The Long Goodbye

In the past few days I've seen some interesting pieces on how Bush controls his public events: in addition to written oaths, some crowds have been made to recite a "Bush Pledge": "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

Meanwhile ABC reporters were churlishly thrown out of an event for simply sporting Kerry t-shirts, told "this is a private event" and threatened with police action.

Now, if you are Bush, and your re-election campaign is based on a mix of falsehoods about how your opponent is unfit for the presidency and falsehoods about how the war in Iraq is going and what the justification for it was, it makes sense to preach to the converted.

But what is it like for the converted? Something that has fascinated me this campaign season is how so many people can support Bush so avidly. That avidity, it turns out, is not accidental. It is part of the picture.

Think what today's GOP asks of its supporters: you must set aside objective reality both as it is presented by the vast majority of reliable media outlets and as you yourself experience it (the economy, health care, friends or family lost in Iraq, etc.) and instead trust in an alternate reality expounded by party loyalists. You must be resolute in not questioning what you have been told by these loyalists about the president, because if you start to question, all his supposed strengths begin to unravel. You must, in short, have an unshakeable faith, not only in his goodness, but in his inevitable victory. Otherwise you will end up peeking behind the curtain and see the feeble man behind the powerful wizard.

And as shamans, priests and prelates have known from time immemorial, the best way to keep people from peeking behind the curtain is with massive public displays of faith.

Just as the conservative press needs the liberal media myth (to explain why Fox's version of reality is so different from everyone else's), Bush hardcore supporters need this cocoon of zeal. It's not just wanting to jump on a bandwagon; it's a feeling -- deeply gratifying -- of letting go, of putting your faith in someone and trusting that they have your deepest interests at heart, of shutting down your own critical faculties when they tell you that this man is a faker, of no longer worrying about all the troubling news about Falujah or Abu Ghraib or the economy or anything else because it's all liberal bias and the truth, Bush's truth, your truth, will win out.

So, what happens when that truth doesn't win out? What happens when your savior takes a pounding on election day?

Take a long last look at Bush and his messianic antics, my friends. Savor these last moments of solipsism and doublethink. Because this may be their swan song.

Of course, in all probability Rush and Drudge and Fox and everyone else will go right on, attacking Kerry at every turn and trying to get him impeached for jacking off into the White House toilet. Bush's hard core won't disappear.

But I truly believe that there is a huge bubble, a sense that this race is closer than it really is, that Bush's support is all as strong and committed as the hard core that pledge allegiance at his rallies. When that bubble pops, and Bush goes down by 100 electoral votes (you heard it here first), the scales will fall from people's eyes. Who was this moron they were following all this time? Why did they ever believe a single word out of his mouth?

This is crucial for Kerry, if he wins. He cannot be conciliatory, cannot try to be a unifier by catering to the rabid. He must tear down the curtain entirely, show just how disastrous Bush's presidency really was, and make his brand of conservatism a no-go for the GOP for years to come.

Because along with the zealots, there are the millions of moderate Republicans, the Clinton Republicans, who hate what Bush has done to their party. They will be Kerry's allies in this, because they want their party back. They, and they alone, can marginalize the voice of the radical right.

The time has come to shift the pendulum back.