It was everything they thought we wanted to hear, carefully choreographed, with packaged sound bites delivered by the party's intellectual elite. But their "me too" platform made the delegates wince. And draping themselves in the stars and stripes was neither becoming for their constituents or credible to the undecided voter.

Although their repeated refrain echoed "We can do better," there was no mention of the fact that: the unemployment rate today (@ 5.5%) is lower than it was in 1996 (6.2%); that the inflation rate today (@ 1.9%) is lower than it was in 1996 (2.6%); that mortgage rates today (@ 5.86%) are lower than they were in 1996 (7.81%); it was Bill Clinton who made "regime change" in Iraq the official US policy; and the Defense of Marriage Act, which Kerry voted against, was signed into law by Clinton.

Then came the finale, with John Kerry "reporting for duty." But after making his 4-month tour of duty in Viet Nam the center-piece of his campaign, Democratic nominee, Senator Kerry, had precious little to say during the convention about his anti-war activity or his liberal 20-year voting record since then. Instead he postured as a centrist by espousing conservative policy nuances and more high-brow campaign promises. Yet the stark differences remain between what candidate Kerry says and what Senator Kerry has done.

So this month we review the demands of the Faustian pact that all but required pure theater at the Democratic National Convention. We begin with "For John Kerry: No Memory, No Shame, No Bump," an insightful review of the "cosmetic convention" by Richard Davis. This is followed by "Why the Dems Will Lose," a prescient commentary by Michael Novak on why reacquiring power will remain elusive. Next we reveal why the left must continue thier charade in "Liberals Can't Level," by Thomas Sowell. And last but not least, we end with a contrasting piece that addresses "What it means to be a Republican," provided by the RNC web site.

Before signing away his soul to the devil in exchange for power, Faust, the hero of Medieval legend, expressed his indescribable discontent this way, "Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breasts, and one is striving to forsake his brother." This same tempest rages within the heart of the Democratic Party today. Like Faust, who ultimately found redemption, we pray that our liberal opposition also listens to their better angels before it's too late.

Roy Tanner



For John Kerry: No Memory, No Shame, No Bump
By Richard Davis
August 4, 2004

Polls can some times renew your faith in your fellow citizens. The new USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll on the presidential race is one of those times. Kerry not only didn't get the traditional popularity bump from the convention, he actually lost ground to Bush, an almost unheard of scenario. Other polls show a very slight Kerry bump, but if CNN says a liberal from their own party lost ground, that's credible enough for me.

Which also proves that the mainstream media once again got it all wrong. If you had watched any news outlet, including Fox, on Thursday or Friday you would have thought Kerry's speech rivaled the Gettysburg's Address in effectiveness, and that the convention had been an overwhelming success. Didn't the delegates all cheer like crazy? Journalists heard the applause and saw balloons, and that was the story they wanted. Brokaw, Rather and Jennings were positively orgasmic. Print media universally presented a glowing report. If Gallup had polled the media alone (not a bad idea, actually), Kerry would have had an amazing bump, and every news outlet would have led with that story beginning Sunday night.

But were journalists even paying attention? New York Times columnist David Brooks said he was initially impressed with Kerry's performance, then he looked at what Kerry actually said. "I should never have gone back and read the speech again," Brooks wrote in his column. "What an incoherent disaster. When you actually read for content, you see that the speech skirts almost every tough issue and comes out on both sides of every major concern." It's too much to expect today's journalists to listen for content. (How many of them have even bothered to read the speech? How many have the ability to read it critically?)

Only conservative pundits on the radio and the internet seemed to notice that the would-be emperor had forgotten a few clothes. Newt Gingrich called the speech "profoundly dishonest." Thomas Sowell talked in his column about the "camouflaging" of facts and "orchestrated disinformation." Several National Review writers trashed the speech, and bloggers emptied both barrels into the whole charade. (Imagine this campaign or life after 9/11 without the internet.)

The only question was how would viewers react? The Kerry campaign is built entirely with smoke and mirrors. It's cornerstone, one of the low points in American politics, has been the shameless effort to portray Kerry as a war hero who deserves to be elected for military service alone. Forget that he served just four months. Forget the war crimes he admits to committing. Forget the suspicious flesh wounds. Forget the lies and slander against his fellow soldiers. Forget the trashing of medals. Most of all, forget the atrocious voting record.

Are Americans really as stupid as Democrats think they are? This entire hero hypocrisy--and Kerry's handlers know this is pure theater and simply don't care--has only two cynical purposes, to bash Bush and deflect attention from Kerry's voting record on defense. Bring out more flags. Say "strength" as many times as possible. Surround yourself with veterans (the ones who aren't calling you a fake and a liar). Just don't mention the 30 years since you got that last scratch on your ass.

