OLEAN -- For decades now, I have amused myself by trying to predict the outcome of presidential election campaigns I have covered. Date of publication of this column is the day before Election Day, 2004, so I will make my Fearless Prediction once again, this time for Niagara Falls Reporter readers.
|
JUMP TO STORY:
Editorial Tough Times Schindler Hudson Gallagher Mt. Views Citycide Billstuff Letters |
A caution: This is not an endorsement, nor does it necessarily indicate how I am going to vote. It is merely a prediction.
I've been pretty good at this through the years. Ronald Reagan was an easy call -- first over Jimmy Carter, then over Walter Mondale. Bush the Elder over Michael Dukakis was a little tougher, but not much. Bill Clinton over Bush the Elder was a tossup at first, but easier down the homestretch. Clinton over Bob Dole didn't take much effort.
To tell the truth, I don't think I made a prediction in 2000, but I wasn't surprised by Bush's final victory -- disputed and close as it was. Gore should have scored a fairly easy victory, but lost a huge number of votes because of his wooden personality, inability to sound sincere and determination to keep Clinton on the sidelines. When Dubya convinced voters he felt "comfortable in my own skin" as he so effectively put it -- while Gore obviously didn't -- it spelled the start of making a winning margin, even it was hair-thin. These things are often more important than issues.
That being said, I think issues actually will carry the day in 2004 -- for Sen. John Kerry.
I predict Kerry will win the presidency by a close margin (not as close as 2000), garner about 280 electoral votes, and gain the White House by victory in the northern neck-and-neck swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Here's my reasoning.
For weeks, the conventional wisdom has held that Bush's slight lead in the polls can be explained by voter concern over national security and keeping terrorism in check -- a feeling that Dubya, for all his faults, has at least fought back at the murderous bastards who attacked our homeland three years ago. Kerry, that explanation goes, is still an unknown quantity in regard to keeping the terrorists at bay.
My intuition tells me that emotion may rebound and work against Bush on Election Day.
All elections involve to some extent reliance upon the subconscious -- a voter making a closed-curtain decision in the ballot booth without really knowing why. These gut calls, I suspect, are far more frequent than voters let on during exit polling interviews.
My theory is this: When doubt over Bush's controversial war in Iraq creeps in, many voters will subconsciously score that issue a tie, then fall back on some others that have been floating around for months, unsummoned for discussion or reflection, in some reptilian lobe of the brain.
After autumnal discussions in classrooms, taverns, e-mails and marketplace with voters ranging from students to tradesmen to housewives to farmers to blue-collar workers to professors to administrators to unemployed individuals, I have narrowed those subliminal issues down to four, the ones I think Americans are most vexed by and worried about.
I call this quartet the HEET Factor, if you would:
Health care and medical coverage.
Environmental policy.
Economy doubts.
Taxes.
Let's start with Iraq. The mainstream media pound on this question daily, and make steady allusion to the deteriorating situation there, mostly in a Kerry-says-Bush-says context. But there are so few American reporters left in Iraq that some less promulgated descriptions of how truly dire the situation is do not reach the eyes and ears of voters.
Sure, reporters for cable news networks and The New York Times have written well-distributed pieces about how harrowing is their daily existence, and how hard it is just to survive, much less report, in an atmosphere where deadly insurgents seem to control the ebb and flow of fighting and journalists are confined to their hotel rooms for safety's sake. But after decades in this biz, I don't think many Americans pay much attention to that. Their reaction is: Quit whining, it's your job.
What interests me more are the little-noticed reports contained in things like a recent letter to the editor in a newsletter put out by the American Council on Foreign Relations. In it, a former U.S. Army staff sergeant -- using Mr. X as a pseudonym and now working as a private bodyguard for western executives who are supposed to be rebuilding Iraq -- describes the seemingly hopeless nature of such work.
First, observes Mr. X, with the exception of tough and well-trained Brits, the military personnel from Coalition partners are "a joke" and "worthless." Secondly, he contends that Iraqis are not the problem: "It's the thousands of foreign fighters, and you can't persuade these guys with promises of freedom and democracy É they are here to fight and die for their cause." Third, and this is very important in my theory, our Marines and Army infantry units -- who have trained in Military Operations in Urban Terrain for years -- "could have leveled Fallujah and a half dozen other cities if they just had their leashes taken off. But they were never given the chance."
