Democratic Consultant: "If Bush Wins, We Will Make This Country Ungovernable By Christmas"

You may have thought that since the site was down, I took off the day to attend to personal business. You couldn't be more wrong. Ace of Spades HQ does not sleep and will not falter, and during the down-time, your intrepid correspondent crashed a roundtable discussion hosted by the Manhattan Institute/Fabiani Society. In attendance were Kathryn Lopez of NRO, Robert A. George of the New York Post (I believe), and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

I also wandered the streets for a bit, keying every car which displayed a pro-Bush bumper sticker, so that this petty political vandalism would be blamed on fascist leftists. I do for you and I keep doing for you. (If it was your car-- sorry, but you can't make an omlette without keying a couple of cars.)

At any rate, John Fund had several interesting things to say about the upcoming election.

First of all, he's fairly confident of a Bush victory.

Second of all, he finds it silly that the Dems are putting so much stock in the polls being wrong at this point. Dems believe that all these "new voters" will save them; I believe he pointed out that Republicans have enlisted nearly as many new voters. Further, Dems continue to believe that people using cell-phones aren't being polled enough, and that these "hidden voters" will save the liberals' bacon. Fund says that pollsters do attempt to compensate for this, and furthermore, there are other ways to reach such voters, and also that there aren't many people who rely solely on a cell phone for communication.

He didn't make the obvious point-- why should one assume this army of cell-phone users is especially liberal? Maybe there's some data indicating they do skew to the left.

Third, he thinks it's 75% likely the election will result in a clear win for one candidate or another. There's a 15% chance of disputed election that will take several weeks to resolve -- with lots of litigation and recounts -- and a 10% chance of a full political meltdown that will be worse than Florida. He thinks that would obviously be bad for our democracy, and who can argue with that? I don't want to overstate things, but we're kinda-sorta close to a really nasty period of unending political warfare. I'll have more scary-insightful comments on that later, as Josh Marshall would say.

But the real news was Fund's report of a conversation he had with a Democratic consultant, whose name, he said, we'd all know. He didn't say the guy's name, but he said he had spoken to him in the green room during the taping of a recent show.

Fund asked what he thought of the election, and this man said, "Off the record, I think Kerry just might lose." But he then continued (paraphrased): "That doesn't mean it's over, though. Democrats will protest and fight so strongly that Bush won't have a win even if he wins. We will obstruct so much that this country will be ungovernable by Christmas."

That's what we're faced with, guys. It's imperative you vote to not only re-elect the President (whoops-- guess I let the cat out of the bag re: my endorsement), but to re-elect him fairly comfortably, to actually give him a mandate and prevent the full-scale political meltdown of this country.

Democractic government and internal political peace are not necessarily permanent features, not even in America, although we've muddled along well enough for so long that it might seem that way. Other countries have suddenly been faced with political crises and political violence and yes, even civil war. (I guess we've had all that too, but not for some time.)

Vote.

posted by Ace at 02:54 PM

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