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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Americans are turning against Bush's disastrous Iraq policy. So why aren't they embracing his presidential rivals?
Nov 10, 2003 | Here's how badly things are going for George W. Bush in Iraq: When a reporter asked last week if he could promise there would be fewer U.S. troops in Iraq a year from now than there are today, the president proclaimed it a "trick question" and refused to answer.
This ought to be good news for the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House in 2004. Since the planes hit the towers on the morning of Sept. 11th, the rally-around-the-flag president has appeared all but unbeatable. But with each passing day now -- with each military coffin the administration won't let the cameras see -- Bush is growing just a little more vulnerable. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last weekend showed that a majority of Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq. Americans are wondering whether the war was worth it. They're worrying that U.S. troops are getting bogged down, that Bush has started a war he can't finish.
They just don't seem to want any of the Democratic candidates to take his place.
In the zero-sum game of politics, you'd expect the Democrats' stars to rise as Bush's begins to fade. But it's not happening. Bush's approval ratings are dropping fast, but the Democratic candidates aren't rising up to fill the void. In head-to-head polling matchups, Bush beats each of the Democrats now running against him. And even Democrats themselves are in discord as to whether the party should be pushing a fire-and-brimstone anti-Bush guy like former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean or an Iraq hawk like Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Why? With Iraq unraveling and Bush on the ropes, why can't the Democrats come together and deliver a knockout punch? There are too many Democrats running for president and not enough serving in Congress. The Democrats in the presidential race can't get their messages out, and the Democrats in Congress can't do anything at all. While the media is game for "gotcha" stories now -- the press ate up the spat over Howard Dean's Confederate flag comment, and the tempest in a teapot over a leaked memo from a Democratic staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee -- little play is given to the substance of the candidates' views. And the public isn't listening anyway.
The result: As the Post explained in describing its poll results last weekend, the Democrats -- in the eyes of the public, at least -- are "virtually invisible as an effective opposition to a president who commands center stage."
"Public confidence is eroding in George Bush, not only in his competence in a difficult foreign crisis but also in his credibility because of the misuse of intelligence to make the case for the invasion of Iraq," says Will Marshall, president of the Democratic Progressive Policy Institute. "The door is open to Democrats, but it's open only if they come in and make their own case." So far, at least, the candidates haven't done that.
You get a glimpse of the problem as soon as you turn on one of the Democrats' debates. Nine candidates perch on stools on a massive arc of a stage. They answer questions in too-fast succession, racing to finish so that the moderator du jour can ensure that a cold-day-in-hell candidate like former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun gets exactly the same amount of airtime as each of the more serious contenders.
It's a disaster before you can even begin processing the words. But then someone speaks -- say, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry or North Carolina Sen. John Edwards -- and things start to get worse. At a debate in Detroit last month, Edwards began his closing statement by saying: "George Bush's America is not our America, but we have to do more than say, 'I told you so.'"
The trouble is, Edwards can't even say "I told you so" when it comes to Iraq. Indeed, on what is becoming the central issue in the presidential race, Edwards can't credibly claim to have "told" anyone anything at all. When Bush asked for authority to go to war last fall, Edwards said yes. And in the Democratic field, he's not alone: Kerry, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Richard Gephardt all voted for the use-of-force resolution in October 2002. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who appeared to have a clear shot at Bush when he entered the race, ended up shooting himself instead with a bumbling first-day performance when he suggested that he probably would have voted for the resolution and then got so flummoxed by questions that he had to ask his press aide to save him.
Support for the war might have seemed like a good idea for Democrats last fall, when the "United We Stand" aftermath of Sept. 11 had Bush looking invincible on international affairs. The Democratic candidates would fight Bush on the economy -- several of them, including Edwards, voted against the president's tax cuts -- while sticking close by his side on foreign policy. But with the economy finally showing hints of an uptick and the war in Iraq going completely to hell, that strategy suddenly seems exactly wrong.
Democrats who once cozied up to Bush now see the advantage in standing up to him instead. That's easy to do for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who has charged to the front of the Democratic pack by blasting Bush early and often. But for Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt and Clark, breaking up with Bush is proving hard to do.
Consider poor John Kerry. The Massachusetts senator ought to be doing quite well at this point in the race. He is experienced, handsome and smart, a domestic liberal and a foreign-policy centrist, and he can say two things about Vietnam that George Bush can't: I fought in the war, and I fought against it. Kerry should have every advantage; thanks to spillover from Boston television, he's even got pseudo-favorite-son status in New Hampshire. It's all good until Kerry has to start firing up his liberal base on Iraq, and then everything gets -- well, it gets a little complicated.
Kerry says that Bush's handling of the war has "put our troops at risk, creating a potential new sanctuary for terrorism and weakening America's leadership in the world." Unfortunately, Kerry, like Edwards, voted to let Bush start the war in the first place. But when Bush asked for $87 billion to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan this fall, Kerry voted no. In debates and on the stump, Kerry has a hard time squaring the votes. As the New York Times noted in a recent article, it took Kerry more than 40 minutes in a conversation with a reporter to arrive at something approaching a coherent theory as to how the two votes could be consistent.
Kerry has explained that he voted to authorize Bush to use force only to provide the president with a credible threat to use in working with the United Nations. Nonsense, says a staffer for another high-ranking Senate Democrat. "It's absurd for anyone to argue that they didn't think the president might go to war," the staffer said. "Everyone had to know that the president was likely to do it and that it might not be done in the way that John Kerry would do it."
Kerry's campaign staff did not return calls for comment. However, the candidate has said publicly that he couldn't vote in favor of Bush's $87 billion Iraq and Afghanistan package because it is "not the most effective way to protect American soldiers and to advance our interests."
Foreign policy expert Coit Blacker accuses Kerry of "tortured logic." Blacker is the director of Stanford's Institute for International Studies, and before that, he was a national security aide to Bill Clinton and an advisor to the Gore campaign. He says the middle-of-the-pack Democratic candidates "are just terrified of ending up on the wrong side of the [Iraq] issue, and they can't figure out which is the wrong side," Blacker said this week. "These guys are slaves to polls. They see the president's job approval rating slipping, but not so precipitously that they're prepared to say, 'We told you so.'"