If nothing else, the convention was a nice set up for Hilary's 2008 rescue plan, which involves a defeat in November, a party in disarray and a white horse. The disarray shouldn't be a problem. Despite the masquerade party in Boston, Democrats are badly fractured, a party loosed from its center, controlled now by an uneasy coalition of fringe groups and far-left money. When Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton are your moral compasses, you're lost.

Democrats can only pretend to be a party of consensus by deliberately disguising themselves in public. Delegates were actually instructed to dissemble before the cameras, or at the very least to keep quite. Appear normal. Imagine how distasteful that flag-waving display truly was to most of the delegates in that hall. When you'll fake patriotism, which you've disparaged and shunned like leprosy for three years, you're a party with some ethical (and psychological) issues. Where were the Christian hymns? Why not parade in some non-aborted babies in red-white-and-blue diapers for the cameras?

The party's much-vaunted centrism is little more than memory and contrivance. And that spells trouble. If the hate and radicalism that motivate the fringe groups drive away the Democrat's predominately female base, its silent center, the party's over. That is, unless Hilary can rally the girls for one last hurrah. I'd like to see her ballot in November.

Rhetorically speaking, the convention exhibited all the eloquence of a junior high pep rally. Someone should explain what microphones do. Only Teresa managed a more sedated delivery, though no one has had the courage yet to ask her just what it was she was trying to say. Shove it, merci.

Angry excess is all this party has left. Preach against incivility in politics, lie about what you said moments later and then tell a polite questioner to "shove it." Apologize? For what? Let's only hope that someday all women will be able to say shove it and be called smart and well-informed like men. Now be a darling and run out to the limo and get my pills.

Democrats believe that calling their opponents hate-mongers actually demonstrates that they're just the opposite. They're civil. Ask why conservatives are hate-mongers and its doubtful you'll even get an answer. Thus Kerry responds to all criticism with name-calling. The questioner is just being negative and divisive. John Edwards tells the convention how much he opposes the "tired, old, hateful negative politics of the past." Such as? Michael Moore unleashes a sick tirade against Republican "hate-triots," who get up each morning "trying to figure out" which minority group they're going to screw. There's something very ugly taking hold of the left.

Of course, calling your opponent names is just one way to avoid addressing issues and your own shortcomings (it also plays into liberals' obsession with portraying themselves as victims). Since Democrats can't say aloud what they really believe, they resort to righteous indignation. Buy truckloads of flags and call yourself the party of security and defense. Who are they kidding? Demand better education, but just don't mention that liberal Democrats have had a literal stranglehold on American education for over 30 years. Now, a trillion dollars or so later, no parent, black or white, wants to send her children to their schools. Racism? Just reverse it and pontificate like MLK on steroids. Will black Democrats ever leave Selma? Can they even imagine anywhere else to go?

For all the volume, the convention was remarkably dispassionate. Not even Jesse Jackson could fire up the usual bombast. No one believed what they were saying. Think of the concerns closest to their hearts which they couldn't even mention: abortion, affirmative action, gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes, defense cuts, political correctness, open immigration, judicial activism, multiculturalism, welfare, etc. Those issue define Democrats, but they're no longer part of their public discourse. They can't be.

And that's the Democratic dilemma today. They can't say what they believe--and how dare you even ask!--and hiding what they think behind flags and balloons only works on some of the people some of the time. Apparently, by today's poll numbers, that time has run out.



Why the Dems Will Lose
And why they'll be disconsolate.

You know how Democrats hate Bush now? How will they hate him when they lose to him on November 2 by three or four percentage points?

One of the political commentators I admire most for his astuteness said yesterday that the paroxysm of hatred the Democrats have been indulging for the last six months is the worst American political delusion he has seen in his entire life.

What will it be like if after all this hatred, all this effort, all those millions upon millions of dollars spent to express disdain, contempt, and hate Bush wins again, flashes a victory symbol over his head, grins, strides around shaking hands, glows with exuberance and radiance?

For Democrats, losing is much worse than for Republicans. For Democrats, the purpose of democracy is to milk government for ever more abundant benefits. Republicans in principle believe in limited government, and thus in a certain way they do even better out of power than when they must exercise it. Democrats without power suffer much more. Democrats go listless, purposeless.

In a minority, Democrats are fairly useless creatures. In victory, they cultivate grand visions of benefits to be shaken from government largesse; defeat, however, freezes the core of their being. Democratic defeat defies the natural order. For them, history halts. What had been an onward rushing tide swirls round and round, becoming still.

