September 2, 2004

Inside the Loop

Hugh Hewitt says the Bush campaign and its natural allies are swarming on Kerry faster than the Kerry campaign can respond, and the Internet is playing a big role. Come to think of it, HobbsOnline is part of the swarm... And with 1.3 million pages viewed last month - the best month ever - HobbsOnline is dedicating the remainder of days between now and election day to assisting the president's re-election campaign, to the almost complete exclusion of other topics. If you're one of my longtime readers who rely on this blog for coverage of Tennessee-centric news such as the state budget and taxes, you may find less here to read between now and election day. I will continue to bring you the basics on those topics - essentially, the monthly revenue reports in mid-September and mid-October, and any major news regarding the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Committee and the Tennessee Left's ongoing push to create a state income tax. But beyond that, I will be targeting this blog toward the re-election of President Bush and the defeat of John Kerry.

Incidentally, Hugh Hewitt has written the single most indispensable book about politics this year, which you can purchase from Amazon by clicking the book cover image. In it, Hewitt painstakingly makes the point that the War on Terror is the only political issue that really matters right now. It's more important, by orders of magnitute, than the economy or stem cell research or pro-life/pro-choice or gay marriage or education or gun rights or anything else. Period. The reason is simple: If the Islamist terrorists and the regimes that support them and the failed states that host them aren't stopped before get their hands on nuclear or other weapons of mass-murder, your agenda on abortion or tax cuts or anything else will cease to matter at all.

That's why you see the Republican convention featuring speakers like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, who are all pro-choice and at least some of them unopposed to gay marriage or favor gun control - but all of whom focused heavily on the need to keep Bush in the White House to continue the aggressive war against the terrorists.

The media has been carping that the convention has paid so little attention to other issues, such as the economy, education, healthcare, and so on. But that's not true. Focusing on the war is focusing on those issues. Here's why: You can't be an entrepreneur if you're dead, and the economy will never thrive as long as it labors under the uncertainty of war and the threat of more and worse 9/11s.

You can't learn to read or go to college if you're dead. Healthcare doesn't matter if you're dead.

None of the other issues matter if you're dead

Prosecuting an effective war against terrorists and the regimes that support, fund or host them is the policy that must trump all others. The terrorists on 9/11 didn't kill Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens - they killed Americans. They didn't kill pro-choice Americans or gay Americans or social-conservative Americans. They didn't kill Christian-Americans or Jewish-Americans or Muslim-Americans or Atheist-Americans. They killed Americans.

Period.

And they want to do so again, by the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions.

That's why single-issue politics is not just bad strategy right now - it's potentially deadly if it results in the election of the wrong president.

The Bush campaign knows what sometimes the committed single-issue activists and the partisans of the social-issues right too often forget: individuals don't govern, majorities do. That's why you have seen an array of moderate speakers who don't agree with every plank in the party platform, but all of whom do agree that the war on terror is the central issue of our time. Wisely, the Republican National Convention has been a Hugh Hewitt convention.