February 23, 2004

Tangled Up in Red and Blue

Bush may trail in national polls, but beware the electoral college

Will Bush's flag decal still get him into Heaven?

Among my own acquaintances, at least, I've noticed a new polarity lately between folks who still presume Bush cannot lose and others who think he's already beaten. They're both wrong--but the latter more palpably. Look past the national poll numbers that put Kerry 6-10 points ahead. On a state-by-state basis, W is still in a surprisingly strong position despite the many hits he's taken recently.   

Late last week Zogby released a poll that broke down Bush v. Kerry on the basis of 2000 results. In the Blue states won by Gore then, Zogby's numbers have Kerry up 46-45, a statistical dead heat. In the Red states that went for Bush before, he leads Kerry 51-39. Needless to say, this is markedly at odds with what other polls seem to be saying, but I'll take Zogby, who performed best not only in the waning days of the 2000 race but so far in this winter's primaries. It only underscores how absurd it was for Democrats to flock to Kerry over electability: There are half a dozen reasons Edwards would fare better in a number of southern and midwestern battleground states.

But every time I get myself halfway convinced that John Kerry could not win without a miracle, the armored doors of Bunker 1600 slide open and out rolls another stink bomb. The White House has already conceded that its forecast of 2.6 million new jobs created in 2004 is of dubious provenance--Chalabi again, perhaps?

It's become one of the cliches of the hour that Republicans are "scared," but Republicans--at least the ones who live in the Big House--are also being awfully stupid in a tactical sense. Last Friday Howard Kurtz reported that the Bush campaign will indeed sell the "Massachusetts liberal" and "Vietnam radical" lines hard against Kerry. I don't think very many people care to hear either. Maybe Karl Rove is privy to polling data that suggests it will make a difference in a couple of close states, but it's a little too early for fine-tuning the message to that degree. The only other sensible reason for going after Kerry on these grounds is to turn voters off and depress turnout--but again, I don't think it will work on a retail-politics basis. The epithet "liberal" has lost a lot of its sting while no one was looking, and Kerry's Vietnam record only begets other questions distinctly more unflattering to the president than to Kerry.

The more pressing question for Bush is whether he can arrest his own free-fall. If the Democrats and the media keep after him, it's hard to see any answer but "No." Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center confessed the other day, "I'm a little surprised by how negative people are toward Bush personally," and most of the chattering class seems similarly caught out. And it may keep spiraling down; there's an abundant store of scandals in the cellar (I suggested a few here), and at some point even "strong" Bush supporters--some 83 percent of his backers, according to a WashPost poll I wrote about last week--will begin to tune out or turn elsewhere.  

Nor are skeptics and undecideds likely to find the programmatic side of Bush's campaign inspirational: It's all tax cuts and terrorism. He doesn't exactly say, "If you roll back the tax cuts, then the terrorists win," but that's the spirit of the thing. Awfully thin gruel. But what else has he got to tout?

I watched Bush's speech tonight, and while I like to think I'm pretty good at casting a dispassionate eye toward political elocution, I could see nothing in it to excite anyone's imagination--not even the traditional GOP base, much less the fence-sitters. The big line near the end was, "We'll defend America, whatever it takes." I'm telling you, people don't want to hear that shit anymore. In pushing the memory of 9/11, Bush is leaning on glories that feel like ancient history now. More recent disasters, and mainly economic ones, are the lingua franca this season.

Obligatory Nader Survey

Do you really think this is going to mean a damn thing? My own sense is that no one is going to pay attention. Witness the fate of Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries. Not just partisans but onlookers are focused exclusively on the main event this time. But tell me if you think I'm wrong, and tell me what you think Nader is thinking.

Posted by Steve Perry at February 23, 2004 08:58 PM

Bush v. Bush

[Excerpted from "50,000,000 Kerry Fans Can't Be Wrong," City Pages 2/11/04]

No matter how low the approval ratings go, a vast number of anti-Bush folk remain absolutely, fatalistically convinced the White House will find a way to pull out the election. Or steal it, as they did last time. One can't fault them for thinking that this is the most cutthroat bunch of political operators to soil the Oval Office rugs in a long time. On the popular question of whether there will be an October Surprise--a sudden crisis or breakthrough of apparently spontaneous origin that is in fact politically manipulated--the smart-money answer is plain: Only if they can arrange one. Osama naturally looms largest. There are those who believe US intelligence already has a pretty good idea of his whereabouts and is keeping one eye on his movements and the other on the calendar, and they are not just the usual paranoid crowd. This is mainstream cocktail party chatter now. One way of expressing Bush's present crisis is to say that a lot of average people seem prepared to believe he'd do just about anything to stay in power.

