Election results

please Gutknecht

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

ROCHESTER -- As far as First District Congressman Gil Gutknecht is concerned, the general election of 2004 which saw President George W. Bush being re-elected to four more years in office will be long remembered for its historical significance.

"This has been one of the most amazing elections in my lifetime, and we have seen just an enormous turnout, not only here in Minnesota but around the country," said Gutknecht who was elected to his sixth term.

Gutknecht won 59.6 percent of the vote while DFL challenger Leigh Pomeroy earned 35.4 percent and Independence Party challenger Gregory Mikkelson received 4.79 percent.

"There is probably more interest in this election than any that I can remember since 1960 (when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon for president)."

And that's not the end of the good news that made Republicans like himself extremely happy.

"It turned out to be a lot less close than a lot of people thought. I'm happy for the president, and I'm happy for the country that the president won a clear majority of the popular vote. I'm also happy now that Sen. Kerry is going to concede."

Gutknecht said Kerry could have dispatched thousands of lawyers to states like Iowa, Nevada and Ohio, instead.

"I suppose it is conceivable but almost impossible that they could have challenged enough votes to have somehow knitted together what would technically be an electoral win," Gutknecht continued.

"But it would be forever heated, and he would face the daunting challenge of facing a Congress and a Senate which is much more Republican and much more conservative."

Then, said Gutknecht, "he would have had to somehow convince not only the people of the United States but the people of the world that he had some sort of legitimacy. So, I think from a legal standpoint, I suspect the lawyers were making the case that it's not undoable, but from a practical standpoint, it was totally undoable."

That would have made Kerry a "minority" president like Bush was in 2000.

"There's no question that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, but he lost it by a razor-thin margin. It wasn't 3 1/2 million votes, and I think that was the real obstacle that the Kerry people couldn't overcome," Gutknecht explained.

The elements that puts the 2004 election in a special category, don't stop there either, Gutknecht added

"It's the first time since 1988 that a president has been re-elected with a majority of the votes."

While he credits both Republicans and Democrats of doing a "marvelous" job of getting people out to vote, it doesn't tell the whole story, Gutknecht said.

"I think the message of this election actually can be found in a lot of the ballot initiatives on things like gay marriage and a number of other issues that were on the ballot around the states," Gutknecht continued.

"I think the real lesson of this election is that American electorate is still much more conservative than the national media gives it credit for, and in virtually every race we won, the more conservative candidate won."

Gutknecht doesn't see the president making any radical changes in his approach to handling Iraq's conversion to a democracy and the war on terrorism.

"Both his approach and his effectiveness in the war in Iraq and the war on terror were mis-characterized for a long time. I think the Bush policy is the only viable policy that I can see. We have to turn the authority and responsibility and the power of managing and policing Iraq back to the Iraqis," Gutknecht explained.

"I wish the president had said consistently, at the end of the day, the war in Iraq is going to have to be won by the Iraqis. The United States is there to help them establish a democratic foothold in that part of the world, and we have a moral responsibility to see our task through. (However) we have got to nudge the Iraqis to police their own streets and to deal with the terrorists themselves," Gutknecht said.

"We do know that terrorists are collecting there from all over the Middle East so it's not a very pretty picture. My view of the Bush strategy is that it's the only viable strategy right now, and I don't think that's really going to change. But I do think it's going to accelerate," Gutknecht continued.

"We now have over 100,000 trained Iraqi forces in Iraq, and they're going to have to step up and start policing the streets and doing the hard work of freedom."

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