I doubt that the non-tinfoil public at large changes its overall opinion in the polls. Show me a poll that shows a dramatic shift, and perhaps then I'll do more than laugh at how out of touch you are with mainstream America...
Posted on 3/24/2002, 10:18:36 PM by vannrox
by Ryan Lizza
As they pondered the right kind of State of the Union speech for a country at war, the president's brainy scribes turned to one that had been delivered when the country was at peace. "There was a meeting," a White House official explains, "and the chief of staff [Andy Card] said, `We want a different type of State of the Union. We don't want a laundry list.' Of course that never happens." This year it happened. In contrast with his budget address a year ago, George W. Bush delivered a coherent speech with big ideas rather than a Clintonian laundry list. The model was Franklin D. Roosevelt--not FDR's 1942 address to Congress one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but his 1941 "Four Freedoms" speech a year earlier.
FDR's speech was largely a warning about complacency. Roosevelt cautioned against "loose talk of our immunity." He said there were "secret agents" in the United States plotting an attack. "The need of the moment," he declared, "is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily--almost exclusively--to meeting this foreign peril." Like Bush, he asked that this be done "without regard to partisanship." Where FDR cast the United States as a beacon for a world to be built upon four freedoms--of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear--Bush declared seven "non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance."
But the most notable parallel is that FDR delivered the "Four Freedoms" address when the country was in danger but not yet at war. He was preparing inward-looking Americans for a conflict with the outside world. And this is what makes the 1941 speech such a telling model for Bush's wartime address Tuesday night. It marks a recognition by the White House that, prior to the speech, terrorism was no longer most Americans' top concern. Enron had replaced Afghanistan. Two-thirds of the public said they wanted Bush to talk more about the economy and domestic issues than terrorism. Less than five months after 9/11, Bush had to remind Americans that the war has only just begun.
This is the fundamental tension that will persist for the rest of this election year: Democrats will try to capitalize on voters' inevitable return to domestic concerns--especially Enron and the economy--while Bush will try to yank them back to the war. The extent to which both sides are leveraging these issues can't be overstated. For Democrats, Enron is a way to talk about almost every issue they care about: campaign finance reform, Social Security, the economy, and the federal budget. It is also a means to attack Bush's agenda and exploit his greatest vulnerability, the perception that he is too tied to corporate America. For Bush, leveraging the war on terrorism knows no bounds. He has repackaged his entire domestic agenda in the garb of "security," a process that began well before his State of the Union. On Bush's nominees languishing in the Senate, Ari Fleischer recently said, "The president deserves to have his team in place, particularly during a time of war." On the day Dick Cheney announced he would not cooperate with the General Accounting Office, he said, "Can you imagine an FDR or Teddy Roosevelt, in the midst of a grave national crisis, dealing with the problems we're having to deal with now, over here on the side as a matter of political expediency, trading away a very important fundamental principle of the presidency?" Last year Bush's aides usually referred to "faith-based" legislation; now it is always called the "armies of compassion" bill.
But within this umbrella of "security" that now covers all Bush initiatives, there is a grander strategy that the White House hopes will help pass the president's agenda, elect a Republican House and Senate, and build a majority coalition for Bush's reelection. Call it divide and conquer.
Tuesday night Bush asked Congress to approach his domestic policies in "the same spirit of cooperation we've applied to our war against terrorism." But the hallmark of Bush's 2002 strategy is not unity; it is division. His congressional agenda this year is built around a set of issues that split Democrats in ways that reprise intraparty battles of the 1980s. It started this month with taxes. With the return of federal budget deficits, Democrats tried to attack the Bush tax cut, but quickly split into three camps. Ted Kennedy explicitly wants to repeal some of the cuts. Tom Daschle blasts aspects of the tax cut for causing red ink and worsening the recession, but is cagey about delaying or repealing them. And Dick Gephardt, the last prominent Democrat to speak on the issue, was so afraid that Bush would accuse him of raising taxes that he has all but endorsed the same disingenuous argument as Bush--that a call for delaying tax cuts ten years from now amounts to a tax increase today.
Bush hopes to create this same dynamic on almost every major issue he mentioned in his speech. Take defense spending. The Democrats' now familiar strategy has been to embrace Bush on all matters related to the war. Early administration leaks suggested Bush's defense-spending increase would be around $30 billion, but the number he announced was larger than anyone expected: a $48 billion hike, the largest jump in 20 years. Democrats responded with silence or uncertainty. "Well, there clearly isn't room," said Tom Daschle. "But I think it's probably premature to come to any conclusion about whether this number is appropriate or whether another number would be better." A Pentagon request that large will create major fissures among Democrats, and Bush is baiting them into attacking it during war. Bush's huge homeland security budget will do the same. And even as the president increases the deficit and offers no obvious plan for deep cuts elsewhere, he is laying the groundwork to blame the Democrats as profligate spenders. The deficit won't last long, Bush said, glancing at the Democratic side of the chamber, "so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible manner."
