Bush beats Europe

Irwin Seltzer at the Weekly Standard believes that last week's EU elections show that Bush and Blair are triumphing over Chirac and Schroeder.

So these countries, and the German business community, are telling Schröder to tone down his anti-American rhetoric--which he can't do without antagonizing the voters he has persuaded to hate America in general and George W. Bush in particular.

TO ADD TO the Franco-German discomfort, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved the new Iraqi government, led by Ghazi al-Yawar, who was educated in America. And when the heads-of-state show moves on to Istanbul later this month for the NATO summit meeting, after a two-day stop in New Market-on-Fergus in Ireland for an E.U.-U.S. summit meeting, Chirac is likely to find that his resistance to NATO involvement in Iraq's reconstruction will be ignored by an organization desperate to prove that it is relevant to the 21st century. All in all, it seems that in a single week the reputations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair have moved from the valley of despair to the bright uplands reserved for those who get it right in the tough world of geopolitics.

Additionally, this could all be very bad for Kerry.

All of this is a misfortune for John Kerry. His campaign rests on a three-legged stool. The first leg is that Bush is a job-destroyer; but the economy has created almost one million jobs in the past three months, and is probably adding better than 10,000 every day. The second leg is that Bush has antagonized America's allies and is isolated; the 15-0 Security Council vote to recognize the Bush-backed Iraqi government saws that leg off. The final leg is that the Bush tax cuts have been a disaster. Ronald Reagan's death has brought renewed attention to the fact that the late president's tax cuts helped to end the recession he inherited from Jimmy Carter, just as Bush's cuts kept the Clinton recession short and mild.