November 01, 2004, 2:49 p.m.
The Arabian Candidate?
Kerry receives the kiss of death.

by Duncan Maxwell Anderson

The good news for John Kerry is that he just picked up another endorsement. The bad news is that it's from Osama bin Laden.

OBL has crawled out of his spider-hole to prove he isn't as dead as he looks, and to blackmail America into giving up the war on terror.

In pajamas and a sailor's white gob cap, he also told the world that President Bush has been "misleading" America in the war on terror, that Gov. Jeb Bush falsified the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and that the president was asleep at the switch as the Twin Towers fell because, as he sat in that elementary school, "the girl telling him about her goat butting was more important."

This certainly proves that wherever bin Laden has been staying, he has been able to watch the CBS Evening News. But his last-minute campaigning is a catastrophe for John Kerry and may send the Democratic party to the resting place of the Whigs.

To illustrate why, I'll make you a bet: If you see someone with a "Remember 9/11" sticker on his car, and you manage to flag him down and ask him whom he favors for president, he will not say "John Kerry."

You might say, "I'm not taking that bet. Of course that person is a Bush voter."

Of course is right — but that's a very strange fact. After all, Democrats as well as Republicans were murdered on September 11, 2001. Isn't everyone, no matter what his politics, equally committed to understanding and remembering whatever can be learned from that pivotal day in our modern history?

No. Back in July, addressing the Democratic National Convention, New York attorney general Elliot Spitzer warned the president not to make 9/11 an issue in his campaign: "I say to the Republicans, do not go there. It would not be fair or right, and we will not let you do it." The convention crowd actually cheered this declaration.

In the New York Times of October 14, Thomas Friedman was livid that Republicans seemed to be "addicted" to 9/11: "I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar... I do not want it to become a day that defines us."

The rage and panic on the left have been building for three years, as the meaning of the events of September 11 has become clear. After that day, a world was gone, and it was the Democrats' world.

The Democrats are obsessed with President Bush's war, but it's not really about him. He was simply the man in charge on the day that showed the Left's ideas to be weird and irrelevant. Such as:

Their contempt for soldiers, policemen, and firemen. In a showdown between tough, blue-collar men — who rarely have graduate degrees or vote Democratic — and a group of Islamic lunatics with bombs, most Americans actually rooted for the blue-collar guys.

Their disdain for family life. Face to face with the fragility of life, many career women changed course after 9/11 and started families or had more children. The birthrate among women 25-44 has risen steadily, as has the proportion of women who stay home with their children. In popular surveys, support for abortion has declined and support for homosexual "marriage" is marginal. Surely not all of these trends are coincidental.

Their hatred of America. Millions upon millions of Americans realized that their country was free — with just laws, beautiful traditions, and the opportunity for prosperity for all. The contrast with the darkness and cowardice they saw displayed in Arabia and Europe was stark. Exuberant flag-waving became commonplace.

The media culture worked hard to get 9/11 out of people's minds. Images of the Twin Towers were banished from the airwaves while the dust was still in the air. (And yet, this year, pictures of Abu Ghraib became like screen-savers on the evening news.)

And John Kerry has run on a platform of 1960s nostalgia, supporting every form of groovy socialism from nationalized medicine to abortion on demand. To distract the country from the war on terror, he talked about the Vietnam War — which the Left likes to talk about, because we didn't win.

But the OBL tape has shaken all the distractions to dust. America's mind is back at Ground Zero. And curiously, after three years, Osama has appeared from the shadows to say this: "You American people, my speech to you is the best way to avoid another conflict."

Peering behind his bluster and his sneering paraphrases of Michael Moore, I wonder: Why, all of a sudden, is this murderer of civilians trying to avoid another conflict? The inescapable answer is that he knows he is losing. If Osama is taking the trouble to criticize the president, it is because he hears the footsteps of our commandos in his sleep.

Sen. Kerry, until we meet again, it's been a wonderful campaign. It's over now.

The rest of us have received a simple message about President Bush's war on terror: It's working.

After the British finally defeated Rommel at El Alamein in 1942, Winston Churchill said: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

— Duncan Maxwell Anderson is president of High Tor Media, Inc., a New York book-packaging firm.

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