The politics of terrorism

The importance of the Cold War to Republicans was underscored by the differences between the last election of the Cold War, in 1988, and the first post-Cold War election, in 1992. In both elections, George H.W. Bush was the GOP nominee. In both elections, he won large majorities among voters who listed foreign policy as a primary concern. The big difference? By the time Bush was running for reelection, foreign policy had receded as a central issue for most voters, despite the military victory that Bush had orchestrated in Kuwait. In 1992, most of the country voted on economics and other domestic issues. The Republicans were routed. George Will, the conservative columnist, captured the elder Bush's problem perfectly: "George Bush prepared all his life to conduct the Cold War, only to have it end, leaving him (almost literally) speechless." The president's son was to gain back some of the advantages his father lost when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

A national threat served George W. Bush in another way: When voters look for security, especially from foreign enemies, they look to the executive branch of government. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this in 1940 as war raged across Europe. His reelection slogan then was, "Don't change horses in midstream." In 1940, the horse was a Democrat; this time, the horse is a Republican.

There is one important difference between Roosevelt's approach and Bush's. FDR saw fear as something that could paralyze a nation and prevent action. Bush (like Harry Truman and Vandenberg before him) saw fear as moving the nation to action. Each new terrorist alert reminded the nation of the dangers it faced and pushed other issues to the background. A cynic might say that the only thing Republicans had to fear was the end of fear itself. Whatever doubts Americans had about Bush's handling of the economy, polls showed -- at least until 2004 and despite doubts about the Iraq venture -- that they saw him as a strong and steadfast leader facing down the menace of terror.

And because the war on terrorism, like the Cold War, would be long, shadowy and difficult, there was no telling when it would be declared over. The toppling of those Saddam statues was not like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The capture of Saddam was not like the hanging of Mussolini. After Saddam, even after Osama bin Laden, there would be other enemies to slay, other terror cells to break up.

An open-ended campaign served Bush's political interests far better than a shorter but all-consuming conflict. World War II had demanded the total mobilization of American resources and sacrifices from all sectors of society. The sacrifices in the war on terrorism were asked mostly of members of the military, police, and firefighters -- and of few others. Bush could give patriotic speeches on even days and tax-cutting speeches on odd ones. War, it was presumed, could coexist with tax cuts without end.

In the narrowest political terms, Bush was shrewd to avoid total mobilization or anything close to it. Consider, after all, the fate of Winston Churchill. Despite his brilliant leadership, the British prime minister was bounced from office in 1945 by voters whose wartime sacrifice and solidarity encouraged them to embrace the Labor Party's program of social reform. Bush's rhetoric gave nods to the ideas of service and sacrifice but demanded little -- and certainly none at all from his political base. There was no talk from the White House of the sort of social solidarity that paved the way for Labor's victory in Britain.

Instead, the president and his lieutenants seized advantages none of them had anticipated when Bush assumed office. Thus did a war on terrorism that began in national unity end in partisan division and recrimination.

The breakdown of post-9/11 bipartisanship happened gradually. Even in this heyday of bipartisanship, there was evidence that partisanship would come back. Most disturbing to Democrats, there were signs that Republicans were prepared to use the call to national unity as a means of silencing all criticism of Bush, especially criticism related to the handling of terrorism. If opposition is unpatriotic, what is an opposition to do?

One turning point came in May 2002, when word leaked that an intelligence report on August 6, 2001, had warned of the possibility of terrorist hijackings. For the first time, Bush faced sharp questioning over what he knew and did not know in advance of the events of 9/11. One striking aspect of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the discipline (staunch partisans later saw it as timidity) that Democrats showed in not pressing the administration for answers on possible intelligence failures. The report that the president might have had at least some sort of warning brought forth questions that another administration -- Bill Clinton's, for example -- might have faced immediately after the attacks.

The Democrat who faced the sharpest attacks that May was House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. Even Democrats were uneasy with his use of the Watergate era "what-did-the-president-know-and-when-did-he-know-it?" formulation to challenge Bush on the August memo. But the White House's war against any and all Democrats who dared utter a critical word was so furiously partisan that it suggested a defensiveness about Sept. 11 no one knew was there.

Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, declared that anyone who dared criticize the administration too hard was getting in the way of the war on terrorism. "Incendiary" commentary by opposition politicians, the vice president said, "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."

This effort to suppress dissent was too much even for the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, which flatly labeled Cheney's remarks as "wrong." It added: "It's precisely because we're in a war that we need to find out where we failed."

Next Page: How Bush turned the homeland security bill into a political weapon

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