Why Bush Is Losing (And how he can turn it around)

THE NOVEMBER ELECTION won't be about the future of Iraq. John Kerry's selection of John Edwards, who joined Kerry and a majority of Senate Democrats in voting to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is merely the final confirmation of the Kerry campaign's decision to remove forward-looking Iraq policy from the roster of issues in the fall campaign.

If Kerry had wanted to argue the Richard Clarke/Howard Dean thesis that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder, his course of action would have been simple. He would have picked as a running mate Florida senator Bob Graham, or someone else who opposed the move into Iraq, and explained his own vote to authorize the invasion as a mistake, based on the same faulty intelligence that misled George W. Bush and Tony Blair about the presence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Then the debate over Iraq would have dominated the fall campaign.

In the four months since he clinched the Democratic nomination, John Kerry in his methodical way has moved heaven and earth to make sure such a debate never happens. He favors the Allawi interim government, the U.N. resolution of support for that government, the national elections this coming January, the writing of a democratic constitution by the winners of that election, and an American military presence for as long as our troops are needed to provide security for Iraq's democratic transition. In other words, his position is no more than a millimeter from that of President Bush.

Looked at another way, four months ago the conventional wisdom was that Kerry would downplay his 2002 vote to authorize Bush to invade. Instead, he has decided to play down his 2003 vote to deny money for U.S. operations in Iraq.

There are two corollaries to Kerry's unobtrusive but decisive repositioning on Iraq. (1) George W. Bush has won the war debate, or at the very least is continuing to dominate it. (2) Kerry's me-too hawkishness has hurt him in the virulently anti-Bush Democratic base very little if at all. Today, Kerry is well positioned to defeat a president who, in his response to the mass murders of 9/11, has eliminated the anti-American rogue states of Afghanistan and Iraq, achieved breakthroughs on the long-term realignment of Pakistan and Libya, and set a reluctant Middle East on a path toward democracy that goes far beyond anything achieved or even talked about in the past.

This isn't supposed to be happening. Decisive, event-making presidents are not supposed to be in danger of defeat while their crisis or war is still going strong. It's easy to understand why Jimmy Carter was tossed out of office with U.S. hostages still in Iran: He was not only not an event-making president; by Election Day he had been widely written off as a passive victim of events. We can even understand why a war leader like Churchill, or a foreign-policy president like the first Bush, could be tossed out after their wars, hot or cold as the case may be, had definitively ended: They were no longer needed in their area of specialty.

But July 2004 finds the United States far from a postwar environment. Casualties continue in Iraq, Islamist terrorists destroyed a popular conservative government in Spain and cost Washington an important ally, the Saudi oil kingdom looks as unstable as it has ever looked, and everyone wonders if the United States can get through the November election without a major terrorist event at home. Yet by almost any measure, Bush has been a decisive, effective war president. If you doubt that, ask yourself why his Democratic opponent, so dripping with disdain for Bush's leadership, is unwilling to advocate a rollback of a single one of the administration's key war decisions.

Still, the president has job approval numbers that put him only a bit above the level of one-term presidents. And as in previous wartime elections, a strong economy is not helping him any more than it helped the Democrats in 1952 or 1968. Recent polls show Bush's rating on the economy not only not improving, but tracking close to his rating on his conduct of the war, which has never been lower.

As recently as December, the picture was very different. Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, and despite the continuing Sunni insurgency and American casualties, Bush's approval rating on the war was in the 60s. The Democratic frontrunner, Howard Dean, embarrassed himself by commenting that Saddam's capture made us no safer, a revealing moment from which he never really recovered.

In the Democratic presidential caucus in dovish Iowa on January 19, candidates who had supported the congressional authorization for the president to invade Iraq received more than 80 percent of the votes. The conventional wisdom among many Democrats was that their best chance of beating Bush was for the war to fall out of the headlines, returning the debate to the domestic issues where Democrats were assumed to have their strongest arguments.

What happened to change that? Other things may later have added to Bush's problems, but the only set of events that coincides with the precipitous decline in Bush's job approval is the resignation of chief weapons inspector David Kay and his statement that, contrary to what he and virtually everyone else had thought, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion.

Kay's message was internalized by voters over several weeks. By the end of that period, Bush's approval rating for Iraq, and for his overall handling of the presidency, had sunk roughly to where it is today. Kerry clinched the nomination in early March and has been running roughly even with Bush ever since. Clearly, the Kay revelations caused something to snap.

But the Bush decline was far from uniform. The failure to find the WMD hurt him most among Democrats and independents. It hurt him least among Republicans and conservatives--his core vote.

Immediately after 9/11, Bush gained broad support for his handling of the war from voters of all descriptions. It didn't take long for things to get partisan again, yet the off-year elections of November 2002 saw small but unusual GOP gains at every level. In 2003, the year of Iraq, Bush's war rating varied considerably. The April capture of Baghdad and the December capture of Saddam gave him solid bumps, but his rating stayed comfortably high all year. The Kay resignation left Bush with essentially no greater support than in the 2000 election. Since then, but only since then, it has been hard to find Gore voters planning to vote to reelect Bush. Why?

