The Washington Times

In an important but hardly obvious sense, the reelection of George W. Bush may have been the best thing that could possibly have happened in 2004 to improve relations between the United States and Europe.

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The Washington Times

Ralph Nader was the dog that didn’t bark in the 2004 election. He finished with about a third of a percentage point of the popular vote, down from 2.74 percent in 2000. In 2004, he was simply not a factor.

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The Washington Times

At the risk of being insufferable, I said George W. Bush would win “just over 50 percent of the popular vote to John Kerry’s 48 percent.” As of late Sunday’s tallies, Mr. Bush actually finished with 51.0 percent of the popular vote and Mr. Kerry with 48.0 percent. I thus underestimated Mr. Bush’s majority victory by a few tenths of a percentage point. Sorry about that.

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The Washington Times

And the winner is – but perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Analysis first, verdict second – though even this procedure is controversial in this presidential election.

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It’s already over, and the neocons won.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the “neoconservatives” of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics’ telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake the world in the image of the United States.

And for this, come November 2004, the neoconservatives must pay. The defeat of George W. Bush by his Democratic opponent–and for purposes of the critics’ argument, any Democratic opponent would do–would mean a repudiation of this neoconservative view of the world. Many Bush critics saw in Iraq a comprehensive discrediting of neoconservative policy prescriptions, including the doctrine of preemptive or preventive war, belief in the efficacy of military power in general, faith in democratization, and unilateralism. It merely remained for voters to administer the coup de grâce at the polls and the neoconservatives would be discredited once and for all.

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