatric gravy train. Even here, though, Gore goes too far: the elderly are certainly the biggest whingers in the country, but it's doubtful whether they're quite the chumps AI treats them as.
Last week, some aged Democrat in Des Moines, trying to be helpful, stood up at one of the vice-president's events and reminded the audience that, even under a Gore regime, people would still be free to invest their own money as they wished. Given that Al is running several degrees to the left of where he ought to be, the old coot was doing the Veep a good turn. Tone-deaf as ever, Al couldn't see it. He scoffed at the idea of codgers investing in the stock market and then turned to his new running mate, Granny Winnie. As human-interest stories go, Granny Win- nie is a human who's perhaps too inter- esting. She's a li'l ol' lady Gore came across a few weeks back who tramps the highways of Iowa picking up soda cans in order to collect the deposit and pay for her prescription drugs. Tragic, eh? Except, as it transpires, she has a son who's a millionaire businessman and has offered to pick up the tab for the drugs, as he does for her new roof and her prop- erty taxes. But Winnie refuses his money. She wants the American taxpayer to pony up. Winnie the soda-can fetishist is the only person in this election campaign weirder than Al Gore, and perhaps for that very reason he's determined to keep her on the team, even though you'd be hard put to find a more bizarre argument for socialised health care. 'The national media tried to make a big deal out of the fact her son is well-to-do,' said Al. 'She doesn't have to pick up cans to pay for her prescription drugs. She can go and ask her son for money. But you don't want to do that, do you, Winnie?' Winnie agreed that she didn't.
Anyway, invited to respond positively to the notion of seniors deciding their own future, Al gestured to Granny Winnie again. 'Are you ready to get on the Inter- net and be a day-trader, Winnie?'
`What's that?' asked Granny.
Al had his answer. You can't possibly expect the helpless little people to take care of themselves. Let Al make all the decisions for you, it's so much easier. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, accurate- ly characterised Granny Winnie as the `grand symbol of American stupidity'. If Bush is the candidate as moron, Gore is the candidate for morons. Mediscare Round Two won't work.
They could always find some dirt on Bush, but that's proving problematic. The New York Times sent a hotshot reporter up to Fairbanks, Alaska, to nose around the so-called 'missing chapter' in Dubya's biog: the summer of '74, which he spent working for Alaska International, a new airline/con- struction company. 'What might seem puz- zling about Mr Bush's sojourn in Alaska,' wrote Jo Thomas, 'is that it never comes up.' Suspicious, huh? Sally Smith, now the Democratic mayor of Juneau, lived over in Fairbanks then and dated Dubya a few times. 'We had a beer,' she told the Times. `That's all I remember.' Strange, wouldn't you say? The paper, though, has found out that 'the aviation arm of Alaska Interna- tional had a colourful list of clients, includ- ing the Central Intelligence Agency and the Shah of Iran'. The Times doesn't spell it out, but is it possible young Dubya you remember, the airhead fratboy who spent his first half-century drunk out of his skull lying face down in the pizza — was, in fact, running a covert CIA Alaskan liaison operation with the Shah's dreaded secret police, Savak?
Oh well, better luck with whatever numbskull the GOP puts up in 2008, boys. In New Hampshire we like to retire early and I don't want to be sitting up all night waiting for a cliffhanger result from Hawaii. So here's my prediction: on 7 November, Bush will win 40 states including the soi-disant 'toss-up' Florida, plus such reliably Democratic turf as Maine, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia, plus Clinton's Arkansas and Gore's Tennessee. California will be close but Gore will probably cling on, though he'll be forced to spend a lot of time and money there. I know there's 11 days left, but Alec Baldwin has pledged to leave the country if Bush wins, and he's got a lot of packing to do.
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