On Wednesday, November 7, 2012, I woke up early, 3:30 according
to the small cell phone I use instead of a watch and that Oumi says
no one would bother to steal because it is not a smart phone. I
said someone might steal it to get some calls in and she allowed
there was that.
Most mornings I turn on the computer downstairs between grilling
some vegetables and boiling some coffee which she takes to her job
which starts early but on the 7th I did not even glance at the
computer. I made some coffee, weaker than used to be my wont
because for the first time in her life Oumi, what with long hours
of work and school, has taken up coffee but she cannot take it
strong. I was on my second cup and checking the seasoning on her
food when she came down showered and dressed and gave me a kiss.
She did not say anything except, Who won? I said I did not know, I
fell asleep. When you rise before dawn you tend to go to sleep
earlier than used to be your wont. She nodded, showing neither
surprise nor disappointment that I did not know who would be
president of the United States.
When I dozed off a few hours earlier, the television was off,
and I remembered a vague image of a split screen with a news anchor
wearing a suit and sitting at a table talking to a reporter in what
looked like a rumpled fashionable suit who was standing somewhere
with an earpiece and holding a microphone and saying it was too
close to call in I forget which county of a state out there
somewhere. Much attention was focused on Ohio, I now recalled, as
well as Florida. Pennsylvania had been called for the incumbent not
much earlier and that was when I had decided I was not going to try
to stay up late and I knew I was not going to turn on the news when
I woke up in the morning. It was going to be a very bad day.
Most of the conservatives had been calling it for the governor
since early October when he clobbered the incumbent in the first
debate, but they did not notice, or they did not say they noticed
from tact or superstition, that his follow up was feeble. They said
he was following a strategy of staying calm and serene and
reassuring, or what they like to call presidential. A small number
thought that was not enough, he ought to follow up the debate
performance with attacks on the foreign policy disasters of the
incumbent administration, hammering away especially at the fiasco
in Libya on September 11. The governor and his aides thought that
would sound shrill and even suggest to some voters called
independents whose minds might not yet be made up that he was
reckless and trigger happy and was planning to get us into more
trouble overseas. Surely there was a way to say it was the
president who was getting us into trouble overseas by a policy of
systematic and even deliberate weakness of which the murder of our
ambassador in Libya was the all-too-grim evidence.
This paper and the Weekly Standard and some editorial
pages said this and puzzled over the dissembling not to say
dishonest response from the White House. The president could not
react, quickly or slowly, for the simple reason that he still did
not understand the nature of the global contest we are engaged in
and the characteristics of our enemies. His staff and high
officials sought lame excuses to avoid saying specifically that an
act of war had killed Americans and we were treating it as a tragic
error. The governor should have pointed this out, to greatest
effect during the second debate, when he had the opportunity and a
huge audience, but he did not. With neither candidate making an
issue of Benghazi, it could not have much weight in most voters’
minds, if they still needed to make them up. Possibly, as the
governor’s men evidently calculated, foreign policy was of little
or no consequence to the electoral arithmetic at this point, and
they may well have been right. But having gambled and lost, they
will be second guessed for a long time on this one. And the
Republic’s security, for four more years, will be in even greater
jeopardy than it is already.
We now face a grim prospect. We must dig in and resist for
another full presidential term and try to limit the damage the
socialists wish to wreak on the country and its institutions, not
to say its spirit and character. Character is fundamentally an
innate trait, almost genetic. But in a curious way, leaders, in
democracies no less than in tyrannies albeit in different ways, set
an example of character and it carries, and young people and
children are marked by its misty influence, four years, eight
years. Mr. Kristol quoted Yeats. “…For how can you compete,/Being
honor bred, with one/Who were it proved he lies/Were neither shamed
in his own/Nor in his neighbors’ eyes…” (Mr. Kristol references
the whole poem, “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” on
the WS page.)
On the domestic side of the American dream, the Democrats
already have their health program, which has been weakened, notably
with a number of opt-out provisions. They will return to it with a
vengeance, strengthen it and thereby weaken our economy, lessen the
creative incentives in our medical research establishments, and
endanger the healthiness of many if not most Americans. How can you
advance health in a society by replacing doctors with
administrators, laboratory researchers with tax collectors?
