The Great Divide

By MATT WELCH

LOS ANGELES -- Remember how they said Sept. 11 changed everything? They lied.

Seventy-two hours before election day, the United States looks almost exactly as polarized, on almost the exact same demographic (and not philosophical) lines that were illustrated famously on that Red-Blue map after the divided election four years ago.

George W. Bush and John Kerry have for weeks been within the margin of error of a statistical tie. Liberal Jon Stewart and conservative Ann Coulter are numbers one and two on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list; the rest of the top 10 features two anti-Kerry books and two against Bush.

Every morsel of news is instantaneously spun by supporters of either candidate into unrecognizably different stories. Reports show 380 tons of Iraqi explosives have gone missing from a well-known Iraqi factory? "A disaster," says the liberal American Prospect. "Nonstory," counters the conservative National Review.

Even the World Series was viewed through partisan eyeballs, with Kerry crowing that the victory of his Boston Red Sox must be a positive omen, and Bush trumpeting the endorsement of gutty Sox pitcher Curt Schilling.

But underneath this farcical replay of the 2000 divide, something indeed is new, and directly attributable to the Sept. 11 massacre: Never in my lifetime have I seen the electorate so passionate, and never before have the two sides seemed so utterly, unshakeably certain of themselves.

Campaigns are not the best places to seek out public confessions of self-doubt, but the certitude on display in this race has long since crossed the threshold from confidence to delusion, and whoever is elected on Tuesday (or whenever it ends) will soon be smacked in the face with the cold hard truth.

Bush, for starters, seems constitutionally incapable of admitting a single mistake even after four years of spectacular intelligence failures, deficits and job losses.

When asked to name his biggest mistake this April, the President said, "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn't yet." Given another shot at the second presidential debate last month, he offered up lamely: "I made some mistakes in appointing people."

Kerry can admit "mistakes," but usually only of the elocution variety, as in "I made a mistake in the way I talked about it," which is how he tried to wiggle out of saying, in regards to an $87- billion appropriations bill for Iraq, that "I voted for it before I voted against it."

More substantively, Kerry's campaign, and the widespread anti-Bush sentiment that provides much of its oxygen, is based on certain axioms that are, at best, articles of faith.

The biggest and most urgent bit of wishful thinking is that a Kerry presidency would have a miraculous and transformative healing effect on the United States' tattered relationship with the Western world.

During the three presidential debates, Kerry uttered the words "alliance" or "allies" 20 times, often as his only detailed response to questions about what, specifically, he would do in Iraq today. "I know I can do a better job in Iraq," he said in the first debate. "I have a plan to have a summit with all of the allies. ... I think we need a president who has the credibility to bring the allies back to the table and to do what's necessary to make it so America isn't doing this alone."

The only problem with Kerry's plan: The "allies" -- which are understood to be France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Canada -- have all already announced their troops will stay home, even if the Democrat wins.

Kerry dipped even further into the speculative with his assertion during the second debate that, had he been president during the run-up to the war, "I would have brought our allies to our side."

I reckon that we won't know for decades who, between Bush and Jacques Chirac, is more to blame for the inability of the United Nations Security Council to agree on an explicit authorization of military force. Still, I can say with great confidence that A) Kerry doesn't know for sure either, and B) his implicit assumption - that the fallout was Bush's fault - ignores the tangible role played by European anti-Americanism.

If Kerry wins, he will learn this the hard way.

The French government didn't start tossing around the epithet "hyperpower" only after George W. Bush was elected, nor was 2003 the first time that a French president has thwarted American diplomacy.

The memoirs of Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright are filled with exasperation at Washington's oldest ally, and crude playground insight suggests European public opinion is not likely to change overnight: Just because the most popular and powerful kid in school has a new haircut, doesn't mean you won't resent the hell out of him for doing what he pleases.

This last point remains utterly lost on Bush and his administration. Anti-Americanism, in their view, is a moral weakness to mock, not a policy problem to confront. It's the price of having an independent moral compass, not the result of throwing around your weight willy-nilly.

"Listen," Bush said at the second debate, in response to an audience question about how he would "repair relations" with other countries, "we've got a great country. I love our values. ... Sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they're right."

This traditionally isolationist sentiment, when mixed with the neo-conservatives' essentially internationalist belief in the "forward strategy of freedom," produces natural dissonance and harsh reality checks. American troops were not, alas, greeted with flowers in Baghdad (which was suggested, remember, in the pre-war argument for keeping troop levels down).

The idealistic war of liberation in Iraq required gutter-level co-operation with the brutally repressive regime in bordering Saudi Arabia. Citizens with the misfortune of living in countries that border Afghanistan are generally less free, not more, as a partial result of American policy.

The dictators of Pakistan and Uzbekistan have snuffed out opposition parties with Bush's blessing (or at least benign neglect), and Iran has stepped up its anti-democratic crackdown.

Pragmatically speaking, a Woodrow Wilson-style internationalist foreign policy conducted with an Andrew Jackson-style irritability and swagger, is a formula for overstretch. You don't get much help from people you piss off.

The U.S. right now might not be physically capable of fighting another war, and it will be years, maybe decades, before overextended National Guardsmen are again called "weekend warriors." But being right means never having to admit you were wrong, especially if you're certain the opponent is unfit to govern.

There is little to no consideration, on the anti-Bush side, that the target of their wrath may have done the right thing, and indeed the only thing possible given the geopolitical circumstances, to the regime of Saddam Hussein, or that democracy in the Middle East is more likely as a result.

And from the right, the certainty that Kerry is insufficiently serious about terrorism is matched only by the confidence that there are no serious drawbacks to cranky interventionism, just people who lose their nerve. 2000 seems like a distant and trivial world of White House sex and humble foreign policies. We're as divided as ever, only this time we mean it.