Les Jones

News > If Kerry Wins, Steyn is Resigning

In the 2000 election, Alec Baldwin said he'd leave the country if Bush won. Bush won, and Baldwin welshed.

Now columnist Mark Steyn is telling his Spectator readers that if Kerry wins, he'll resign his post. Not out of protest, but out of shame at calling it wrong for his audience.

Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else - organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

But I don’t think it will come to that. This is the 9/11 election, a choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of September 10. I bet on reality.

How many Kerry-supporting pundits are willing to make the same promise?

This wasn't a last minute gamble four days before the election, either. Steyn made the same promise a while back, though I'll be darned if I can find the link.