Portrait of Gary Bauer courtesy of Henri Rousseau's "The Child on the Rocks," c. 1895

"What does Gary Bauer know, and when will it happen?"

Gary Bauer has told the story enough times that we can make up the quote and still it will be accurate, which we will do: It was 1964, the Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan giving "The Speech." Gary was so impressed that he turned to his father and said, "Someday that man will be president, and I will work for him."

This event and this statement is important to Gary Bauer, for it later happened. As he tells it, 18 years later he was able to give his father a tour of his office in the East Wing of the Reagan White House!

Now it turns out that Mr. Bauer's prescience at that time was no fluke, nor was it an isolated incident. Investigators on behalf of this website have been looking into Mr. Bauer's past, present, and future, and have uncovered several facts of some unusual interest. Our suspicions were raised at the Iowa State Fair. Whereas the other candidates spent their time in the main thoroughfares, greeting voters and looking at the Butter Cow, Mr. Bauer was conspicuously absent. It seems now that he had sneaked away and was spending his time with the Fortune Teller set up next to the Grandstand, both correcting some of her less-likely assertions for customers and gaining important counsel for himself.

The investigation revealed an uncanny ability of Mr. Bauer, going back to 1964, and beyond. Visits to his Kentucky hometown (name withheld by request) turned up several memories. A term paper that Mr. Bauer wrote for his sophomore Civics class had some amazing predictions. "After Ronald Reagan's term," he wrote at that time, "the president will be George Bush, and following Bush will be Bill Clinton." Now for the amazing predictions: he predicted that cyclamates would one day not be allowed for sweetening soda pop, that "pay-TV" would prove to be very popular in the future, and that eventually Strom Thurmond would pass away. (Sen. Thurmond's great longevity has thwarted Mr. Bauer's attainment of a perfect record for a number of years, but due to the nature of living creatures [that they all eventually die], he has a better than even chance of still being correct.)

Mr. Bauer's personal popularity in the intervening years has gone up and down. His great intelligence, achievements, and piety on the one hand have opened numerous doors for him. He is often welcomed, received with open arms by groups and institutions. But on the other hand, his popularity often goes down, especially when people are around him for any length of time and develop any sort of personal rapport and intimacy. He tends to be a "Mr. Know-It-All," peppering every conversation with such remarks as "I knew you were going to say that" and "I saw that one coming." And in arguments he is even known to point out logical inconsistencies and contradictions between what people are telling him now and what he knows they will say sometime later. His ability to foresee the future tends to give him great confidence, but it has it's downside when he not only finishes people's sentences but starts them!

There are subjects that boggle the mind of man. One is the theological proposition of predestination, that the future is determined by God; for some, God only knows the future but doesn't determine it; this leaves freewill (of a sort) intact. Could we ever say, perhaps with the process theologians, that God is surprised by the future? Or to put it more mildly, that God is self-limiting, that He might choose not to know the future? Whatever you say about God, Gary Bauer knows the future. There's only one thing he doesn't seem to know, that he himself will never be President...so why is he wasting everyone's money and his time?

He alone knows.

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