NEWS SUMMARY - THE NOTE
President Bush tries to roll the boulder up the hill to squash the Neverending (prison abuse) Story, with a trip to the Pentagon today that you can see live on ABC News at 11:30 am ET.
He also has to deal with the overall situation in Iraq; the near-total absence of a second-term agenda (beyond "I'll keep you safer"); the appearance, CW, and reality of sagging poll numbers, including wrong track; gas prices, college tuition hikes, and health care costs; and an energized Democratic base.
John Kerry, on the other hand, has to deal with the appearance, CW, and reality of no message; a lack of broad-based love (even among much of his staff!); (apparently) he's a Massachusetts liberal; a tough electoral college map; a split Democratic base on Iraq; and a ferocious male gender gap.
And they both have to deal with a carping, unhappy press corps in full-blown "damned if they do, damned if they don't" mode.
Showing iron discipline, we will resist for yet another day making any grand Abu Ghraib abuse judgments about whatitallmeans politically, except to Note again that it is going to take an awfully big story to knock this out of the lead anytime soon. (And yes, we fully appreciate that only in a free country likes ours can a story like this dominate the headlines.)
No one — not even big feet Washington pundits — knows where this is headed as an electoral issue.
And our reluctance to try to lap the field was fed by this bit of Fox News Sunday brilliance from Fred Barnes about last week's "word" that the president had turned the Oval into a woodshed during his time with Secretary Rumsfeld:
BARNES: … I've done some reporting on that. The president didn't authorize that leak. Karl Rove didn't authorize that leak. The press office, thinking they were showing the president had acted firmly, went ahead and told reporters about the mild rebuke.
That must have made Elisabeth Bumiller AND Dana Milbank AND Scott McClellan just laugh and laugh and laugh when they heard it!!!
These are trying times for the man in the cynosure. A Kerry memo sent to reporters last night calls it "free fall" and points to right-track/wrong track numbers, a handful of approval numbers, and lists myriad reasons why the commander in chief is, in the opposition's view, not in a commanding position.
And yet the incumbent President's electoral position remains, to borrow his favorite word, steady.
So here is our best map of what some are calling the Bush Bubble — that arguable gap between the president's re-elect numbers and his general approval rating on various issues.
Or, put another way, what accounts for the relative buoyancy of a man beset by (mostly) bad news?
Or, yet another way: why isn't he doing worse?
1. He's keeping the conservative and Republican base happy — and we're making the necessary distinction between the roots of the grass and its tippy-tops. The President's support among the faithful remains quite strong.
2. A gradual, inarticulatable, unpollable sentiment among most Americans that enjoys the feeling of being at the top of the heap, disregards potshots, favors the exercise of unilateral power, distrusts entangling institutions, and isn't quite sure what the alternatives are. American exceptionalism is still a fundamental creed — and this President embodies it.
3. The failure of President Bush's opposition to come up with a credible alternative to Iraq. By credible, we mean widely accepted and comfortable to the masses. This tracks with a general and enduring split among Democrats and left/liberal progressives about the nature and aims of American power.
4. Wars (in Iraq and versus terror) provide for now a floor and a ceiling on the president's numbers. And no domestic terror attack since 9/11 is arguably the administration's largest unalloyed, if untrumpeted, success.
5. An unvetted (bubble-benefited) Democratic nominee who has yet to find a voice that comforts while it enervates. And who may, by dint of the possible death of the jobless recovery (see the WSJ's ed page) have lost his best issue. Let's see how the national and local breakthrough on his health care message goes this week&
6. Masterful message massaging and communications work by the Bush-Cheney re-election team.
7. A country that views political develop.m.ents through two increasingly sharp cultural lenses — perhaps (checking the back of the envelope here … ) 42% Red to 39% Blue.
8. News cycles that speed up, chew over, and swallow both the good and the bad and then take a bite of something else — leaving little time for reflection or news to "sink" in to the national consciousness. And then there's the general disconnect between what the media wants (i.e., a Bush apology during the press conference) versus what the public seems to want (reassurance that things are going to get better and the course we're taking is the right one).
9. The First Lady, the personal likeability, and the Bush Brand in times of adversity.
Now, bubbles can burst, but no one can know for sure when they will or what causes that to happen. And sometimes things that LOOK like bubbles are in fact made of cast iron. |