So loss at any time (as in 2000) is almost inadmissible by Democrats. But a loss in 2004, particularly a solid loss, will be for them a disaster beyond imagination. Such recriminations there will be. Some will blame the "centrism" of the Kerry team, and the much-resented repression of the Left. Some will come to see the isolation in which the widespread paroxysms of hatred and contempt for George Bush blindly thrust them. Some will see that the core ideologies of the Left are faultily drawn in economics, their attraction to a kind of governmental centralization, and their antipathy to capitalism, the market, corporations, and job creators. They claim to love employees while hating their employers, a self-defeating cycle. In matters of culture, others will see that the left-wing's sexual ethic and religious sensibility are too far out of tune with the American people. Nonetheless, one can predict that both in economics and in culture, others will try to drive the party more leftward still.

In any case, it would be wise to get ready for the coming cataclysm.In 2004, I see six reasons why the Democratic goose is cooked:

1. No one, neither his colleagues nor his wife nor his supporters nor he himself, has anything good to say about John Kerry except that he served bravely in Vietnam. The nearly 30 years since then have generated few boasts on his part, few commendations from others, few successes anyone can seem to remember.

2. The Democratic elite sitting in convention cannot present themselves as they are to the American people, but must stifle their deepest feelings, be silent about their most passionate aims, and hide their turbulent loathing of George Bush Republicans (lest it frighten independents with its ferocity). The Democratic elite is saying as little as possible about same-sex marriage. And guns. And very little about abortion. And not a word about total withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, quite the opposite. Democratic elites do not want the people to know what they really think. On that ground, they fear they will lose.

3. Democrats must hide from the public what they truly think about evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Catholics. They express these thoughts mostly among themselves.

4. John Kerry looks sillier in the pale blue NASA rabbit suit than Michael Dukakis did in a tank.

5. The months of April, May, and June were so heavy with bad news for George Bush -- the huge Sorosian expenditures on anti-Bush ads came at him in torrents -- and still he held even with Kerry in the polls. It is hard not to believe that there will be at least a slight change in the roaring winds. When it comes (and the change is already underway), it is bound to push Bush's sails steadily ahead as the weeks roll on.

6. The worst lies told by the Democrats about Bush -- those of Joe Wilson, Michael Moore, and others, saying that Bush lied about Iraq -- have already been proven wrong by the 9/11 Commission (which was supposed to blow Bush out of the water just before the election, but ended up destroying his worst calumniators). These lies were also proven wrong by the British inquiry. Even the Kerry Convention in Boston ended up taking the Bush strategic line in Iraq, except for one thing: Kerry is wistful about the probability of persuading France and Germany to bear some burden on behalf of liberty in Iraq. Good luck! God knows, Bush and Colin Powell tried.

Finally, there is the matter of faith, even of the sort Tom Paine showed in 1776. Paine was no Christian, but he did believe that God had created this vast and splendid universe in order to share His friendship with free women and free men, and for this reason the Creator put freedom at the core of things. Tom Paine had no tolerance for the Bible, and less for Biblical fundamentalists, but he was not so much an atheist, he wrote, as to believe that the Almighty Who made the universe for liberty would allow the cause of people willing to die for it to come to naught. Paine couldn't bring himself to believe that God would favor George III.

In that same spirit, I find it hard to believe that the Creator who gave us liberty will ignore President Bush's willingness to sacrifice his own presidency for the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq -- their 50 million citizens, and perhaps their progeny for ages to come. A kind of cosmic justice (which does not always materialize, I recognize) calls for vindication. Especially when the president has been so unfairly calumniated by his foes, domestic and foreign.

In accepting the nomination of his party Thursday night, John Kerry could not quite bring himself to give both the president and the volunteer military who performed so well some credit for this great and significant advance for human liberty. The theme of liberty in the Muslim world belongs to George Bush. It was he who named liberty the only real alternative to terrorism.

"With a firm reliance on Divine Providence," to cite our forebears once again, Bush has publicly held that one cannot fight terrorism merely by killing terrorists. One must provide an alternative of liberty, prosperity, and opportunity -- one must labor to build free societies where they do not now exist. Liberty works. I think Bush will win because these are the truths Americans hold.

Bush believes these truths. At this moment, the Democrats (who used to believe them, nobly so) do not even see their relevance. Kerry spoke well about patriotism, the international leadership of America, and liberty -- but he seems willfully blind to the relevance of these beautiful ideals to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terrorism. For such ideals and purposes some 900 young Americans of this generation have laid down their lives. They will be thanked by generations yet unborn.

