Sunday, August 15, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Watch Maine and New Hampshire

Last week, we were discussing the gender gap which sees Nevada women favoring Kerry and Edwards, 50-39 (while Nevada men favor Bush and Cheney, 53-36), apparently because the Democrats keep promising more and more free stuff, and the ladies believe the tax revenues to pay for all this stuff just spring up each morning like mushrooms after a heavy dew.

Of course, the other side is not without its own delusions. Born-again Christians vote for George Bush because he says he's a born-again Christian (hey, I believe him) ... even though there's not much that's "Christian" about his administration.

Where's the full tax credit for those who rescue their kids from the statist government youth propaganda camps, either home-schooling or sending them to competing private schools? If the Republicans really believe smaller government and lower taxes would make us more free and prosperous, why don't they repeal the income tax and lay off half the federal work force, next week? How about just the useless agencies that Ron Reagan promised to close, 24 years ago? They do now control the White House and Congress, right?

Doesn't matter. Mr. Bush says he prays real regular.

Besides which, the Christian right can't win an election anywhere, as Richard Ziser is about to prove by losing 2-to-1 to Harry Reid, who represents Clark County in the U.S. Senate, and who (if senators were still chosen by their state legislatures, as they were through 1912 and as the founders intended) would be lucky to currently be chairing the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Nonetheless, I suspect Mr. Bush may yet pull this one out.

Americans usually re-elect incumbents, rather than issuing another learner's permit. Americans rarely elect senators, and for good reason. Generals and even governors have had to balance budgets, to make sure the boots and the MREs get delivered where the troops are. Senators just write really big checks and fly home for some yachting, assuming someone else will somehow cover their bank drafts.

Besides, hardly anyone really likes the transparently ambitious John Kerry, who made next-day, re-enacted home movies of his own combat heroics, and who got rich by marrying a fairly bitchy foreigner.

John Kerry is trying to bring back the halcyon days of John F. Kennedy's "Camelot." I grew up in New England among fellow Democrats and Catholics (to the extent there was much difference) who literally had little shrines to the martyred president in their homes.

But (heresy alert) young Sen. John Kennedy didn't make all that effective a president. He was way out of his depth when he met Khrushchev in Vienna. Required to sit upright in a chair for hours, shot up with steroids and painkillers for his back injury and other ailments, Kennedy admitted to aides on his way home that Khrushchev "mopped the floor" with him.

And it's because Khrushchev found Kennedy so inexperienced, so weak and clueless in those meetings, that he pushed the Cuban missile affair so far that it almost started World War III.

Worst of all, John Kennedy left our government in the hands of that crook Lyndon Johnson, who gave us copper quarters and dollar bills that aren't worth a dime and actually passed all those ridiculous welfare state boondoggles that had been stalled in Congress for years -- and which have been progressively bankrupting us, ever since.

The one thing John Kennedy did understand, though, was that if you wanted prosperity and higher tax receipts, you got both by cutting taxes -- and cutting them substantially.

But that's the last thing a President Kerry would ever try. The guy has never met a tax or spending measure (other than the ones designed to keep the Army in axle grease) -- or a victim disarmament law -- that he wouldn't rush back to Washington City to vote for.

He is from Massachusetts ... OK? Where the big highway signs say "Welcome to Massachusetts: Have a Gun, Go To Jail."

Everyone says it'll be a close race. If Kerry wins, it will be. But if George Bush wins, let me go out on a limb here, and suggest that might not be a close race.

Come late afternoon on Nov. 2, watch Maine and New Hampshire. Yes, New York and Southern New England will go for Kerry -- the Hillary fans, who think we should be arrested and jailed if we pay cash for a medical service from anyone but our federally designated "health care provider," would love to see America's foreign policy run out of the Elysee Palace.

But if Maine and New Hampshire go "red," that could indicate a Bush sweep of states -- not urban centers, with their welfare queens and unionized bureaucrats and illegal aliens and absentee tree-huggers being bused to the polls, but states -- in the Rust Belt and in the South.

If that happens, watch Iowa. The Democrats may carry Wisconsin and Minnesota, but if they lose Maine and New Hampshire and Iowa, the darndest thing might just happen. Conservatives who were going to stay home in Nevada and California and the rest of the West because George Bush allowed John Ashcroft to steal our library book-borrowing records and forgot to do anything to restore our gun rights and managed to invade the wrong foreign country (hardly a small mistake) may just get up from in front of the TV, heave a heavy sigh, and make a late trip to the polls, voting (as they did in 1864 and 1944, in effect) to instruct the tongue-tied goober to "kill some more damned Arabs and get it over with."

Not that it makes the slightest bit of difference to me, of course.

It's spelled B-A-D-N-A-R-I-K: www.badnarik.org.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.