When Being Right Is Wrong

Things are spiraling downward for us. Oh, we're still in the lead and a lot of great things have been accomplished and, well, it's only a mid-mid-term election but...Make no mistake about it, as President Clinton learned in 1994, things can change very quickly in American governance.

So why the disasters? Why the defeats at the polls last week, the seemingly bottomless trend in the President's approval ratings and the general sense amongst many that even with being so clearly in the right (no, twenty-three year old feminists with tenure and an axe to grind against humanity, should not be allowed to coerce other people's children into having medical operations performed on them without their parents' permission) are we being beaten?

Part of the problem is that we are so right. It was inconceivable to us that anyone would actually vote for strangers to be allowed to trick our children into having medical procedures performed on them on the whim and the will of some twenty-three year old feminist "teacher" who, after leaving Ward Churchill's "Ethnic Studies" class sees abortion as a way of knocking off another "little Eichmann" before they are even born that there was no need to fight.

Okay, maybe we'd lose some of the propositions on the ballot (the difference between tenure after two years or five years seemed like a technicality, not a moral imperative) but there's nobody who would actually vote for leftists to be allowed (in cahoots with profit-seeking abortionists) to coerce children into harmful medical procedures, is there?

There was also the arrogance that came with some earlier victories (some major, like the recall, and some minor like a tiny uptick in Republican registrations in leftist California). Having fancied themselves "experts," the folks "in the know" in the party ignored the voices of the rank-and-file as we insisted the ballot initiatives were going to go down to defeat if we didn't fight back sooner. Most of us recognized that the brilliant (and utterly deceptive) ads of the Democrats and their financiers were scoring major points and that, if we didn't counter them then, once we finally did it would be too late.

The "powers that be" knew better -- they "knew" that people don't pay attention to early ads -- they had terrific Powerpoint presentations and the condescension of their superiority borne of titles -- and the battle was lost before it was even entered.

I think George Bush suffers from his being right. I think the strength of his Christian convictions says that "good will win" and that his job is just to keep doing what is right and victory is assured. But, to take a line from the Bible, "faith without works is dead" and, while the President surely has the faith of his (political as well as religious) convictions, he just hasn't been doing the work of convincing others via the bully pulpit.

I think the president is so convinced -- bolstered by victories in 2000 and 2004 as well as victories against the terrorists and their supporters (e.g. France and Germany) -- that "good will out" that his attitude is that he doesn't have to fight. He seems to be pulling a "rope-a-dope." And, while the opponents ARE dopes, they are also powerful and desperate punchers flailing away and, in these later rounds of the Bush era, the accumulated body-blows are taking their toll. Just hanging back will not suffice. George Bush needs to fight.

Perhaps the slaps of this past few weeks and months are good. Perhaps they're the kind of things that make a far-superior fighter take his chump opponent seriously. I hope so. Because arrogance and a sense of superiority (no matter how justified) has been the downfall of fighters as great as Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson against opponents as weak as Leon Spinks and Buster Douglas. And they have been the downfall of civilizations.