by David Trumbull

November 19, 2004

What Did You Know and When?

News item -- dateline NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2005 -- Today CBS news called Iowa for George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election; Dan Rather's concession speech will be carried live today on all mainstream media.

Readers of the Post Gazette can pat yourselves on the back, for you are the people in the know. Back in August, when conventional wisdom predicted a close contest for the presidency, this column confidently forecast that Bush would be reelected by a comfortable margin in the popular vote.

In October, when nearly all pundits agreed the race was a tie, Res Publica reaffirmed our early prediction of a six percentage point victory for President Bush. With all the votes counted --including Iowa-- the final result, a five point victory for the President and Republican gains in the House and Senate, confirms that Massachusetts liberalism is a political and intellectual backwater.

I'll go out on a limb again and make another prediction: Never in my lifetime will the Democrats nominate another man from Massachusetts for the presidency.

While we at it, let's venture a few more political prognostications.

In 2008 the Republicans will not nominate, for President, Rudolph Giuliani or any other pro-choice Republican. This year's election delivered victories for Republicans, and even bigger victories for the pro-life movement. Once again, as we have seen in elections for the past decade, the few Democrats who actually did win contested races were, in many cases, pro-life. According to the National Right to Life Committee, polling of voters consistently shows that the pro-life position gains a candidate an additional three to four percent of the vote. Republicans nationally will not be so foolish as to listen to a few pro-choice fanatics in Blue States and nominate someone who will lose the swing states and deliver the presidency to the Democrats.

The hype about Arnold Schwarzenegger will die down long before any effort to amend the Constituion to allow the foreign-born to run for the presidency can even get off the ground. The massive budget problems, not of his making, will undermine his, or any California governor's, chances of emerging as a national leader. Actually, now that his multi-billion dollar stem cell research project has won at the ballot box, he can't even claim that all of California's financial mess was inherited from the former Democratic administration. Schwarzenegger curried favor with the Hollywood elite by pushing for, and getting, massive taxpayer funding for a project that is so scientifically questionable that no private investors could be found to back it.

My final prediction. As the results of this and future national elections set in, Republicans will come to regard his appointment of Margaret Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts as former governor Weld's greatest contribution to the Republican Party. With her one ruling mandating gay marriage, Justice Marshall defied the law, tradition, and reason, and created several Red States out of former swing states.

David Trumbull is the chairman of the Boston Ward Three Republican Committee; he may be contacted at (617) 742-6881 or chairman@ward3boston.org. Boston's Ward Three includes the North End, West End, part of Beacon Hill, downtown, waterfront, Chinatown, and part of the South End.