November 4, 2004
I guess John Kerry went into the primary without a plan to win the election.
The Democrats threw everything they had at this election. They ran a phony
Vietnam War hero and a phony Southerner. They had middle-aged women
executives at MTV hawking "Rock the Vote" to entice the most uninformed
young people to vote for Kerry. They had Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews
and New York Times darling Eminem. They had documentaries, books, the
universities, Hollywood (and the French!) on their side.
They had liberal thugs ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters, stealing
Bush-Cheney signs and slashing the tires of Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote
vans on Election Day. In Colorado, they traded voter registrations for crack
cocaine. In Ohio, they registered Mary Poppins and ****** Tracy. In South
Carolina, Emily's List called Republican households and gave them incorrect
information about the location of polling places.
The media campaigned heavily for Kerry with endless Abu Ghraib coverage,
phony National Guard documents and, days before the election, false news
reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq.
The Democrats' cheating never stopped. The big story of this election is the
fraudulent exit polls on Election Day. Strange as it seems to me, it is well
acknowledged that people are more likely to come out and vote for a winner.
Early exit polls showing Kerry the clear winner could be expected to depress
the vote for Bush.
Stunningly inaccurate exit polls released around noon on Election Day
convinced news anchors, talking heads and even the campaigns that Kerry
would win walking away. But at 9 p.m., when the first actual results began
to come in, the election flipped to Bush. It was the first Kerry flip-flop
that actually served the national interest.
The exit polls were absurd: They showed Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20
points and Bush tied with Kerry in Mississippi. Only monkey business can
explain the wildly pro-Kerry exit polls - admittedly hard to believe with a
party that has behaved so honorably throughout this campaign. Michael Barone
speculates that the sites of exit polling were leaked to the Democrats, and
Democrats sent large numbers of voters to those polls to take exit polls and
throw the results.
But for all their chicanery, vote-stealing, Hollywood starlets, fake polls
and faux patriotism, the Democrats were wiped out on Election Day.
Bush won the largest popular vote in history with a 3.5 million margin.
Indeed, simply by getting a majority of the country to vote for him - the
left's most hated politician since Richard Nixon - Bush did something "rock
star" Bill Clinton never did. Bush maintained or increased his vote in every
state but Vermont. Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate, and
continue to dominate state governorships. Also making history of a sort,
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle lost his election, marking the first time
in half a century a Senate leader has been defeated.
To Michael Moore, George Soros, Terry McAuliffe, Dan Rather, Al Franken and
the whole gang at Air America Radio - you were great, guys! Thanks for the
help! We couldn't have done it without you!
Of course, we could have done it a lot earlier on election night but for
"Boy Genius" Karl Rove. It's absurd that the election was as close as it
was. The nation is at war, Bush is a magnificent wartime leader, and the
night before the election we didn't know if a liberal tax-and-spend, Vietnam
War-protesting senator from Massachusetts would beat him.
If Rove is "the architect" - as Bush called him in his acceptance speech -
then he is the architect of high TV ratings, not a Republican victory. By
keeping the race so tight, Rove ensured that a race that should have been a
runaway Bush victory would not be over until the wee hours of the morning.
As we now know, the most important issue to voters was not terrorism, but
moral values. Marriage amendments won by lopsided majorities in all 11
states where they were on the ballot. Even in Oregon, the state targeted by
gay marriage advocates as their best shot of defeating a marriage amendment,
the amendment passed by 57 percent - a figure noticeable for being larger
than the percentage of votes cast for Bush in Oregon. In the great state of
Mississippi, the marriage amendment passed with 88 percent of the vote.
Seventy percent to 80 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage and
partial-birth abortion. Far from appealing exclusively to a narrow
Republican base, opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the
Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly.
There were marriage amendments on the ballot in Michigan and Ohio. Bush won
Ohio narrowly and lost Michigan by only 2 points. How different might that
have been if Bush hadn't run from the issue.
But Rove concluded Bush should stay mum on gay marriage and partial-birth
abortion - contravening the politicians' rule of thumb: Talk about your
positions that are wildly popular with voters. "Boy Genius" Rove decided
Bush shouldn't even run radio ads on gay marriage, and at the last minute,
Bush started claiming he was in favor of civil unions, just like John Kerry.
Amazingly, it was the Democrats - the ones who support gay marriage - who
used the gay issue for political advantage, most famously when Kerry
gay-baited Mary Cheney during the third debate.
The one toss-up Senate seat lost by the Republicans was Pete Coors in
Colorado, where the Democrats did not hesitate to run commercials of a
bacchanalian gay festival in Canada sponsored by Coors Brewing Co. The most
narrow Republican win in a toss-up Senate race was in Alaska, where the
Republican candidate was another "progressive" on the social issues.
When contemplating a former New York mayor as their next presidential
candidate, Republicans should remember: This election should have been over
sometime in August, not 1 a.m. election night.
Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org
