The gloat about the vote

George Grant once lamented about how “the wealthy and the clever” led sophisticated Canada’s attack on its last prime minister with openly rural values, John Diefenbaker. “It has made life pleasant for the literate classes,” wrote that gloomy titan, “to know that they were on the winning side.”

What went around for the politically refined in 1963 came around for their American heirs on Nov. 2, when another politician they found an easy mark for their contempt, U.S. president George Bush, was re-elected with an increased margin — carrying with him majorities in both houses of the American legislature.

How unpleasant it has been for them this past week: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times haggard on Sunday morning political television, Dan Rather of CBS News trying to body-English the red-and-blue map behind him on election night, any number of minor Democratic-leaning pundits alternately breathing contempt, bewilderment and anger. And in almost everything written about the result of the election, a spitting, stammering disjunction — about “ignorance,” about “rednecks,” about Christianity, about anything that sat still long enough to take the blame for Bush’s victory.

And what joy there must have been at the Ray Street offices of the “best daily newspaper on the world wide web,” the Guardian, when they found out that Clark Cty. had voted heavily for Bush. (Clark is the Ohio county where the Guardian invited its readers to adopt a voter and persuade him to vote the way right-thinking citizens of the International Community wanted him to. In 2000 it voted for Albert Gore.) Not only did the Guardian put its own prejudices about the people of Clark Cty. on indiscreet display, it showed off its conceit in its own goodness and rightness. The Guardian dived into its intellectual depths: and hit its head on the bottom. Nothing daunted, it published a comment piece by Simon Schama in the days after the election, dividing the U.S. into “Worldly” and “Godly” America — the first the reasoning, sensible polity that voted for Kerry and the second that Bush-voting subliterate Hell of church, farm and barracks. After only three days, ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oubli.

The Daily Mirror, lowbrow counterpart to the Guardian, delivered itself of a post-election editorial that foamed about the civic incompetence of American electors (this, in the country that sends Tam Dalyell, George Galloway, Martin McGuinness and Patricia Hewitt to Parliament). To the Mirror, Bush is simultaneously devious and dim-witted, gung-ho and a draft-dodger, and — in a startling triumph of genetic engineering — a “dangerous chameleon” and “a gibbon.” (We cannot bring ourselves to look.)

It said a great deal about Bush that Britain’s principal point source of printed misinformation and its leading producer of fish-and-chip wrap both denounce him with the indifference to evidence, to contradiction and to incoherence that are the marks of true fanatics.

But enough of the jungle. Meanwhile, back in the States, hard-core narcissists in the Kerry camp — including, need it be said, a number of his Hollywood cheering section — have taken to threatening suicide, or at least offering to move to another country.

It gets better, however. The really disconsolate Kerry supporters — deprived of a 2000-style conflict between the electoral and popular vote — have trotted out the Fixed Election nag. Its outriders at this stage appear to be Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann, and ex-Guardian conspiracy theorist Gregory Palast, last noticed by the mining industry when he accused Sutton Resources and Barrick Gold of having been complicit in a mythical massacre of artisanal gold miners in Tanzania.

It was not, apparently, enough that exit pollsters got their work wrong on election day; not enough that credulous television networks parroted the faulty results; not even enough that their decision desks jumped at calling states where Kerry had a slim lead and waffled over calling those where Bush had a wider lead. No: those infernal machines were tampered with, pre-loaded with Bush votes, programmed to ignore Kerry votes.

Sometimes we wonder if Bush’s political rainmaker Karl Rove hasn’t created this repellent crowd just to make his man look good. Those evil neocons are capable of anything, you know.