For the Texan who is president, and is under enfilading fire on all sides, from adversaries and events, this may seem like Comanche Spring. But polls that take the temperature of the presidential race indicate that his political condition is not as parlous as might be expected.
His only great day recently was when the number of jobs created in March was announced as 308,000, and the numbers for January and February were revised upward, making the first-quarter total 513,000. But then the bombardment of Bush by books began. Yet this, too, may have helped him.
The 9/11 commission, with a large assist from Richard Clarke’s book, focused the nation’s attention on national security. So did Bob Woodward’s book. The Bush campaign has, in effect, received royalties from both books, because the campaign is focused on relentlessly reminding Americans that they are at war.
With the sounds of Fallujah fire fights filling American living rooms–and bars, hotel lobbies, airport concourses; there is no refuge from saturation journalism–what is John Kerry to do? If he talks about anything other than Iraq, he seems strange. (As when he says, “We’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to cut the deficit in half in four years.” Both?) But what can he say about Iraq, now that the president’s answer to the only question that matters–“What’s next?”–is: Beats me, until U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi speaks. It is hard to slip a Kleenex between Bush’s position and Kerry’s, which is: Stay the course but seek help.
Symptomatic of how the somber news from Iraq has changed America’s political climate is this: The Patriot Act has become what gun control became in the 2000 elections. That was an issue concerning which Democrats consulted polls and then said, in effect, “Oh, never mind.”
During the primaries, Kerry and his rivals vied in a Patriot Act vilification sweepstakes. In December Kerry said, “I believe this administration… has forgotten some of the heart of the Constitution.” He spoke of “replacing” the act in order to end its threat to civil liberties. Now, with a USA Today poll showing that 60 percent of Americans think the act is either fine or not tough enough, Kerry speaks mildly of “fixes” to improve it.
This retreat, and pronouncements like “We must never retreat from having the strongest military in the world,” resonate with an American majority. But Ralph Nader is taking notes and preparing to rub the salt of such statements into the wounds of an intense minority on the Democratic left. Do you remember Howard Dean? This minority does, fondly.
You, valued reader, probably can barely imagine how unlike many–actually, most–of your fellow Americans you are. Here you are, reading a news magazine, which is a minority taste. Stranger still, you are reading the back page, a habit that is, in the eyes of most Americans, weird. You find politics interesting, so you may be startled to learn from a sifting of various polls that more voters know that Kerry is a veteran than know that he is from Massachusetts–and most voters do not know that he is a Vietnam veteran.
In many of the crucial 18 battleground states, voters have heard more about Kerry from Bush ads than they have heard from Kerry. And then there is the Fox News factor. A Pew poll asking how Americans get their information about the presidential campaign reveals that 35 percent say the network evening newscasts–and 38 percent say the cable-news networks. Four years ago the networks still dominated, 45 percent to 34 percent. This change is not all because of Fox, but because in four years Fox has become ascendant in the cable-news competition, the Bush campaign can take comfort from the evolving contours of the information marketplace.
What is Kerry to say, now that national-security issues and good economic news are driving the debate away from the Democrats’ preferred terrain? Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that Kerry emulate John Kennedy, who in 1960 ran to the right of Richard Nixon on national security by charging–falsely–that Republican policies had allowed a “missile gap” favorable to the Soviet Union. Just as Bill Clinton in 1992 blunted charges of excessive liberalism by promising federal funding of 100,000 more police officers, Kerry should promise 100,000 more soldiers to close the “muscle gap.”
Or Kerry could try to drive up doubts about Bush’s competence. He could say: “This election is not about ideology. It’s about competence.” The trouble is, that was said to the 1988 Democratic convention by the last Democratic nominee from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, before he sallied forth to do battle with George H.W. Bush.
