There is no doubt that there are great issues at stake in the 2004 elections. This will be the first presidential election after the attacks of September 11. Three years later, a largely Christian army is trapped in a melting pot of ethnic hatred and Muslim rage. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden has yet to be found Truly the end of history has succumbed to the clash of civilizations in which military might cannot be the sole determinant of survival.
Our leaders seem inadequate to the challenges of our times. William Butler Yeats wrote that the “best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”fobn Kerry certainly “lacks conviction,” while President Bush, following through on bis campaign promise to govern as a “compassionate conservative,” has succeeded in uniting his base—against him. President Bush has also presided over the greatest expansion of the welfare state in nearly half a century with the passage of the prescription drug bill. Indeed non-defense discretionary spending has grown by 18 percent. Under Reagan it fell by 14 percent. For good measure, Bush has even added $18 million to the budget of the National Endowment of the Arts. And when the Supreme Court rescued affirmation action last summer, Bush praised their decision as a “victory for diversity.” The Federal Marriage Amendment, intended as a nod toward Bush’s conservative base, has alienated both libertarians and constitutional conservatives.
Initially, President Bush acted with great conviction in foreign policy—only to produce a state of affairs that must be disquieting to conservatives, regardless of their initial support for the war. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction has rendered the invasion and occupation of Iraq nothing more than an exercise in nation-building. Even the adamantly pro-war National Review recently published an editorial entitled, “An End to Illusion” in which it noted that the Bush administration displayed “a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations.”
The great temptation is to vote for a third party candidate. There are two tactical reasons for this. First, a third party revolt may pressure the major party to appeal to its discontents. The advantage of this option is that if the major party does not react, the third party may eventually replace it as one of the major parties or reform the other major party. Indeed, this is how the South switched its allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Of course, this all presupposes the existence of a viable third party candidate, which is not the case in 2004.
Clearly, the most important issue in this election is foreign policy. Unfortunately, ourfate in Iraq will not be determined by who wins in November. If Americans reelect George Bush be will stick with the status quo. Otherwise, to retreat in Iraq would undermine the very basis of his presidency after September 11. It will take another president to amend the Bush Doctrine. That man will certainly not be the ambiguously antiwar Kerry, who simply does not possess the courage to effectively withdraw our troops from Iraq.
Therefore conservative voters should not base their votes for president on the implications for the presidency alone. Rather they should look to the implications for the judiciary. Herein lies the only authentic conservative justification for voting for Bush: his judges will be demonstrably less activist than Kerry’s. After all, it is the judges who have kept affirmative action intact for another quarter century, taken God out of the Pledge of Allegiance in California, and who now are the blackrobed revolutionaries in the front lines over the fight for gay marriage.
