The push against Bush
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The gubernatorial contest in Virginia this week threw up a model that the Democrats could build on, reports Washington correspondent Geoff Elliott
theaustralian.news.com.au
12nov05
Tim Kaine opposes abortion, quotes from the Bible and cruised Virginia in a V8 pick-up truck during the state election campaign. He boasted about his love of the outdoors, of his 12-gauge shotgun, and said how it was ridiculous that under state law good folks were not allowed to hunt on Sundays.
"A lot of hunters work six days a week. Sunday might be the one day that they could go out hunting and maybe take their kid hunting," Kaine told electors. "I support Sunday hunting and would hope to work to implement it in a fair way."
Little wonder, then, that Kaine swept to victory this week against a negative challenger, Jerry Kilgore, to win the governorship of Virginia, a traditionally Republican state that is part of the conservative south which for decades has dominated politics in Washington, DC.
But the thing is, Kaine is a Democrat and Kilgore is a Republican.
Kaine has delivered what many believe is a model for Democrats to wrest back control of the political agenda in the US, which is to speak the language of the regular guy, just like President George W. Bush, and use religious faith to describe and defend Democratic values, particularly on issues such as the death penalty, which he opposes.
Kaine's victory was one of a slew of elections across the US on Tuesday (since 1845, all elections in the US have been held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November) and they broadly fell into a narrative that conforms with the view that Bush's second-term Republican administration is on the ropes.
The Virginian election result rode in tandem with Democrat Jon Corzine's win in New Jersey. Then, in California, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered a humiliating defeat in a referendum on, among other things, reining in unions' political power and budgetary reform.
For all that, there are plenty of reasons that the elections this week had little to do with Bush - politics is local, after all - and the White House was certainly attempting to portray them that way.
But when the momentum is against you, it's hard to be heard. "Even though I could spend the next two hours talking about extenuating circumstances and why it was unfair to characterise this as a referendum on Bush, the fact is it's going to be seen as important," says Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report.
He calls it a snowball effect, whereby Republican congressmen and state leaders gradually become increasingly nervous about being seen with Bush because of his record low standing in opinion polls. There are signs all over Washington that Bush is being undercut by Republicans looking after their own skin, ensuring some product differentiation ahead of the congressional mid-term elections in November next year.
Although the outcome in New Jersey was expected because the state traditionally leans towards the Democrats, the Virginia result is most worrying for Republicans. Bush held Virginia in last year's presidential election with 54 per cent of the vote, but his approval ratings in the state have slipped to 44 per cent.
The Kilgore campaign appeared to distance itself from Bush, but on election eve the President attended a Kilgore rally to try to bolster the less-than-convincing candidate. Writes conservative columnist Robert Novak: "The Monday night appearance in Richmond [Virginia's capital] by a dispirited and exhausted Bush, returning from his difficult Latin America trip, was a dud."
However, more than any dissatisfaction with Bush, what Kaine had going for him, among other things, was the negative campaign from the awkward Kilgore, who authorised television advertisements that appropriated Holocaust imagery to attack Kaine's opposition to the death penalty.
In one of the ads, which featured relatives of murder victims, a distraught father said Kaine would not support the death penalty even for Adolf Hitler. The ads drew fierce criticism and Kaine was quickly able to rise above it, explaining that as a Catholic he had problems with the death penalty, as he did with abortion.
But he cleverly straddled the Republican and Democrat messages by saying that he would abide by Virginian law and authorise death penalties if he had to. He also said that he respected legal rights on abortion.
In couching his concern about the death penalty and abortion in religious terms, it seems Kaine struck a chord with conservative voters, who appear to have been put off by Kilgore's uncharitable attacks.
The White House subsequently tried to paint Kaine as a politician who ran on Republican values. "In Virginia, for instance, you had a ... Democratic candidate for governor who ran on a conservative platform, a platform that was very much out of line with the Democratic national party," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan when asked about the results.
Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, disagrees. "Kaine ran as a moderate, pro-government Democrat, not at all as a Republican," Mann says. "He supports maintaining legal access to abortion while speaking comfortably about his personal moral opposition to it. His Catholic faith is genuine and he is not afraid to talk about it. Nothing Republican about that. He is respectful of traditional values and tolerant of those who differ. He talked mainly about what government could and should do, not the hot-button social issues that Kilgore stressed."
Another thing that worked in Kaine's favour was the record of outgoing Democratic governor Mark Warner. His election four years ago (Virginia governors are restricted to one term) was portrayed as something of a fluke, but he turned out to be a centrist politician who bridged the Democrat-Republican divide.
He favoured growth and was focused on getting stuff done, saying that 98 per cent of his job was about balancing budgets, educating kids and sorting out transportation. With Warner well liked in Virginia - his popularity is borne out by an 80 per cent approval rating - Kaine appeared in public with the incumbent whenever he could and often referred to the Warner-Kaine campaign. Not surprisingly, attention is now switching to the telegenic Warner as a potential 2008 presidential candidate and websites have already been set up towards that end. One of the factors in his favour is that Virginia is part of the south, and the previous three Democratic presidents - Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson - were all southerners.
It may be too early to draw conclusions about next year's mid-term congressional elections and analysts caution against using the Virginia results as a barometer. In 1997, for instance, Republicans won the state gubernatorial race but lost seats in the following year's federal congressional elections. But there is one seismic precedent. In 1993, Republicans won in Virginia and New Jersey, and the following year they won control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate, a control they have not relinquished since then, apart from an 18-month period in 2001-03.
Cook says at the start of the year he gave Democrats a zero per cent chance of winning control of the house or the Senate, or both. Now he puts the probability at about 20 per cent, "and zero to 20 per cent represents a pretty big shift".
Mann's forecasts are even more aggressive. "The 2005 election returns alone wouldn't portend a Democratic sweep in 2006, but they confirmed the larger reality that Bush and the Republicans have taken devastating blows since the 2004 elections and are now very vulnerable," he says. "The structure of house and Senate elections makes it difficult, but by no means impossible, for the Democrats to ride a national wave to a majority in Congress. If the 2006 mid-term elections had been held last Tuesday, I believe they would have gained more than enough seats to recapture the majority in both the house and the Senate. If the public mood remains sour, and the bad news [about] Iraq, energy prices and criminal investigations does not cease, the Democrats will likely succeed."
The consequences of the Virginia result may be profound, Novak contends. "For a liberal Virginian to win a southern red state signalled that cherished Republican majorities in both the house and Senate, plus all the perquisites they entail, could be lost in 2006," he says, predicting that many Republicans seeking to shore up their vote will try "to keep as far away from President Bush as possible". |
