The Bush Landslide That Wasn’t
By Cliff Kincaid (11/05/04)
It’s hard to argue with success, but the election results indicate that if President Bush and the Republicans had taken a tougher line against the moral pollution of our culture, they would have won by an even larger margin. The passage of anti-homosexual marriage amendments in 11 states—by margins as high as 86 percent and no lower than 57 percent—demonstrates the conservative cultural trend that is now dominant throughout the country. Yet Bush, who opposes homosexual marriage, only captured 51 percent of the national vote.
The lesson is that if Bush had pushed harder against cultural pollution—and the media that contribute to cultural collapse—he could have taken away some of Kerry’s blue states. Michigan and Oregon, which voted for Kerry, passed the anti-homosexual measures by margins of 59 percent and 57 percent respectively. Kerry is pro-homosexual rights and was against the marriage amendments.
The conventional wisdom is that Bush won because the Republican machine got more cultural conservatives and Christians to the polls. But those same results also suggest that Bush may not have done enough to highlight the moral and cultural differences between Kerry and himself. On the campaign trail, Bush highlighted in general terms his stand for family values, and during one debate he explained his support for a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage between a man and a woman. But he did not go out of his way to express support or campaign for those ballot measures.
Bush’s 51 percent margin—versus the much higher percentages in favor of the anti-homosexual measures—can possibly be explained by the belief that some voters may have voted for the anti-homosexual measure on the state level and against the President on other issues, such as the economy or the war. But the cultural conservative trend was so strong—having been cited above the economy and Iraq as a priority issue in exit polls—that it’s also reasonable to suggest that if Bush himself had pressed harder on the values front, he could have brought more voters over to his side and racked up a much larger margin of victory. It could have been a landslide.
The Washington Times notes that the election results are a setback for people like billionaire George Soros, who spent about $24 million to defeat Bush. Soros, who made an issue out of Iraq, has an agenda that includes drug legalization, homosexual and abortion rights, more restrictions on gun rights, and euthanasia. A major funder of the ACLU, Soros operates a financial hedge fund and an international network of companies and foundations that make Halliburton look penny ante.
All of this is anathema to cultural conservatives. Yet neither Bush nor Cheney ever publicly named Soros as a Kerry backer in an effort to draw attention to what was at stake in the election. All Bush did in this regard was to mention Hollywood’s support for Kerry during one of the debates. Kerry himself had described Hollywood as the “heart and soul” of America after disgusting and profane performances by Hollywood celebrities at a Kerry fundraiser. The videotape of the event was never released publicly by the Kerry campaign.
Bush could also have mentioned that Hugh and Christie Hefner, the father-daughter team that runs Playboy, had contributed financially to Kerry’s presidential campaign and several Democrats running for office in 2004. They included Senate candidates Barack Obama in Illinois and Patty Murray in Washington, both of whom won. Christie Hefner also contributed to America Coming Together, the Soros-supported get-out-the-vote group. Another pornographer, Larry Flynt of Hustler, gave $1,000 to the Democratic National Committee in July. In Federal Election Commission records, of course, he is listed simply as a “publisher” from Los Angeles.
Can you imagine what might have happened if the Bush campaign had highlighted financial support for Kerry and the Democrats from the Hefners and Larry Flynt? Or if the role of ACLU ally George Soros in virtually taking over the Democratic Party had been highlighted in a national Bush campaign ad? It was a huge missed opportunity.
The Bush campaign may have been reluctant because such an attack would have generated even more of a media backlash against Bush than was already evident. The media demonstrated their alliance with the Hollywood liberals when demands for release of that videotape of the Kerry fundraiser were met with silence. This was another issue that was ripe for exploitation by a Bush campaign that seemed, in the final analysis, just too timid in confronting the cultural polluters. The campaign said just enough, however, to win. Now is the time for rhetoric to be followed by action. The media will scream, but they—like Kerry—lost the election.
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