It seems clear that Kerry, the Democrats, and their allies in elite opinion have pinned the WMD fiasco on Bush as a kind of character issue. This is the message of Al Gore, no less than of Michael Moore. On a rational level it makes no sense. If Bush knew Saddam's weapons were a fiction, he had to know he was buying himself enormous trouble, post-invasion. Bush of course believed the weapons were there, as did the British, the French, the Germans, and the Russians--not to mention John Kerry, the leading beneficiary of Bush's loss of credibility.

Nor can it be argued that Bush could have limited the political damage with some shrewder handling of the revelations. The president went to Congress and to the United Nations and put great emphasis on the dangers of WMD in Saddam's hands, as he should have, given the available intelligence. The weapons have not been found. If there is some way to make voters feel better than they do about this, we have no idea what it is.

It is possible, of course, that things could go so well in Iraq that Bush could hang on to win reelection. There are two problems with this. The first is that the enemy in Iraq has no interest in making Bush look good. The second is that the nature of Bush's decline since the beginning of the year makes it hard to reverse among that slice of the electorate that turned against him.

That is because, much as the president and supporters of his foreign policy might wish otherwise, the country is deeply polarized in its partisan allegiance. Kerry's ability to move to the right on Iraq, with little or no damage to his candidacy in the Blue states, confirms that the split is not about the war, however defined. Five years ago at this time, Bill Clinton was a war leader in the former Yugoslavia, and many of his congressional opponents were Republicans. The split is still about our deepest values.

If it is about any one thing, it is about God. It is a truism that if you went to a religious service in the last week or so, you probably are voting for Bush-Cheney. If you didn't, you're probably voting for Kerry-Edwards.

The economic models assembled by such estimable professors as Ray Fair say Gore should have won handily in 2000. Bush and his team upset the calculations by running a character campaign against the Clinton administration. Gore was well aware of it, and wriggled mightily to get out from under the Clinton label.

Those same economic models predict a comfortable Bush victory today. Kerry and Edwards, with help from Michael Moore and (inadvertently) David Kay, plan to avoid any serious debate on the economy or the war and defeat Bush with a character campaign. They are on track to achieve this result.

But the character issue is a pale derivative of the values issues, and a paramount values issue looms: the advent of gay marriage, presently in Massachusetts and inevitably everywhere else if federal and state judges have their way. The Senate's first big vote on a constitutional amendment to preserve marriage will come this week. It will get nowhere near the two-thirds majority needed, but most Republicans will be on one side, most Democrats on the other.

That is far from true of the rank-and-file followers of the parties. In Ohio, for example, at least two reputable polls suggest that more than half of Ohio Democrats are hostile to gay marriage. Such Democrats now plan to vote for Kerry. They may know that Bush is more in favor of traditional marriage, but they have (at this writing) no reason to think this is one of the issues likely to be decided by the presidential vote.

It is not in the interest of Democrats for them to think differently, and Republicans have shied away from the issue, as they have on most such values issues since the elections of the 1980s. No matter how much a prospective issue favors a given side, there remains an understandable reluctance to incur elite condemnation as a purveyor of hate. But then again, how much lower on the moral scale could one fall after inventing tales of nonexistent Iraqi weapons in order to start a war that kills women and children on behalf of Halliburton?

Recent press analyses of Kerry and other Democratic speakers note a sharp increase in the incidence of the word "values." Strategists for both sides sense that beneath the messy surface of wartime politics, a politics of values is operating more deeply than ever. If the version of this that surfaces in 2004 is the character issue, advantage Kerry-Edwards. If the debate deepens into the realm of religion, life, and the preservation of marriage, advantage Bush-Cheney.

Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon are principals of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm.

So the swing voters think Bush lacks character, and Kerry has it, because Bush's CIA told him Iraq had WMD, and everybody else believed it, but Bush lacks character because he believed it too, and now Bush's only hope is to try to marginalize Kerry as some kind of crazed social left winger. Whatever, but I don't think so. The election may be about competence, but not character.

We really have to bring out the values debate to the fore, and start fighting on the ones on which the Democrats are on the losing side. The President to win re-election needs to press ahead with gay marriage, judicial activism, and the place of faith in the public square. Link the Democrats to the continued assault on the traditional family, of subverting the will of the people, and of being hostile to the place of faith in our nation's heritage. An overarching and sustained critique could win this debate for President Bush and the Republicans. It will NOT be won on the economy or on his handling of the Iraq War.

This article requires you to accept a series of false assumptions to reach their conclusion that Bush is "in trouble."

For example, they claim Bush's job approvals are at level similar to other one term presidents... In fact, he is at about 49% (average) right now - and averaged 53% for the month of June, per Gallup. Bush 41 and Carter were both in the 30s at this point of their respective campaigns. Ford was in the low 40s, and he just barely lost.

This is the trouble with coming up with a thesis before you come up with the supporting facts. You will continue to argue in favor of the thesis, facts be damned.

