OPINION: It's a good rule of thumb that so-called "moderate opinion" is several degrees to the left of popular opinion. You can test this easily: pick a subject such as, say, illegal immigration and compare the position of every Democratic senator, the majority of Republican Senators and 90 per cent of the US media with the position of the American people, writes Mark Steyn
That's why the press were befuddled by last week's polls. A month of disaffected terrorism guru Richard Clarke, the preening 9/11 Commission, a soi-disant controversial new book from Bob Woodward, Moqtada al-Sadr, Falluja and Basra, and a constant drip-drip-drip of conventional wisdom on the President's "vulnerability" - and what happens? Bush's numbers go up and Kerry's go down.
Another six weeks of Dick Clarke's book tour, of snotty network reporters condescending to the President at his press conference, of showboating hacks badgering Condi Rice at Congressional hearings, of Bob Woodward and his unreadable book filling up slabs of CNN's primetime every night with irrelevant arcana about what did Prince Bandar know and when did he tell Woodward he knew it, another six weeks of things that make Bush "vulnerable" and he'd be heading for a 49-state blowout over Kerry.
Don't get me wrong - America's still a 50/50 nation. That's to say, 50 per cent of the nation backs Bush, and the other 50 per cent either loathe him, are undecided, or aren't yet paying attention to Campaign '04.
The problem for John Kerry is that he and the networks and the New York Times are finding it all but impossible to make any dent in the Bush half. If it is a 50/50 nation, one side's 50 per cent is pretty solid and the other's a lot softer.
How can this be? Well, let's turn to our senior political analyst, the late Osama bin Laden. In his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago, Osama famously observed that, when people have a choice between a strong horse and a weak horse, they go with the strong horse. But, to take that a stage further, the strong horse doesn't have to be that strong when the other fellow's flogging a dead horse.
The 9/11 Commission? Nobody cares. You can't drive the car when you're staring in the rear-view mirror. And, as those polls showed, if Americans are forcibly plonked in front of that rear-view mirror, they lay more blame on eight years of Clinton administration policy than eight months of Bush administration policy.
WMD? Another dead horse. Whether you were pro-war or anti-war had nothing to do with WMD. Bush thought Saddam had 'em, but so did the French, Germans and Russians, and they were all anti-war. For most pro-war Americans, the need to whack Saddam was more important than the pretext on which he was whacked. He was unfinished business from September 10th.
That's why even the old quagmire scenario now playing 24/7 on the cable channels doesn't work for Kerry. Visiting foreigners often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan, usually emblazoned below a proud American flag: "These Colours Don't Run."
For a quarter-century, the presumption of the country's enemies was that those colours did run - they ran from Vietnam, from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, from Mogadishu. Even the successful campaigns - the inconclusively concluded Gulf War and the air-only Kosovo war - seemed designed to avoid putting those colours in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, those colours ran from the African embassy bombings and the Khobar towers, and he expected them to run from 9/11, too.
A narrow majority of Americans get this: being seen not to run - or, if you prefer, being seen to show "resolve" - is now an indispensable objective of US foreign policy. So, when four contractors get lynched and hung off a bridge in Fallujah, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd may think it's time for an "exit strategy", but most Americans want to see the thugs who did it hunted down. One day it will not be necessary to sell "These Colours Don't Run" T-shirts. But it is as long as Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore and co. are twitching to add Iraq to the pock-marked pantheon of Vietnam, Iran, and Somalia.
The left resists this analysis. "Resolve", they say, may sound macho but it's also simplistic. Not necessarily. In today's phony-baloney world, nuanced inertia is the simple choice, the default mode of international diplomacy, of the UN and the EU. When you dig into what's holding up American resolve on Iraq, the people seem to be making more subtle distinctions than their elites.
Thus, the President's numbers aren't affected by the sob-sisters of CNN's Baghdad bureau filing their heartrending reports on how thousands of Baathist apparatchiks haven't been paid since they were made redundant from Saddam's Department of Genital Mutilation and Electrode Clamping last April. US public opinion is hard-headed about this: the welfare of the Iraqi people is a bonus, but the welfare of the American people is the primary objective. That's why the US went to war.
That's the problem for the Democrats. If "resolve" is the issue, can you beat it with "nuance"? If I had to name the definitive Kerry campaign headline it would be this, from the Associated Press last week: "Kerry Says His 'Family' Owns SUV, Not He." Below it was a long explanation from the candidate on how that gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban in the yard was nothing to do with him. Who you gonna believe? A environmental crusader or your lying eyes?
His statement is true in the sense that his "family" (i.e. his ketchup- heiress missus Teresa) also owns the house and the grounds. But it's hard to claim that your powers of diplomatic persuasion would have won over the French and Germans when you can't even win over your "family". And do Americans want to hand over responsibility for Iraq to someone who won't even take responsibility for the car in his driveway?