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October 03, 2004
Seven Reasons Why Bush Will Lose
Hoke here.
I don't know when or if I will be with you again. Ace intimates that he is pleased with my work, but he's also a jealous, petulant type, and if he feels I've usurped him in any way, he will slice like a fu**ing hammer.
Here are some thoughts, presuming I won't be subbing again before the election.
Bush will lose. It will be very close, but he will lose for the following reasons.
1) He's been debilitated over four years by a steady drumbeat of media bias and vicious antipathy on the part of the opposition. Florida assured the Democrats would come back strong in four years, but Bush himself - the embodiment of all that Red America swagger, stupidity and salvation - drove the Democrats to vile acts.
2) We are more like Spain than we want to imagine. The towers fall, and there are flags on every overpass. Even Neil Young pens a tune. We always flourish in the moment. The moment now is extended, however, and that means the dirty job of continuing the fight through preemption. al Zarqawi recognizes this, and if we have an American man or, God forbid, a woman, pleading for his or her life just before decapitation, it will have the same effect as the Madrid bombings. Enough of us will want to change the channel and the alternative will be Kerry.
3) We're a mortician's society, examining the dead instead of proactively seeking to enhance life. This means that no good in our actions can be countenanced, all bad must be exhumed, and the future is irrelevant.
4) Bush is tired. His most endearing quality last time out was when he told a flabbergasted Diane Sawyer that if he lost, life would go on, and he was sincere (in contrast, Gore has a massive breakdown and has now become Peter Finch-meets-Marlon Brando). His "smirks" in the first debate were nothing of the sort. He was a man who has many responsibilities looking at a guy whose only responsibility was trying to win an election.
5) There is a script. The script called for the decimation of Howard Dean because Dean screamed. It was funny, but it was also cruelly unfair. The new script calls for a Comeback Kid.
6) Kerry's adoption of 75 positions may have been more clever than folks imagine. He has a hardcore "Bush is a Nazi, Bible-thumpin' moron" posse. He just needs to get a few more to cross over, and in the end, he'll be able to "HYPNOTIZE!" enough of them to win. It is important to understand that his people get in a room and say "Okay, what should we say about Iraq today that might get us votes?" They are not talking about altering adjectives. They are talking about altering verbs and nouns.
7) We're weak. We've lost 1000 good people in Iraq, and we're at the end of our tether. As a nation, it is easier for us to lose 3,000 through inattention in the form of victimhood than proaction in the form of changing the world. At heart, we want to go back to lobbing missiles from afar as policy.