In the post-election news conference during which he tried to bring himself to concede defeat, Daniel Ortega had a peculiar, yet strangely familiar, look on his face.
Haven't we seen that look before? Indeed we have. Ceausescu on the balcony - that now indelible image of the despised dictator so oblivious to his people's real feelings, so believing his own numbing propaganda, that at the moment of truth when he is confronted with his people's contempt, he can evince nothing but incomprehension. How can the ingrates spurn me?The ingrates of Nicaragua spurned Ortega and Sandinism at their very first opportunity, 11 years after they had been promised the chance. The margin of victory - 14 percentage points - is a landslide by American standards. Bush beat Dukakis by a mere 8.
But it far underestimates the true weight of Nicaraguan opinion. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of Nicaragua's population has fled Sandinista rule. Had exiles been permitted to vote by absentee ballot (as expatriate Americans are permitted in their elections), the Sandinistas would have lost by 25 points. (In 1964, Johnson crushed Goldwater by a mere 22.)
This is why the Sandinistas did not allow absentee ballots. Add the fact that they used the full power of the state, their monopoly of the media, harassment of the opposition and control of the voting age (lowered to 16 on the assumption that teenage conscripts subjected to relentless indoctrination in the Sandinista army were a captive constituency) - and the magnitude of their rejection becomes clear.
The Sandinistas are stunned. And so too are the Western media and elites. This is the third time they got it wrong on Nicaragua.
In 1979, they celebrated the Sandinistas as nationalists, agrarian reformers, the embodiment of the anti-Somoza revolution. They turned out to be Leninists who, far from embodying the revolution, hijacked it. Violeta Chamorro, who beat them Sunday, was part of the first revolutionary junta. Within a year, the Sandinistas had pushed her and other democrats out.
The Western elites got it wrong again during the 1980s when they dismissed the Contras as a gang of somocista, CIA hirelings. Archbishop Obando y Bravo called them "the resistance." But when Ronald Reagan called them "freedom fighters," the cognoscenti snickered.
They never adequately explained how such an army could raise 20,000 men, a force more than twice the size of the Salvadoran guerrillas in a country with half the population. Nor could they adequately explain how until U.S. aid was cut off in February 1988, the Contras had control of most of northern Nicaragua.
The media got it wrong again this time, believing polls showing the Sandinistas in the lead. In a communist dictatorship where the party controls your job and your ration card, people are not inclined to reveal to strangers their political allegiances.
When I saw the last pre-election poll showing the Sandinistas ahead by only 16 points, I was as sure as UNO leader Alfredo Cesar was that UNO was going to win. In a dictatorship that might still be in power the day after an election, far more than 16 percent of people will out of sheer prudence mislead a gringo pollster.
The fall of Sandinism in the first free election to test a Third World communist regime won't put an end to the romance of the West with Third World communism.
Ever since Hungary '56 and Czechoslovakia '68, the Western left has pretended that Third World communism was different from the Soviet variety. Their affections were engaged first by Mao, then Castro, then Ho (and the Khmer Rouge), then the Sandinistas. The guerrillas of El Salvador are today's liberals in a hurry.
When each is subsequently exposed for crimes ranging from common political terror to genocide, the caravan of enlightened opinion moves on to the next set of agrarian reformers. Little more is required than a promise of socialism, revolution and anti-Americanism.
Hence the historic importance of the Nicaraguan election. After the Soviet Union, China, Southeast Asia and Cuba, Nicaragua shows - by secret ballot, no less - that the left's record of being on the wrong side of history is unbroken.
Wrong now again in El Salvador. It is because the guerrillas know that they cannot win an election in El Salvador that they continue to fight. Their only hope is to impoverish the country, polarize the people and provoke the extreme right into acts that will make America turn away and go home, leaving El Salvador to them.
The astonishing march of democracy throughout the world tends to make Americans complacent. It should make us more militant. What we want, at least in the Americas, is total victory.