Cold Comfort, But Comfort

A little over two months ago, just before the Republic convention, the brilliant, non-left-wing British historian Niall Ferguson wrote a piece ("Republicans for Kerry") in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Bush's re-election would be bad for the Republicans and good for the Democrats. Here is its heartening core:

"It is a mistake..to conceive of each presidential contest as an entirely discrete event, a simple, categorical choice between two individuals, with consequences stretching no further than four years....

"In geopolitical terms, at least, what happens on Nov. 2 will change very little indeed. Yet in other respects -- and particularly in terms of party politics -- the election's consequences could be far-reaching. It is not too much to claim that the result could shape American political life for a decade or more.

"Fourteen years ago, in another English-speaking country, an unpopular and in many respects incompetent conservative leader secured re-election by the narrowest of margins and against the run of opinion polls. His name was John Major and his subsequent period in office, marred as it was by a staggering range of economic, diplomatic and political errors of judgment, doomed the British Conservative Party to (so far) seven years in the political wilderness. I say "so far" because the damage done to the Tories' reputation by the Major government of 1992-1997 was such that there is still no sign whatsoever of its ever returning to power.

"Many Conservatives today would now agree that it would have been far better for their party if Mr. Major had lost the election of 1992....Instead, the next five years were a 1000 kind of Tory dance of death.... All of this provided the perfect seedbed for the advent of New Labour and the election by a landslide of Tony Blair in May 1997. Well, Mr. Blair is still in Downing Street and...seems likely to remain there for some years to come.

"Could something similar be about to happen in the U.S.? In my view, the Bush administration, too, does not deserve to be re-elected. Its idée fixe about regime change in Iraq was not a logical response to the crisis of 9/11. Its fiscal policy has been an orgy of irresponsibility.... It's still all too easy to imagine George Bush, like John Major, scraping home by the narrowest of margins (not least, of course, because Mr. Bush did just that four years ago).

"But then what? The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term could be more damaging to the Republicans and more beneficial to the Democrats than a Bush defeat. If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that "Deficits don't matter") and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Dems will have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out."

Black Is the Color of Mourning

Ah-ha: now we know why New Yorkers have dressed in black all these years: collective precognition.

Keeping Slaves, Killing Indians, Being Republican

If President Bush is re-elected 48 hours from now, he probably will have done so by winning Iowa or Minnesota or Wisconsin, or two of them, or even all three. And I will find that an especially dispiriting aspect of a very dispiriting outcome.

The last Republican presidential candidate to carry Iowa or Wisconsin was President Reagan in 1984, when he won every state except Minnesota -- and Minnesota has not given its electoral votes to a Republican since 1972, in the 49-state Nixon-McGovern landslide. As the German-Scandinavian product of the Republican midwest (Nebraska), I have taken a certain extended-regional pride in the political progressivism of those three German-Scandinavian midwestern states -- not just in the way they vote for president but in the mostly sensible, low-key, fair-minded ways they seem to manage their affairs generally.

And as I have stared at the electoral map these last days and weeks, counting and recounting, I kept returning to another, more expansive basic fact of domestic geopolitical history. Today's ahistorical, anodyne way of stating this fact is that the west (except for the Pacific Coast) and the south are "red," while the northeast, most of the industrial midwest and the Pacific Coast are "blue."

But it strikes me (undoubtedly because I have been reading and thinking a lot about the 1840s and 50s for the last couple of years) that a true, harsh and meaningful way of explaining the red-blue split is this: the more recently that a place permitted slavery or engaged in wars on Indians, the more likely it is to be a Republican state today. Republican states in 2004 are those where slaves were kept or Indians shot during the last 150 years. Democratic states are those where the Indian wars and slavery ended in the first half of the 19th century or earlier. Of course there are conspicuous anomalies -- Indiana (and maybe now Iowa or Wisconsin) on the right, Delaware and Maryland on the left -- as there always are to such "rules."

And does it mean that white southerners and westerners in 2004 are somehow "guiltier" of the historical crimes of slavery and Indian genocide that the rest of white America? Certainly not. But it is...ironic, at least, that white southerners and westerners today tend to feel less obliged to try to compensate somehow for the racist misdeeds of our collective past.

Bipolar Polling Disorder

I have kind of a statistics jones. I wallow in polling data, and there's more than ever this time around. But which should we trust?

Of the major national polls, Fox News and Zogby have both consistently had Bush running most weakly, in neither one ahead by more than 4 percentage points since the beginning of September. And of the major polls, too, during the same period Fox News and Zogby have had the most modest swings in their Bush vs. Kerry point spreads -- ranging from 2 to 4 points ahead for Bush according to Fox, and from even to 4 points ahead for Bush in Zogby. Most of the other best-known polls have had Bush up by an *average* of around 6 points, and by as much as 11 (Time and Newsweek), 14 (CNN/USA Today/Gallup) and 16 (Pew) points. CNN/USA Today/Gallup's numbers zigzag the most crazily: they showed Bush moving up 7 points during the second week of September, down 6 the next week, down another 8 the following week, and now, 2 weeks later, up 8 again.

My strong hunch is that Fox and Zogby have got it closer to right -- that as goofy and mercurial as undecided voters may be, actual individuals are not switching back and forth as wildly as the other polls are depicting.

The most recent Fox News poll (Bush 2 points ahead) is 2 weeks old, but Zogby's latest poll, conducted over the weekend, calls it a 45%-to-45% tie. (By the way, it was Zogby who predicted Kerry's upset victory in the Iowa caucuses, who got the Gore's popular-vote victory right in 2000, and got Clinton's margin over Dole exactly correct in 1996.)

This Is Nothing

This is, for the time being and maybe forever, a hypothetical blog, a placebo blog, at most a nascent blog. I enjoy knowing it's here, gassed up with the key in the ignition, available to me as a vehicle for immediately scribbling down any epiphanies I feel obliged to share with the world. But right now I have no surplus opinions, and not a lot of spare time I want to spend indoors at a computer. So expect weeks, maybe months and possibly years to pass with no posts.