So will their commander-in-chief.

Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is http://www.michaelnovak.net/.



Liberals can't level
Thomas Sowell
August 8, 2004

Sometimes little things can tell you about big things.

While Senator John Kerry and his running-mate Senator John Edwards were recently being photographed at lunchtime at Wendy's, to show what regular guys they are, their real lunch was from a local yacht club, which is more their speed in real life.

There is nothing wrong with eating lunch from or at a yacht club. What is wrong is being phony -- and thinking that the American people need to be conned.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President four times while never pretending to be anything other than what he was, a born member of the elite class. Neither he nor the American voters required any such charade as that of Kerry and Edwards.

A certain amount of fraud creeps into many political campaigns but fraud is absolutely central to the Kerry campaign. Above all, his campaign must camouflage or deny the central fact of Senator Kerry's political career -- that he has been the most liberal member of the United States Senate.

Says who? Says Americans for Democratic Action, a leading liberal organization for more than half a century. The ADA keeps tabs on Congressional voting and ranks Senators on their votes for liberal causes, so as to inform ADA's members as to who are their strongest supporters.

Senator Kerry came in number one on liberal voting in the Senate, ranking above Ted Kennedy. Senator John Edwards likewise had an even more liberal voting record than Ted Kennedy. These guys are on the far left of a liberal party.

What does that mean in concrete terms?

Among other things, it means racial quotas, higher taxes, weakening the military, and -- perhaps most significant of all -- appointing liberal judges who will spend decades finding reasons to turn criminals loose and allowing frivolous lawsuits that drive up prices to consumers and destroy businesses and jobs.

You can't run on that platform and win a national election. Moreover, you cannot frankly state the underlying assumptions behind the liberal vision of the world, such as the notion that the liberal anointed need to impose their superior vision on the masses.

Politically, you have to pretend to be one of the people, even though the whole basis of your vision is that you are vastly superior to the people. Even when you are a pompous elitist who looks down on the average American, you have to project a political image as a regular guy by being photographed with a baseball bat or a hunting rifle in your hand -- or eating at Wendy's.

Disinformation is where it's at, if you are a liberal. Weakness on military defense, for example, has to be camouflaged by constantly using words like "strong," "strength," " tough" and the like, while clenching your fist and using a bombastic tone.

In a memorable scene near the end of "The Wizard of Oz," the wizard -- after being exposed as a fraud -- admits that he cannot give Dorothy's friends what they want, namely courage, a brain, and a heart. But he presents them with substitutes for all these things.

That is what Kerry and Edwards must do to have a chance at winning this year's election. They must come up with substitutes for reality.

In a sense, it is unfair to expect liberals to talk straight to the public because politically it is not a level playing field.

Conservatives can get elected to all sorts of offices, including President of the United States, while saying that they are conservative. But there are far fewer places where a liberal can get elected saying that he or she is a liberal -- and certainly not elected President of the United States with that label.

Voters have seen the results of liberalism over the years and don't like what they have seen. The last openly liberal candidate who was elected President was Lyndon Johnson, 40 years ago. The last Democratic candidate who even admitted to being a liberal was Walter Mondale, 16 years ago -- and he was buried in a landslide.

So don't look for liberal candidates to admit being liberals, when the Presidency is on the line. They are not about to commit political suicide. People in the media consider it an "attack" even to call candidates liberals -- or to call the media liberal.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc



What it means to be a Republican

"In all these days of promise and days of reckoning, we can be confident. In a whirlwind of change and hope and peril, our faith is sure, our resolve is firm, and our union is strong." President George W. Bush

I BELIEVE the strength of our nation lies with the individual and that each person's dignity, freedom, ability and responsibility must be honored.

I BELIEVE in equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, sex, age or disability.

I BELIEVE free enterprise and encouraging individual initiative have brought this nation opportunity, economic growth and prosperity.

I BELIEVE government must practice fiscal responsibility and allow individuals to keep more of the money they earn.

I BELIEVE the proper role of government is to provide for the people only those critical functions that cannot be performed by individuals or private organizations and that the best government is that which governs least.

I BELIEVE the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government closest to the people.

I BELIEVE Americans must retain the principles that have made us strong while developing new and innovative ideas to meet the challenges of changing times.

I BELIEVE Americans value and should preserve our national strength and pride while working to extend peace, freedom and human rights throughout the world.

FINALLY, I believe the Republican Party is the best vehicle for translating these ideals into positive and successful principles of government.