November 03, 2004

Post-Election Reactions From Around The World : Niall Ferguson for The Independent
by Liza Sabater

Independent Comment : The depressing reality of this messianic President's new empire by Niall Ferguson
Read the whole damn thing. It's brilliant.

At Oxford in the early 1980s, I was one of those Tory boys who cheered Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as they stood up to the Soviet Union, the trade unions and rampant inflation. For us, conservatism was about freedom in the sense of free markets and individual freedom versus collectivism. This is not what the Republican Party today means by freedom. Not so long ago, I saw one of my old Oxford friends, who now lives and works in Washington. "You know, Niall," he said to me, "I used to think of myself as a conservative. But I have learned something about myself since I came to this country. It is that I am in fact a liberal." Such sentiments help to explain why so many of us - from Andrew Sullivan to the Economist - ended up backing Kerry.

So why did he lose? After all, he put on a good showing in the three presidential debates, at times making Bush look almost as stupid as his critics say he is. And the Democrats got the voters out as they have not done since the 1960s. The simple answer is, of course, that the Republicans got their voters out too - and there are marginally more of them. Hats off, therefore, to Bush's campaign manager Karl Rove, who has pulled off an astounding feat of political mobilisation.

Yet Rove was only able to get Republican activists so fired up because they discerned a meaningful difference between the two presidential candidates on the issues. What was that difference? In many ways, the key can be found in a single quotation from a profile of Kerry that appeared just a few weeks ago in The New York Times magazine. In it, Kerry was asked how he would deal with the problem of terrorism. This is what he said: "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

In two fundamental respects, what this revealed was that Kerry just didn't get it about the post-9/11 world. First, needless to say, it showed that he underestimates the magnitude of the threat posed by radical Islamist organisations like al-Qa'ida. But it also showed that Kerry is chronically afflicted with a moral relativism that may be the norm in Boston, but is utterly abhorrent to the Christian Americans of that heartland that now stretches all the way from Montana down to Texas and right across the once solidly Democratic South. An "acceptable level" of terrorism, prostitution, illegal gambling and organised crime is not what the majority of Americans want their president to aspire to.

Posted by Liza Sabater in 2004 Elections
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