They have announced a vast immigration reform without giving
much in the way of specific details, but it can be surmised their
intention is to produce a huge new bloc of voters — amnestied
illegal aliens and fresh contingents of new arrivals — that will
assure future electoral victories. In this perspective, the
conservative side is forced to resist massive and rapid
legalization of residents who will vote against them, even though
they are often people, quite possibly most often, who hold to many
of the same virtues the conservatives are trying to preserve,
enterprise, hard work, community and family, independence. But of
course life is not abstract, and you may be hard working and
striving for the opportunity of the American dream, but if you are
poor and worried about your family, you do not see a contradiction
between that and relying on the state for your health, your housing
subsidy, your children’s education, and all the other gifts the
left will offer to accompany immigration reform, all in the name,
of course, of making assimilation easier (which it will not, on the
contrary).
Politically, it will be difficult for conservatives not to
appear defensive, reactionary, and mean-spirited. Perhaps their
best bet therefore is to embrace these very traits and find a way
to turn them into virtues, stating that there is no merit in
compounding bad policies with worse, and they are not against
immigrants but politicized immigration policy, just as they are
open to every pragmatic scheme to render manageable the economics
of health care, but draw the line at socialized medicine which will
serve no health-giving purpose.
It will take clarity and courage and we do not know yet whether
the Republicans have the men — and the women — with these traits,
particularly in the demoralized state they are bound to fall into
as the invigorated administration gets going after the second
inauguration and the reality of at least four more years in the
wilderness sets in.
True, the wilderness is not entirely bleak. The Republicans did
well in the House, though they failed to convert several chances to
make gains in the Senate, where there will remain a Democratic
majority whose leadership would convert it from a prudent council
into a rubber stamping chamber for the executive. Republicans have
two alternatives at the federal level: They can play a hard line
game, obstructing every single program, appointee, and initiative
the administration makes that is not designed to promote policies
they favor, and offer alternatives of their own at every turn; or
they can play the bipartisan game and try to govern the country and
direct its foreign policy in concert with the administration.
Unless the president has a road-to-Damascus moment between now
and the first few months, or even weeks, of his second term, we can
be certain the second course is futile, worse: a program to
discredit the Republicans as a useless opposition party of
opportunists and me-too men. The party should remember that the
socialists have been failing for four years and have brought the
country to the brink of very long-term, if not irreversible —
nothing is irreversible — decay and weakness. By having no part of
policies that will serve only to make matters worse, while
explaining to the American people that the American promise lives,
they will win the argument that failed during this year’s
campaign.
This failure should not be the cause of discouragement. Of
course it is unfortunate and disturbing, but if you choose to take
part in public affairs, you do not have the option of being
discouraged. If you think you have, that is of course your right,
but you should find something else to do, quite possibly more
useful, such as launching a tennis school or writing children’s
stories. Whether it is a wise choice is not the point: if you are
in public life, you have to function on the assumption that you
will prevail, or you are simply cheating your fellow citizens.
The Republicans, particularly the conservatives among them, may
reproach themselves for tactical mistakes and strategic errors.
They should examine their consciences and ask whether personal
ambition did not too often get in the way of party unity and
tactical soundness. They should reform their primary system and
find a way to avoid the sort of demagogy that, in fact, opened the
door to the lowest kind of class-war demagogy by the Democrats,
which evidently they used successfully.
The democratic cookie crumbles in its own odd way, and even with
the country sociologically somewhere to the right of center, even
with capital L liberalism dead in the water, as Mr. Tyrrell has
written and as liberals themselves prove every time they do or say
something, the political game throws up results that by definition
have to disappoint as often as they reward.
But I would write all this later. Now work and life and striving
beckoned, and I would think about a few sets of tennis indoors and
some work on my ‘91 Ford truck.
It is your country, Oumi said, packing up my gourmet grilled
vegetables and pouring some coffee into a small thermos. It is
yours too, I replied. Hard working little economic women like you
will keep it great and free. Thank you for rising with me, she
said. Would I miss a chance to be awake with you? She kissed me by
way of reply and spoke a true American verse, There is always
another day.
