MaroonBlog

On Election Day itself, the commentators might as well be slicing open a goat or consulting the oracle at Delphi. Bush will win if it rains in Ohio. Long lines at polling places are good news for Kerry. If your cat coughs up a fur ball while watching Fox News, that means the election will be thrown into the House of Representatives.

For the pundits, this is the moment to bring out their Gibbon, or their Tocqueville. For the cable news network bookers, this is a moment to try and find this guy Gibbon everybody is talking about (de Tocqueville sounds like he might have a foreign accent), a time to discover that he has been dead for 200 years, and a time to settle for Douglas Brinkley instead. Details are out, generalities are in.
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Columnists in a mood to show off no longer assert that the Nebraska Republican primary holds the key to everything. Instead they assert that the election's meaning cannot be grasped until it is understood that the vote was, in its essence, a referendum on whether life has any meaning and that the conclusion was a ringing "perhaps."
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After a year or more of this election campaign, you may feel like you're drowning in the triviality of it all. Just hold out for two more days, and you'll be swept up in history.

Then you'll really be sorry.

Themistocles, Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War,
X squared, Y squared,
H2SO4.
Who for? What for?
Who we gonna yell for?
GO, MAROONS!

As I have said before, I wish this election weren't so important. But I'm afraid it is. If the Americans elected John Kerry in, oh, 1992 or 1996, that would be one thing. If they elect him in 2004 — that will tell us something disheartening.

A little story: Some time ago, England had what was called "the Metric Martyr." This was a fellow — a grocer or a butcher, I forget which — who sold his goods in imperial measures: pounds, ounces, etc. But because England is now beholden to Brussels, he was prosecuted for not using the metric system (hence, Metric Martyr).

I asked our senior editor David Pryce-Jones (a Brit), "How could the British people permit this? I mean, it's their system — the imperial system, or the English system — to begin with." David answered, "The British people wouldn't permit it. The question is whether they remain the British people."

I have thought about that story in the last few weeks.

What George W. Bush is doing now is hard, often unpopular, and right. Will the Americans give him another term, so as to finish the job, or at least further it significantly? It could make a great difference in how history views him. Of course, it could also make a great difference in how history proceeds.

I published a letter containing the old wisdom, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for life." Another reader wrote, "I think the more appropriate line about fishing is, 'Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll try to replace you with someone who'll give him fish every day.'"

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq eliminated a criminal regime that tortured and killed on a massive scale, used its oil money to buy foreign officials and illegal technology, and did not recently manufacture or stockpile the chemical weapons it flagrantly used 15 years ago on Iraqi Kurds and Iranian soldiers.

All of those elements need to be taken into account by voters as the presidential campaign thrashes its way to resolution. Each campaign urges the electorate to buy its incomplete version of Iraq, past and present, rather than consider the total, uneven reality of that country.

The Bush administration cannot avoid the responsibility for having conflated Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and ties to terrorism into an urgent threat to U.S. citizens and interests in 2003. The final report of the Iraq Survey Group delivered by Charles A. Duelfer establishes that the Bush case was seriously overstated in that respect. The fact that the invasion enabled us to know this conclusively goes largely unmentioned.

But the emerging emphasis on what the Iraqi dictator did not do -- an emphasis being pushed by the Kerry campaign -- rushes past the lasting importance of what Hussein did do against his own people, his neighbors and the international community. He does not deserve next year's Nobel Peace Prize for not providing al Qaeda with operational support that could be detected by a less-than-perfect CIA.

The moral responsibility that the United States, the United Nations and others continue to bear for turning a blind eye to the gangster behavior of Baghdad for so long must not be obscured in the election-year blizzard of self-interested facts, semi-facts and distortions. No statue of limitations, explicit or implicit, should be extended to war crimes and corruption of the enormity of those committed by the Baathist regime.

Conservatism rose in the aftermath of Johnson's Great Society, but skepticism about government is in the nation's genetic code. Micklethwait and Wooldridge note that in September 1935, during the Depression, Gallup polling found that twice as many Americans said FDR's administration was spending too much as said it was spending the right amount, and barely one person in 10 said it was spending too little.

After FDR's 1936 reelection, half of all Democrats polled said they wanted FDR's second term to be more conservative. Only 19 percent wanted it to be more liberal. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won while excoriating "big government," America had lower taxes, a smaller deficit as a percentage of GDP and a less-enveloping welfare state than any other industrialized Western nation.

America, say Micklethwait and Wooldridge, is among the oldest countries in the sense that it has one of the oldest constitutional regimes. Yet it is "the only developed country in the world never to have had a left-wing government." And given the country's broad and deep conservatism, it will not soon.

it also would be foolish to discount the advances Afghanistan has made in the past three years. Not only has most of the country enjoyed relative peace during that time, but per capita incomes have doubled, millions of children -- including most girls -- have returned to school, and infant mortality and other health measures have improved. Kabul and other cities are booming, a national road network is under construction and 3 million refugees have returned home. Mr. Karzai recently ousted two of the most powerful warlords from their governmental positions, and about a quarter of the militia members around the country have been demobilized.