Bush is also trying to force the Democrats to show their dovish underbellies on the war on terrorism itself. In his speech, the president articulated a sweeping new view of the war that goes far beyond Al Qaeda, saving his most belligerent language for Iraq and hinting at action against Saddam Hussein. "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather," he noted cryptically. "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." But if there are any prominent Democrats besides Joe Lieberman itching to extend the war to Iraq, they have been remarkably silent. The two-party consensus on the war will crumble if the United States attacks Iraq, and dissenting Democrats will be left explaining--perhaps in an election year--why they don't stand with Bush against Saddam. One White House official marvels at how poorly the Democrats have done at building up any national security credentials in the wake of the attacks. "It's not possible for the politics of a superpower to be dominated only by domestic issues," he says.
Bush has also made welfare reform a top agenda item for 2002, an issue that has split Democrats and united Republicans for decades. Clinton took the welfare club away from his opponents in 1996, but the GOP is eager to return it to their arsenal. So far Bush has staked out a centrist position, calling for the restoration of food stamps for legal immigrants and fighting off attempts by conservatives to require states to coerce single welfare mothers into marriage. There is less division among Democrats on welfare reform than there was in the '80s and '90s, but the issue is still more likely to play in Bush's favor. After all, last time around the popular legislation was opposed by almost exactly half the Democratic caucus--21 senators and 98 representatives--including Daschle and Gephardt. And if Democratic leaders try to stake out as tough a line as Bush, they could provoke a nasty squabble with the Congressional Black Caucus.
Two other pillars of Bush's domestic agenda that he laid out Tuesday are the restoration of fast-track trade negotiating authority and energy legislation. There are cleavages within both parties on trade, but fast track opens deeper divisions on the Democratic side, as the House vote showed last year. In the Senate, Daschle and many Democrats favor the legislation, but pushing a trade bill vehemently opposed by unions during a recession is hardly a good way to rally the labor base of the Democratic Party in an election year. The energy bill may be more complicated. It will be Enronized by Democrats, and Joe Lieberman and other senators have already said they want to know who met with Cheney's energy task force before they consider the legislation it produced. But again, Democrats are divided. Not only do some oil-state Democrats support the Bush plan, but the White House has found the Teamsters a potent ally in its fight to open ANWR to oil drilling, a major component of the energy legislation.
And Bush's alliance with the Teamsters is not an aberration. With the electorate so closely split, picking off even small numbers of union members could help the administration divide and conquer Democrats this year. Bush won the solidly Democratic state of West Virginia in 2000 by catering to the state's coal miners. There is now a budding alliance between the White House and the US Steelworkers, who have been pleasantly surprised by how much attention the administration has paid to their pleas for protectionist measures. In early March, Bush will determine the future of this alliance when he decides whether to implement quotas or tariffs on steel imports. Look for the administration to swallow some of its free-market fundamentalism.
This union strategy, present before 9/11, has now dovetailed with a larger opportunity for Bush to translate his post-attack popularity into a small but sustained advantage for the GOP. No president has ever remained as popular as Bush for as long. The president now has 10 of the 14 highest job-approval ratings ever recorded by Gallup. Previously, the longest a president had ever stayed within five points of his highest approval rating was seven weeks, when LBJ stayed close to his high of 79 percent. Bush has stayed within five points of 90 percent for 16 weeks. "These are stratospheric numbers that have no historical parallel," says GOP pollster Whit Ayres. Obviously, Bush will return to Earth. But he has sustained these numbers long enough to raise questions about whether some people drawn to him personally after 9/11 may be persuaded to stick with the GOP. Republicans say that less educated, lower-income women and blue-collar men are shifting over--the same kinds of Democrats who switched to the GOP under Ronald Reagan. This could be the year that "Bush Democrats" emerge. The president played to this new audience Tuesday night, too. Teamsters President James Hoffa--Bush calls him "Jimmy"--sat behind Laura Bush in the first lady's box. With his eye on the gender gap that he seems to have closed, Bush emphasized the liberation of Afghan women and called attention to four different females sitting with the first lady, including the new Afghan minister of women's affairs.
A defense buildup. Deficit-spending. The dominance of national security. Welfare. The return of hard-hat Republicans. The year 2002 is starting to look like an enormous problem for the Democrats. Still, they have time to turn the agenda to their own set of wedge issues: Enron, Social Security, health care, and the environment. And they might even try responding to Bush's big deficits and big spending by reminding the White House of a passage from FDR's 1941 speech that Bush ignored: "I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today." Or maybe not.