My conversations convince me many Americans resent this possibility. The politically correct view that we have blindly violated Iraqi sovereignty and human rights doesn't have as much traction with voters as high-minded humanitarians and liberal writers might wish. Most people I talk to don't give a tinker's damn what happens to the Iraqis. They don't care if our military turns that whole country into a giant parking lot for Iran and vastly reduces Iraq's living population, just as long as we get the heck out of there soon with some face-saving strategy.
Mr. X also reveals something lacking much play in mainstream media stories --- that rebuilding contractors "were only about two months away from having all of our projects up and running. About two million people here in Baghdad were two months away from having clean drinking water and reliable electricity. But now that the government is pulling the construction contracts and reallocating it to security, they'll never know how close they were."
Which, of course, is exactly the outcome the insurgents wanted.
Australian TV documentaries reveal another chilling prospect: Sadr City, the huge Shiite slum section of Baghdad, is now "virtually 100 percent under the control" of Muqtada al-Sadr's A-Mahdi Army militia.
The Shiites -- we were told early on -- would be on our side out of gratitude for our dispelling the hideous Saddam Hussein, a Sunni whose cruelty to Shiites knew no bounds. But, hold the Australian reporters, Muqtada al-Sadr, who keeps falsely promising to maintain peace, instead has not only constructed an active killing machine, but has armed boys 6 to 12 years old with AK-47s and rocket grenade launchers so they can fight the "American invaders." U.S. forces have apparently quit trying to enter Sadr City.
So, the subliminal feeling seems to be that Dubya had the right instincts and made a worthy effort to respond to 9/11 by using overwhelming force, but then screwed up the prosecution of the War on Terrorism by letting things slide -- by, ironically, being too liberal in his approach. In other words, he turned Iraq into Vietnam by being too incremental in his application of force, and by allowing the Middle East to interpret the whole mess as a religious grudge match -- another Crusade if you will, a word routinely used in headlines in Islamic nations.
If even a few of these factors surface in ballot booth decision-making, the voter -- my theory goes -- will make decisions based on falling back to:
Health care worries. Everyone, with the exception of HMO executives, admits this is an indescribable mess -- filled with confusion, complication and federal hypocrisy. If cheaper drugs in Canada are so unsafe, for instance, then why are we being advised to go there to get flu shots? The much-touted prescription benefits for elderly Americans that Bush pushed through amount to payoffs to Big Pharmaceutical backers and are so intricate and meaningless that very few American seniors are even trying to use them. Dubya's promises to voters regarding correction of these shameful situations in health care amounted to vapid flapdoodle.
Environmental concern. Dubya's record here is so well-known that even Republican politicians are running from it. Big Oil, Big Timber, Big Mining, Big Agribiz, Big Polluters -- come on down; we don't need no stinkin' wild areas or national parks or redwood trees or clean air or clean water.
Just remember to cough up your campaign dollars. As recently as a quarter-century ago, the federal government allocated 2.5 cents of every federal dollar spent to natural resources and improvement of the environment. Today, that figure is about 1.4 cents per federal dollar. Bush has even silenced his best scientists on the emerging real problem of the greenhouse effect and atmospheric upheaval. Dubya may think his legacy will turn on how the War on Terrorism comes out, but it's more likely he will be remembered -- as we all cough our guts out -- for promoting the despoliation of a once-beautiful country.
Economy jitters. Let's ask Ronald Reagan's good old question: Are you better off than you were four years ago? You can drill NAFTA and free trade and globalization into my brain for hours on end. It still won't convince me shipping jobs to lowly paid toilers in India and Thailand and Indonesia is good for Americans -- except for the fatcats who run multi-national companies and can divert stockholder attention with the resultant growth in bottom lines. We don't really produce very much anymore. We sell hamburgers to each other. Ask the people in Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Taxes. The Bush tax cuts may have sounded good, and pleased the monied class, but they didn't make much difference in average American lives. Since when is $200,000 a year in income considered middle class. And the unspoken truth is that even a cut in your federal income tax doesn't make up for the horrendous burden in Medicaid costs and education costs and almost everything else important that Washington is putting on state and local governments. I'm paying so much more in realty taxes in badly strapped Cattaraugus County than I did in infamously expensive Northern Virginia, it amazes me. Yeah, yeah, I know -- my fault for moving to New York State, where taxes are like the air: all over and heavy.
So there it is. Kerry in what could be called a convincing last-minute squeaker. Sort of like the Boston Red Sox.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 1 2004 |