Not passing judgment on the opinions stated in this piece, for those who aren't familiar with the name, Jeffrey Bell is no RINO, he's been a conservative activist for 30 years, was a former aide to Reagan and if I'm not mistaken was once president of the American Conservative Union. As an old-timer who is familiar with what he's done for the movement, even if I don't buy all of it, when he says something like this it at least gets my attention.

You sound like Dukakis. He tried to run on competence too and lost. The election should be about LIBERAL values. I went through them and they're all unpopular with the public. John F*ckin' and the Democrats would rather not debate them. Here is where the President can find his opening. Today's radio address is a step in seizing the commanding ground on the values front. He also needs to get judicial activism and the Democrats' secularism front and center. Remind people the Democrats reject majority rule and they despise people of faith. Of course, the other side will squeal loudly but when they do, don't back off. Keep battering them til they're placed permanently on the defensive.

a politics of values is operating more deeply than ever. If the version of this that surfaces in 2004 is the character issue, advantage Kerry-Edwards

HuH???

And sitting and grinning through a disgusting monologue are considered values by these authors.

I cannot understand why Kerry/Edwards would choose the themes of character and/or values as lynchpins of their campaign. The Democrats have a 3+ term senator with a record of being on the wrong side of virtually every single issue during his tenure in the Senate, and a trial lawyer who built his career on the foundation of judgements that are now shown to have been based on junk science, as their candidates for the two highest offices in the land. Character and values are not traits even remotely associated with either of these men, or their party, and will prove to be losing issues for them. Then again, losing issues for these two also include the economy and national security, so I don't know what the hell these two idiots are going to run on, other than that they're not GWB.

The President WILL lose if he allows Kerry to set the argument. The way out of this trap is to turn the tables on the Democrats on the cultural terrain, where they are clearly out of step with mainstream America. Democrats do not want to run on their own LIBERAL values. Make them the issue. Press the Democrats to explain why they're hostile to the traditional family, to the rule of law, and to the public manifestation of religious belief. After all, poll after poll has shown the public favors man-woman marriage, they want the courts to play a proper role in following - not making laws, and they want religion in our public life to be accorded respect. Who is on the right side of the values argument? I believe here in the key to winning this election.

I guess Kerry-Edwards win the character issue on (1) Kerry's treasonous betrayal of American soldiers left in Vietnam after his departure, and his betrayal of American POW's while a senator (2) Kerry's shabby treatment of his first wife (3) Kerry's ability to lie about where he stands on virtually every issue, including how he believes that conception is the beginning of life, even though he is one of the staunchest supporters of sucking the brains out of a full-term baby while all but the baby's head has been delivered (4) his alliance with not only the pro-baby murderers, but with radical homosexuals, Hollywood scum, George Soros-types, etc. (5)Edwards' ambulance-chasing and deceptive legal tactics which made him rich,... Obviously, a partail list. I can see where Kerry-Edwards want to make the race one that will be decided by character.

actually, I think gas prices will determine the outcome of the election. Bush's decline in the polls, and his recent rise, can be correlated almost directly to the rise and fall of gas prices...

The election may be about competence, but not character.

Bingo. The character issues are a powerful glue for binding the loyalties of the true believers on each side, but the fight for the independents and undecideds revolves around perceptions of competence.

We live in a society of "look alikes", who want their old easy-going life back without any "hassle". Many will gravitate to that promise from Kerry-Edwards.

The Republicans will have to work hard to keep them from getting in. Bush is seen as a warmonger....something that scares all Dem-liberals and some who voted for Bush last time. We know peace through strength is only way, and that this is lifetime war on terror with no real winners. We may win the battle or they may win battle, the actual war will never end. Many cannot accept that their old life is over forever....the security Americans once had is gone.

WE will need people like Bush for the rest our history, whether we get them or not depends on how far most people have their head in sand! or elsewhere.

WE are now just like Israel...tell that to most people but they won't believe you. Israeli's have been fighting terror from almost their beginning. It is now our war, and if we don't keep it on foreign soil, it will resemble Israel's struggle. WE are the same to the Muslims as Israel, infidels.

No, what I am saying is that if Bush loses, despite the improved economy, it might be due to some perception that he is not sufficiently competent to be president (just think about the drug prescription fiasco (the real cost was found out within 6 months to be double what Bush claimed), with Bush continuing to mouth the drug company line about the evils of drug imports). I think a majority of Americans will continue to like Bush personally, even if he loses. I am not suggesting that either Kerry or Bush explicitly running on a competence theme is a good idea. What Kerry will emphasize depends on events. Right now is pushing the middle class squeeze, which is indeed real in some places. Part of the reason the squeeze might have some traction, is that the upper middle class has done so spectacularly well economically, while the lower middle class has been in stasis, and in some places and industries, in a state of angst about a changing economy. Change can create angst.

I don't think gay marriage will cut as an issue. Voters know the presidency is out of the loop on that one; indeed the only one in the loop on that one seem to be the courts.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.