But wanting an October coup, finding one, and executing it are three distinctly different things. Popular liberal mythology has visited on Bush and Rove an almost supernatural air of invincibility. It's silly. If Karl Rove is really the Great Gazoo of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, able to bend political reality to his will by sheer force of mind, then tell me again how his boss got in trouble in the first place. The website Pollkatz maintains a tracking chart of Bush's approval ratings (see illustration page 22). The tale they tell is one of steady erosion punctuated by three events that buoyed Bush's numbers: 9/11, the start of the Iraq war, and the capture of Saddam. But the bang afforded by Bush's triumphs and crises has diminished with each succeeding wave. For a White House that is said to be "all politics all the time," and run by a genius to boot, it's a paltry record.

Last Sunday's Meet the Press showed how quickly and profoundly the earth has moved under Bush's feet. Just a couple of weeks ago, charges that Bush was a Vietnam-era deserter from his National Guard unit were quite beyond the pale. Shortly after Michael Moore re-aired the claim at a Wesley Clark rally, I saw Peter Jennings inform Clark that the allegations were baseless en route to asking how the candidate could fail to repudiate them. On Sunday, one of the pooh-bahs of broadcast news, Tim Russert, was sitting in the Oval Office grilling Bush about it. Near the end, Russert held up a chart with data on unemployment (up 33 percent under Bush), economic contraction (2.2 million jobs lost), and the federal deficit ($521 billion next year alone), and said to the president of the United States, in essence, What the fuck?

Weighed against the servility of most press interactions with Bush, Russert's brusqueness came as a shock--but not as great a shock as W's own demeanor. Bush looked disconsolate and distracted. ("Was he medicated?" a friend called to ask afterward. "Is he into the old man's Halcion?") He barely bothered parrying the National Guard question--"I put in my time, proudly so," he croaked--and his famous pugnacity was nowhere in evidence. If the interview had aired in prime time and not on Sunday morning, it might have dropped another 5 to 10 points from his approval rating all by itself. If Bush ever comes this close to his own version of The Scream when people are actually watching, it's big trouble.

The National Guard question is a window on the world of hurt Bush could be in for if Kerry and the Democrats decide to run a serious campaign for once. Claims that Bush never bothered showing up at his Alabama Guard unit have circulated for years. It is widely perceived to be one of those he said-she said matters that can never be settled conclusively owing to missing attendance records. But a blogger named Phil Carter has pointed out at least three other means by which Bush's active duty could be verified: military pay records, military retirement points, and personal income tax records. It's an answerable question that no one has ever pressed seriously. (Of course we already know the answer: If a shred of paper that vindicated Bush existed anywhere, Team W would have produced it in 2000 to lay the subject to rest.)

There is the story of Bush II writ small: He has been "invincible" to the exact extent that the whole political apparatus has remained unwilling to challenge him. If that is really changing now, a rich vein of scandals awaits unpacking, starting with the terms of Bush's 2000 win: the chicanery at numerous levels in Florida, the scandalous 5-4 Supreme Court vote from which two pro-Bush justices should have recused themselves. (Scalia and Thomas had family members who worked for the Bush campaign.) The lies and intelligence manipulations leading to the Iraq invasion are a lode unto themselves. The ongoing 9/11 investigation, and Bush's efforts to stonewall it at every turn, contains enough explosive material to dominate the news cycle for weeks. Unofficially, it's already clear (from leaks and from the strategic excisions in the congressional 9/11 report) that Bush did receive notice in pre-9/11 briefings of a possible imminent attack on US soil involving Saudi nationals--and, most likely for political reasons concerning US ties to the House of Saud, did nothing. This is not the same as saying Bush "knew" about the attacks, but it smacks of appalling negligence and cronyism--two great themes of the Bush administration, and, one hopes, of Kerry's stump speeches.

The handling of pre-9/11 warnings, in turn, could pave the way for a more comprehensive look at all the ways the administration has been cynical and unserious about homeland security. And we have yet to mention the economy and the deficit. In that connection, one of the most telling lines in Bush's poll chart is the one that's not there. W has never earned a significant bounce in public esteem for anything he's done on the home front.

If attacks on Bush's credibility and performance stay at critical mass for very long--the Republicans desperately need a Kerry scandal--it will upset the White House's entire reelection strategy. It's no secret that Rove means to position Bush as a resolute, in-command war president. But when the Republicans scheduled their three-hanky telethon for New York in September, they could not have anticipated a climate in which the Democratic nominee might be able to stand up and say: "Mr. Bush, it is offensive to see you wrap yourself in the memory of a tragedy that you might have prevented for the sake of your own political gain."

It's early. A dozen things could happen to change the campaign landscape overnight. But for the first time it seems more than plausible that it will be a long, hot summer for Bush--possibly to be followed by a long, hot winter back in Crawford, Texas.

Posted by Steve Perry at February 23, 2004 07:56 PM

« February 22, 2004 | Main | February 26, 2004 »