Bush's "base"---or, at least, 90% of it, is not going to abandon him if the alternative is Tom Daschle, Hillary (for God's Sakes!) Clinton, or John Edwards. They just aren't. And they would be MORONS to do so.
Second, despite what you read on FR, much of the "base" (i.e., people who actually vote in primaries and occasionally call a Senator) could give a crap about immigration or CFR. Please don't launch into a diatribe about how they "should care." We are dealing with reality.
So, the fact is that aside from a small percentage that abandon's EVERY conservative or EVERY liberal in an election because of some single issue that convinced them that the candidate wasn't "pure" enough, Bush not only will keep the large majority of his base but will add enough independents and "war democrats" to smother any other candidate.
The interesting thing will be the House races, and I hate to tell you, but those Congresscritters would NOT have voted for CFR if their internal polling told them it would cost them their seats, pure and simple. Ditto on "amnesty."
Everyone here would do well to climb down off their high horse and to just for a moment remember that we are less than 1% of the "base." And we saw in 2000 how much that disaffected Buchanan/Brown contingent accounted for . . . less than 2% of the entire vote.
I doubt that the non-tinfoil public at large changes its overall opinion in the polls. Show me a poll that shows a dramatic shift, and perhaps then I'll do more than laugh at how out of touch you are with mainstream America...
I care about both of these issues passionately.
And Dubya is going to lose my vote is he offers an Amnesty.
I will vote for other offices however, and I will vote in the primary.
And if it get's us a Hillary or a Daschle, that's not my fault because political parties and candidates are like the free market.
For example, if McDonnalds wants my buisness then they have to earn it. They are not entitled to sales figures, they have a chance to go out into the market and earn them by providing a superior product that appeals to me.
Blind supporters of parties and candidates are similar to businesses who would chase patrons down the street and yell at them for not purchasing their product. That's foolish and ridiculous, but they continue to attempt to rationalize it regardless.
Elections are not a free market. In any presidential election you have only three choices, democRAT, Republican or don't vote (or vote for the Libertarian, Green Party or other third party candidate who cannot possibly get elected, which is the functional equivolent of not voting) (and yes, I know that comment will get me flamed, but history is on my side).
To continue your McDonald's analogy, let's say that there are only two sources of food on Earth, McDonald's or Whataburger. McDonald's occasionally makes you nauseous, but Whataburger always makes you violently ill. Your choices are (1) eat at McDonalds, in which case you MAY get nauseous, (2) eat at Whataburger, in which case you WILL get violently ill, or (3) refuse to eat at either, in which case somebody else will force feed you either McDonalds or Whataburger, whichever they decide on. Which would you choose?
People keep forgetting just how grim things looked before September Eleventh.
These popularity ratings will pass as Americans become bored with the WOT and when they do their focus will return to domestic matters.
Some people here seem to think that this 90% approval will continue indefinately.. and I don't agree with that.
Like you said, his father is a perfect example of a shoe in with a high approval rating one day who got booted out the next.
From here on out there will be many issues that are food for the base!
Guaranteed !
:)
But, about your example it assumes that everything is and must remain static (only x choices of food, no recourse.. etc) They don't and they aren't.
Look at what Perot did right out of the box. Look at the difference between Nader (you should be thanking him by the way) and the Libertarians at the polls, again.. right out of the box.
Remember the Whig Party? All examples of what can happen when people use their votes like they use their dollars.
Also, I do have options.. Why must I go and vote for someone I dissagree with? Because it's politically expediant to give my vote to someone who won't value it?
If I give it to them automatically or if I buy into the notion that the GOP "deserves" votes then what's their incentive to change? They spend allot of time and money chasing minority votes now and alienating me in the process. If they didn't think they had me and my vote "locked up" already then maybe they would be courting me and other Conservatives like me in a similar manner.
And Finally, in your example if I own both McDonalds and Burger King then I can feed you whatever you I wish.
That's the situation we are in right now and it's why I am leaving McDonalds and going to Taco Bell if they don't mend their ways and thank me for doing buisness with them.
Ask the democrats, as they can invent them at will.
Man, the idea of "stealing" all their issues just leaves me cold. I mean, when have we ever been able to out pander the dems?
How could we ever?
I agree entirely. But Bush's ratings will come down no matter what position he takes on any issue. All I am saying is that in Presidential elections it is far better to vote for the lesser of two evils than it is not to vote.
My first choice has not gotten the Republican nomination since Reagan in '84. But I have held my nose and voted for whichever presidential candidate had the R next to his name, because in each election the Republican has been a lesser evil than the democRAT.
The Perotistas swung the election to Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and the Naderites swung the election to Bush in 2000. I don't think that is the result that either of those groups of voters really wanted. I'm just hoping that their side is dumb enough to do it again and our side is not.
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