Bush will win the election, wartime 'hawks' always do
By Tim Cavanaugh
- Tim Cavanaugh is web editor at Reason magazine (www.reason.com). He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
If John Kerry is serious about defeating George W. Bush in the US presidential election next November, I have some advice for him, courtesy of my daughter.
Thanks to the American Museum of the Moving Image's online exhibit "The Living Room Candidate," I've found the perfect one-minute entertainment for a small child: The once-famous "I Like Ike" TV commercial for Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 campaign features a black and white cartoon parade led by a smiling, banner-waving elephant, marching to the infectious, policy-free anthem: "You like Ike, I like Ike, Everybody likes Ike for President ..." This spot never fails to make my kid (not yet, to my knowledge, a declared Republican) laugh, dance, wave her hands and demand repeat viewings. The obvious lesson: If you want to win, get a campaign spot that appeals to a 2-year-old.
It's just one of the many weaknesses of the Kerry campaign that the candidate seems incapable of this sort of common touch. In recent weeks, commentators have predicted Kerry's doom for a number of reasons: because he seems like a snob; because his Roman Catholicism appears insufficiently zealous; because his daughter wore a revealing dress at the Cannes film festival; because he's from America's Northeast; and because he speaks French.
But I've got another reason why Kerry doesn't have a prayer in November. My reason is neither infallible nor earthshaking, and it's based on one of those "iron laws of history" that have a bad habit of melting away once you notice them. But it has considerable support when one looks at the history of US presidential elections.
Call it the Alamo Principle: When troops are in the field, in sufficient enough numbers for the nation to consider itself "at war," the candidate who looks more convincingly hawkish will always win. It doesn't matter how controversial, hopeless, or misguided the given war is (and all three adjectives could plausibly be applied to the Iraq war). It doesn't matter if large segments or even a majority of the population are not persuaded that the costs of the war are worth paying. It doesn't even matter whether the candidate's hawkishness is real or merely an effect of style and spin. American voters refuse to admit, or even consider, battlefield defeat.
Thus Bush, who has managed to sell himself as the hawkish candidate on both the war in Iraq and the "war on terrorism" (though it's often difficult to tell how or where his and Kerry's positions on the two differ), has an edge that is more significant than the slight lead Kerry now enjoys in most polls; and even more significant than indications, in a recent USA Today-CNN-Gallup Poll, that a majority of Americans now consider the invasion of Iraq a mistake.
Anybody who believes Kerry can win as an anti-war candidate needs to cite a single wartime instance in American history where an anti-war candidate has won. Skeptics may point to the three votes held during America's extended involvement in the Vietnam War - and specifically to 1968, the year when, by popular agreement, Vietnam "cost" Lyndon Johnson the presidency. I counter that all three of these votes demonstrate my principle nicely.
In 1964, the United States had fewer than 20,000 troops in Vietnam, ostensibly in an advisory role; Americans could still kid themselves that the nation was not at war. Moreover, while the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, whose advocacy of extreme anti-communism and nuclear weapons was a byword with voters, clearly seemed more hawkish overall, it's not clear that he was the greater hawk on Vietnam. Among other things, he opposed the military draft, and his criticisms of Johnson's handling of Vietnam did not indicate an unambiguous commitment to fight and win the conflict. In retrospect, the 1964 Tokin Gulf resolution passed a few weeks before the Democratic presidential convention (and which gave the administration wide latitude to expand the war in Vietnam), can be seen as Johnson's formal, and successful, drive to establish himself as the real Vietnam warrior.
We don't know how Johnson would have fared in a general election in 1968. Party primaries are poor indicators of general election performance, and Johnson withdrew from the campaign before he and the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, could face off. What is clear is that Nixon was palpably more hawkish than Hubert Humphrey, his eventual Democratic opponent. Nixon ran as a "peace with honor" candidate - the kind of posture that seems moderate on its face but translates to voters as: "I'm going to kick some ass and then go home."
More importantly, the stern, sharp-edged Nixon seemed more personally hawkish than the wooly Humphrey, whose conviction for staying the course in Vietnam always seemed half-hearted. In the event Nixon squeaked by Humphrey, and would almost certainly have won by a much wider margin had it not been for a strong third-party challenge by George Wallace.
The only Vietnam era election that unambiguously pitted a hawk against a dove took place in 1972, when Democratic candidate George McGovern promised to bring the troops home immediately. By 1972, American involvement in Vietnam was winding down and it was clear to all that the United States would lose. Yet even then, with public opinion strongly against the war, Nixon demolished McGovern, winning a popular victory of 60 percent to 37 percent, the widest margin since Franklin Roosevelt's win in 1936. That is to say: Even at the losing end of the most controversial war in American history, the hawk won just by promising to lose more slowly than the other guy.
This military tenacity in the voters says many things about the American character, not all of them flattering. I wish that Americans' determination to win wars were coupled with better judgment about which wars to get involved in. And to a disturbing degree, the classical patriotism of land and culture and history has been displaced in America by a more crude patriotism of martial pride. Still, as evolutionary mechanisms go, military chutzpah is probably one of the more effective in securing the survival of a nation.
This leaves Kerry with a tough row to hoe. He needs to get to the right of Bush on the war issue, and the war is Bush's only issue. Here again, however, he may want to turn to the Eisenhower example. In 1952, running against voter disenchantment with the Democrats' handling of the Korean War, Eisenhower ran not as a peace candidate but as a knowledgeable wartime leader, picking on such minutiae as Harry Truman's failure to provide enough tanks to the Korean Peninsula.
Given Bush's less-than-balletic performance in Iraq, Kerry has an open hole. The popular notion that the Bush Pentagon failed to provide enough troops up front is an obvious angle of attack. The American failure to create an adequate Iraqi defense force is another. Kerry has even more opportunities to portray Bush as the softy in the wider war on terrorism: With modern civilization at war against a Wahhabi death cult once funded by Saudi money, you have an American president who is more comfortable hobnobbing with Saudi princes than with his own secretary of state. Bush is a ripe, low-hanging fruit.
Ironically, Kerry seems ill equipped to do the picking. For all his manifest courage on the battlefield, he's a singularly timid candidate, and his more hawkish statements have so far seemed like cases of "me-too" - precisely the opposite of the effect he should be aiming for. Being a hawk is easy, but seeming like a hawk may be tougher than we realize.
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