Still a majority?(books, arts & manners)(The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality)(Book review)

Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership, by Jim Geraghty (Touchstone, 384 pp., $15.95)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

JIM GERAGHTY's awkwardly titled new book takes a timely look back at the elections of 2002 and 2004. As the subtitle points out, these elections inaugurated "an era of Republican leadership." In the 2000 presidential election, the Republican nominee lost the popular vote, even as Republicans were losing four seats in the Senate and two in the House. But in the 2002 midterm election, Republicans defied historically grounded expectations of further losses and instead regained two Senate seats while holding their own in the House. Standing for reelection in 2004, George W. Bush not only won a narrow majority of the popular vote, but also increased his vote total by more than 11,000,000; Republicans picked up four seats in the Senate and two in the House. The era of Republican consolidation, if not dominance, seemed to have arrived.

In this book Geraghty sets out to explain why. He finds the answer in Republican leadership on the issue of national security. He argues that 9/11 altered the psyche of the average American voter, attuning him to the mortal peril posed by the enemy who showed his face to such devastating effect on that day. "While the intensity of the post-9/11 emotions will fade to a certain extent," Geraghty writes, "something in the American consciousness changed permanently that day." In making his case, Geraghty tells the story of the elections of 2002 and 2004 mostly from the outside--thematically, drawing on the contemporaneous words of participants, pollsters, consultants, observers, commentators, journalists, and bloggers.

Perhaps most striking is Geraghty's account of how quickly Democrats reverted to form following 9/11--to a style Rich Lowry had defined in the context of the Clinton administration as "McGovernism without the conscience." Geraghty notes the initial, twisted post-9/11 reactions of such far-Left figures as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. Geraghty points out, for example, that within 24 hours of the 9/11 attack, Michael Moore was imputing guilt to the United States for "taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador)" and suggesting that some kind of cosmic payback was at work. Geraghty mordantly writes that "neither additional years nor the passage of weeks seemed to temper the reaction of those farthest to the left."

On the contrary, Geraghty shows that the intemperance of the far Left worked itself into the heart of the Democratic establishment as Senate minority leader Tom Daschle and Democratic party chairman Terry McAuliffe attended the 2004 Washington, D.C., premiere of Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. (Ironically, Daschle was himself a subject of Moore's scorn in the film; by Moore's lights, Daschle had demonstrated inadequate opposition to the war in Iraq.) Geraghty devotes a chapter to the proposition that Moore became a symbolic face of the Democratic party in 2004 and concludes: "The party that has the more appealing faces wins the elections." Beauty is famously in the eye of the beholder, but Geraghty is on solid ground in intimating that there aren't many faces less appealing than Moore's.

Geraghty places the ascendance of national security as an electoral issue in the context of events since 1972, and ...