I missed the debate. I will probably hunt down a transcript. According to Howard Fineman, next year is shaping up as a political Armageddon. I think that he is right.
Campaign Will Be a Colossal Brawl
War on terror will divide Bush, Democrats like nothing in years
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
msnbc.com
Sept. 10 — If you think the “clash of civilizations” is fierce in Baghdad, wait until you see the confrontation coming to this country in the presidential campaign. Two worlds are colliding, each with a corrosive contempt for the other. The result, I think, will be the most profoundly vicious election in decades.
TO OVERSIMPLIFY—but only slightly—the Bush White House is going to argue that critics of its policies in the war on terrorism are treasonous weaklings. Democrats, as they are showing in their cable-TV debates, will call the president of the United States almost anything, including: an isolated, ignorant liar who launches bloody wars merely to strengthen his own political standing.
And that’s the nice stuff.
There is evidence everywhere that, at heart, George Bush’s re-election strategy will focus on touting his aggressive use of the American military abroad (and the government’s investigative powers at home) in the war on terror—while simultaneously (by presidential inference and surrogate attack) accusing Democratic opponents of being too wimpy by nature to handle the bad guys.
If the flight suit and Donald Rumsfeld’s recent caustic comments (about critics who aid the enemy) aren’t enough to convince you, listen to what Bush said in his recent address:
“For a generation leading up to 9/11,” he said, there was no “sustained and serious response to terrorism.” As a result, he said, the terrorists became convinced “that free nations (read: America) were decadent and weak.” But once we “went to war,” history took a “different turn. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power.”
Whether pre-emptive war in Iraq was the right call—the shrewdest use of America’s (not limitless) blood and treasure—is the central substantive question of the campaign. Did going to Iraq make us safer? That will be the issue.
Now here’s the politics: The White House will claim that anyone who suggests turning away from the course Bush set makes America look “decadent and weak” again. Anyone who so suggests is decadent and weak. Candidates such as Howard Dean, who recently uttered the phrase “the troops must come home” (though he says he doesn’t want that to happen immediately) are decadent and weak.
Decadent and weak. Got it?
I’ve read this wartime script before: It’s the one Richard Nixon and the boys used to obliterate George McGovern in 1972. Nixon took the relative high road, touting his secret peace plan to end the Vietnam War, while his henchmen, led by Vice President Spiro Agnew, portrayed (not without some justification) the Democrats as a party that had been invaded by a new generation of hippy peaceniks who loved nothing more than “amnesty, abortion and acid.” As a result, Nixon won re-election by a landslide in the midst of an unpopular war—through, interestingly, the Republicans didn’t gain an inch in Congress.
THE WHITE HOUSE PLAN
White House insiders I’ve talked to in recent days say, in sum, the following: that they plan to sell the president to the country based on what they see as his strength of character, his leaderly resolve and his sense of moral clarity—a man’s man, in other words. Critics who suggest another way in Iraq, one insider told me, tend to favor “negotiations and embargoes. If they want to pursue a pacifist approach,” he said, “well, that’s a debate we are prepared to have.”
In other words, that is the debate they want to have. And by the way: Administration types and their Republican allies really do believe that critics of the war are dangerous.
The Democrats’ view of Bush and his crowd is equally apocalyptic and unforgiving. Core Democrats were angry, to begin with, at what they still view as a 2000 election stolen by Jeb Bush in Florida and Clarence Thomas in the Supreme Court. There is also a matter of political physics: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. After 9/11, most Democrats stifled their loathing for Bush out of a sense of patriotic duty; now they are making up for lost time.
And now there is the war in Iraq, which virtually all Democrats have come to regard as worse than a catastrophic mistake—as a deliberate plot by Bush to enrich his Texas friends and divert attention from his failure to apprehend Osama bin Laden and other players in the stateless terror network.
HOW FAR WILL DEMOCRATS GO?
But the Democrats’ presidential candidates don’t know quite how far to go with this. They have an ancestral folk memory of the McGovern debacle. The issue at the moment is troops and money for Iraq. The two extremes are Sen. Joe Lieberman, who wants to send more American troops to Iraq immediately and who says unequivocally that he will vote to give the president the $87 billion he asked for, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who wants to bring all the troops home yesterday and who says he will vote against the appropriation.
The frontrunner, Howard Dean, has been sliding around like a skater on a frozen pond in Vermont: He wants more international troops, not American ones, but at times has sounded like he wants to bring the U.S. soldiers home forthwith. And a few months ago he sounded like he wanted to put more Americans in. As for the appropriation, he said he might vote for it were he in Congress, but only if Bush would forego $87 billion of his most recent tax cut to pay for it.
Where do the Dems go from here? Pounding the table and talking the need for U.N. involvement is a loser politically; the American people don’t trust the U.N. Other than Kucinich, they aren’t going to call for a pullout in Iraq; for all of Dick Gephardt’s talk about the president’s “miserable failure,” he’ll support him, or at least the troops. Do the Democrats really want to stress diplomacy?
THE DEAN STRATEGY
Dean’s advisers think they can fend off the “pacifist” line of GOP attack with the personality of their candidate. Dean is a rather angry fellow by nature, and his handlers seem to glory in his gruff, combative personality (perfect, by the way, for attracting supporters on the Internet). In focus groups, one adviser told me, viewer/voters quickly come to the conclusion that Dean is someone to be reckoned with. “After 10 minutes of looking at the guy they say ‘this is one tough customer,’” the handler said.
If Dean is the nominee, he—and the Democrats—have to hope the whole country sees him that way.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc. |
