Last week I had the opportunity to be interviewed by a writer for TIME magazine about the election. The focus of the interview would be about the viewpoint of staunch partisan activists like myself. I’d been thinking about this topic anyway, so I was interested in doing the interview.
This is a topic I’ve discussed with a few people on both sides of the Bush/Kerry divide and I generally get what at least appears to be an acknowledgment that the position I’m taking has some merit. In the interview I was asked how, as a Bush activist, I would deal with the situation if Bush lost the election. My response to the question was that in the specific case of a Kerry victory (perish the thought) I would most certainly exile myself into the endless and uninhabitable Rub al Khali desert in Saudi Arabia, never to be seen again.
Just kidding.
While I’ll certainly be disappointed and unsupportive of the inevitable U.S. admission into the European Union and the absconding of U.S. foreign policy by the French that a Kerry presidency would precipitate, I’ll ultimately just have to get on with my life just like I did when my chosen candidate in the 1992 election, Ross Perot, revealed to everyone that he’s actually an evil dwarf sent here by those aforementioned French. “Perot” is actually French for “schizophrenic midget who jumps in an out of a presidential campaign in the same manner that most of us jump in and out of the shower…when we’re drunk.”
For the Democrats this election has always been about getting rid of Bush, not electing Kerry. They’ve put their hearts, their souls and even the kitchen sink into dispatching Bush and if it doesn’t work, they will have bet everything and lost. If Bush loses that’s an unhappy situation for me and mine, but we’ll move on because a Kerry victory is only a repudiation of Bush, not of us or the Republican Party. A Bush victory, on the other hand, is a repudiation of all of Kerry’s supporters, since they’ve made this their purpose in living. If the Democrats lose, they’ll start drinking very early in the morning. If I lose, I’ll be sad but I’ll move on. If they lose, they’ve got Hillary. If I lose…I’ve got McCain. Doesn’t sound so bad after all.
Scott Wacholtz can be contacted at s.wacholtz@umiami.edu.