NO SOONER had George Bush won re-election yesterday than his victory seemed strangely inevitable. Something had stabilised. Democracy had performed as expected. The incumbent won. The nice guy won. The commander in chief in time of war won. Guns, God and a large slice of apple pie won. Whoever thought it would be otherwise?
The result has devastated the Democrats, if only because they thought that this election was in the bag. Instead, East Coasters who swore they would emigrate if Mr Bush kept the White House had better leave. Liberals who feared a lurch to the right under a Bush Supreme Court must retreat to fortress San Francisco. Europeans who could not believe that the Americans would confirm a unilateralist warmonger in office must understand that this is just what they have done. Mr Bush’s victory may have been narrow, but so are most presidential elections. He has the biggest popular vote in history, a majority and a strengthened Republican legislature. That is legitimacy.
Observers of American elections were once told to remember the maxim, “It’s the economy, stupid”. Americans vote with their pocket books. Yet Tuesday’s exit polls showed Mr Kerry ahead on the economy and on jobs. He was ahead on the war in Iraq. He initially claimed the bulk of the new voters. His “ground game” in boosting registration by 20 million was supposedly a clincher. Shrewd observers predicted a landslide.
Mr Bush countered with a different maxim, that America outside the big cities will respond to a conservative text forcefully conveyed. He had Mr Kerry always on the defensive on the war on terrorism and the so-called sleeper issue of the “culture wars”. Backed by the authority of office, the President mined a rich seam of suburban fear, fear of Muslim fundamentalism, fear of another 9/11 and fear of a Democratic moral collapse, led by abortion, embryo research, gay marriage and liberal Supreme Court judges.
Republican advertisements were relentless. Wolves emerged from forests to threaten American families. Mr Kerry was a vacillator. Yes, he had served in Vietnam but his service was somehow wrong: he questioned its leadership. Above all hovered the 9/11 trauma, galvanised by ridiculous security scares and precautions. Republican spokesmen plumbed the depths in calling the latest Osama bin Laden tape a virtual “endorsement of John Kerry”. Be afraid America, said Mr Bush, don’t risk a Kerry presidency.
It worked. The bin Laden tape endorsed George Bush. It echoed the moment when he was transformed from halting, insecure President to the decisive leader of a battered nation. Not just America but the whole world was behind him. True, he blew that gain. His bombing of Kabul failed to catch bin Laden and alienated the Middle East. His sponsorship of the neocon expedition to Iraq led him into public mendacity and the most inept occupation of a foreign state in modern times. Mr Bush left America not just isolated but seeming arrogant and incompetent.
Yet the President turned these failings to his advantage. He converted foreign policy failure into domestic success by making a virtue of security. He welded the war in Iraq to 9/11 and to some undefined war against invisible enemies. America is a deeply militaristic nation. It has an armed establishment of some two million people, with reservists in every community. No city is without a large and well-staffed military base. Hence the bond that links elected leader with head of state and commander in chief. All this Mr Bush understood and exploited.
Europeans have always underrated Mr Bush, not for his foreign policy but for his domestic appeal. His performance during the campaign was smooth. He related easily to crowds, even those with whom he had no more in common than his equally patrician opponent. He spoke in the vernacular, in short phrases which made audiences laugh and feel at ease. Polls showed him as Wal-Mart to Mr Kerry’s Starbucks.
This appeal to the white proletariat was reinforced by a third force, America’s movement ever westwards and outwards from the urban concentrations of Democrat strength. The election night maps were stark. Mr Kerry was stuck in Old America, essentially the Yankee states of the Civil War. This week saw the Confederates’ revenge. A Massachusetts senator was defeated by a coalition of the South, the Bible Belt, the “heartlands”, conservatism and states rights. Mr Kerry could not even win Ohio. The power of organised labour is supplanted by the power of organised suburbia.
Far from delivering Mr Kerry niche votes, the liberal lobbies in places such as New York and California terrorised middle America. The Governor of Nebraska remarked archly that “on values Democrats were non-competitive in the heartland”. The 11 states voting on gay marriage laws rejected them. Roughly half of Americans want abortion banned, punishments made more severe and “moral values” entrenched in the Constitution. That half is now ascendant. The liberal horror of a Bush Supreme Court as a council of biblical ayatollahs has a ring of truth to it. There was talk yesterday of Democrats needing to take a leaf from Tony Blair’s book. If so, it will have to be new Democrat, Old Testament.
Mr Bush’s election will give the rest of the world a collective heart attack. It expected Mr Kerry to win. At very least it expected Americans somehow to rein in a man its sees as naive and dangerously belligerent, with views it finds hard to distinguish from the fundamentalism he so opposes. Americans declined to rein him in. They legitimised him. The rest of the world has been roundly snubbed.
I wrote two weeks ago that a second-term Mr Bush might soften his pitch. He might stop flirting with the neoconservative cabal and look to his legacy. He must know that Iraq is a fiasco and would be better placed than Mr Kerry to disengage fast. Iraq was his war and he could more easily present withdrawal as victory. At the same time sheer reality should distance him from the Pentagon crazies and their sabre-rattling over Iran and elsewhere. Having won re-election, I argued, Mr Bush could pull in his horns and restore good relations with the world. Why go down in history as a defeated commander in chief, with a revived Democratic Party dancing on your grave?
I still incline to that view. Scaremongering cannot sustain a nation’s mission or offer it a plausible narrative. The war on terrorism is like those on drugs or poverty, a term of political relativism. Mr Bush must surely grapple with America’s health and social services and contain the soaring budget deficit. Right-wing Republicans may glory in their global ostracism — in language that often recalls South Africa’s Afrikaners — but this cannot last.
Such a scenario depends heavily on how Mr Bush treats his new ascendancy, and especially on his first appointments. His broken-backed Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is expected to depart. But if he retains the Pentagon team and fails to curb the Bourbon Vice-President, Dick Cheney, the world will have a second heart attack. It is one thing for Mr Bush to play the fear card in the Midwest, quite another to use it to justify another American blitzkrieg in the Middle East.
Whatever Mr Bush’s true motives in Iraq, he has failed utterly to sell his crusade to the world. It is not seen as to do with freedom and democracy, but as a cover for commercial gain and the defence of Israel. The world would prefer to handle terrorist gangs its own way, without Mr Bush’s blundering Marines and Guantanamo Bay. If the President means to spend the next four years still bombing Arabs and financing warlords, a mighty falling out of allies seems certain. The world does not accept that moral ends justify immoral means. No election victory will change that.
Mr Kerry may have lost the war, but he won this argument. Neither a president nor even a majority of the American people can rule the world alone. Perhaps in Mr Bush’s second term they will no longer try.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
