Consider where we were and what has come to pass. Consider who we were and what we have become. Four years ago, the overriding issue in the presidential election was how to let the good times roll: There were large government surpluses, and more were projected. Fixing Social Security (news - web sites), increasing healthcare benefits, improving education, and cleaning up the environment all seemed like good ideas at the time. Homeland security? The phrase did not exist. Terrorism? That mostly happened someplace else. Iraq (news - web sites)? Was that the one next to Iran?
But the ground beneath this year's presidential election has, to put it mildly, shifted. "This election fundamentally is about the safety of our children, our streets, our airspace," says Ken Duberstein, a former Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) chief of staff with close ties to the current administration. "We know this will be a 'long, twilight struggle,' and that is why this election is about the war on terror and not the economy, why it's about security and not clean drinking water or the environment. This year it's not the economy, stupid. It's terrorism and homeland security, stupid." Says former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo: "In these modern times, issues have become more and more complex. But the simplest of all issues is war. It's incredibly easy to understand: Evil people came and killed 3,000 right in the heart of our country. We have to destroy them, and we have a president who is a genius at communicating simply--to the point that he lapses easily into simplicity."
And to George W. Bush it is simple. "We will strike the terrorists abroad," he said in a speech in Mason City, Iowa, last Wednesday, "so we do not have to face them here at home." That, at its most simple, is his justification for the Iraq war and his major campaign pledge. Forget about weapons of mass destruction, forget about ties to al Qaeda, forget about nation building. To Bush, it gets down to this: Either fight the terrorists in Fallujah or fight them in Phoenix.
To John Kerry (news - web sites) it is equally simple: By invading Iraq, which was not a threat to the United States, George Bush (news - web sites) has "taken his eye off the ball" when it comes to really fighting terrorism effectively. Giving a speech on the same day, in the same state, in Waterloo, he said: "On George Bush's watch, America is more threatened than ever before . . . . I want a world where no American mother should have to lie awake at night worrying about what tomorrow will bring."
The media, whose institutional memory seems to be about as long as the life of the mayfly, have, in the final days of this campaign, decided that this election is uniquely about "fear." But, in fact, presidential campaigns almost always are: Vote for Barry Goldwater and he will plunge the nation into a thermonuclear war that will incinerate little girls innocently plucking the petals off a daisy. Vote for Michael Dukakis and he will release dangerous murderers from prison who will invade our homes to rape and torture us. Vote for Bob Dole and risk the end of Social Security. Vote for Al Gore (news - web sites), George W. Bush said in 2000, and he will leave this nation "trillions in debt."
A specter. But there is something different about the fear campaign this time around. Something that makes it scarier and, therefore, more potent as a political tool: The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have left a legacy, a specter, and it is the specter of our own deaths and the deaths of our loved ones. If the 2004 campaign has become about anything, it has become about actual survival, about worrying whether we, our spouses, our children, our parents will return home at the end of the day. "Since 9/11, we live on a different planet," says a senior Kerry adviser. "Our lives have been profoundly changed forever. And this is the first time that feeling will be expressed at the ballot box." This feeling has led to the "Battle of the Animal Ads" in the last days of the campaign. A Bush ad shows wolves moving through a forest and says "weakness" invites attack while a Democratic ad shows an eagle and an ostrich with its head in the sand and asks whether in "challenging times" America shouldn't be an eagle again.
That fear works as a campaign tool is not debated in political circles anymore. This time, the issue is who will use fear most effectively. Take the draft. Few can imagine the U.S. Congress actually approving a draft in the foreseeable future, and George W. Bush states flatly he won't call for one. But when Kerry said there was a "great potential" for a draft if Bush wins, he was raising a potent political issue, especially with female voters and young people. And Gary Hart, former Democratic presidential candidate and cochair of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, tells U.S. News: "If George Bush is re-elected, a draft is a real possibility. People are not being recruited, and they are not staying in. The only logical decision you could come to is he will have to resort to conscription for Iraq."
Yet, in times of war, fear usually works to the advantage of the incumbent president. Abraham Lincoln put it most famously (and modestly) when, facing re-election in 1864 during the Civil War, he said: "I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that 'it was not best to swap horses while crossing streams.' " Historian Garry Wills puts it this way: "Elections usually are referendums on the incumbent. But once a nation is in a war there is a great rallying to the leader. Today, these two things are tugging against each other." Wills predicted early on (as many Democrats did not) that this election would to a large extent get down to a referendum on the war in Iraq. "But I thought either Bush would do well in Iraq and win in a landslide or do poorly in Iraq and go out in a landslide," Wills says. "I don't know why Bush's popularity has persisted, except for the rallying effect, the country rallying around a president in time of war." But Bush's relative popularity (his approval rating hovers around 50 percent) during a controversial war also reflects something else: his success so far in linking the war in Iraq to the war on terror and the fight to protect the homeland. It was the theme of the entire Republican convention: Vote for George W. Bush or die. "That picture has been painted clearly and starkly," says a top Democratic operative. "And that will decide the election and not whether Dick Cheney (news - web sites) has a lesbian daughter or the last killer ad we put on TV. " And the operative even gives Bush a little grudging credit when he says, "Bush didn't middle this. He is not finessing this. It is there in its full glory."
It was not supposed to be this way. Nor was it obvious that it would turn out so. At the beginning of the campaign last year, Democrats assumed the election would be about domestic issues such as job creation, a faltering economy, and increasing deficits. They did not want to be accused of a lack of patriotism during a time of war, so many Democrats in Congress voted to authorize the Iraq war, as a way of "taking it off the table" so the campaign could be fought on other issues. The problem this tactic ran into can be put in two words, however: Howard Dean (news - web sites).
Dean, a largely obscure governor from Vermont, correctly judged that the major Democratic candidates for president had badly underestimated opposition to the war in Iraq within their own party. At Dean's "coming out" speech at the Democratic National Committee (news - web sites)'s winter meeting in February 2003, he began by thundering: "What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq!" Dean's rise, first in fundraising and then in the polls, was meteoric and it badly scared the Democratic field. Candidates who had voted to authorize the war to satisfy the right now felt they had to vote against funding the war to satisfy the left. It was a dilemma from which the Kerry campaign has never fully recovered. "John Kerry has not been a good candidate," says Wills, who strongly opposes Bush. "Kerry was crippled at the outset by his vote authorizing the war. He has always been trapped by this. He said he thought Bush would use the authority responsibly. What in Bush's record led him to believe that ?"
Yet Kerry does his best, as he did in the three debates, when he manages to decouple the war in Iraq from the war on terrorism and when he charges that Bush, by pursuing a war against Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in Iraq rather than Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) in Afghanistan (news - web sites), actually increased the threat to the United States by creating "a terrorist haven [in Iraq] that wasn't there." No, Bush replies, Kerry simply doesn't get it. By creating democracies in Afghanistan and in Iraq, we fight terrorism most effectively because "free societies will be hopeful societies, which no longer feed resentments and breed violence."
Normally these would be somewhat esoteric arguments, especially if you lack a job or affordable healthcare or a good school for your children. But the terror threat is real enough, both candidates believe, that it will trump domestic issues in the end (though domestic issues will continue to be mentioned). "How America decides this presidential election will go a long way in determining how we face the enemy," says Duberstein. "As a people we are focused unbelievably on the changes in our daily life: the Jersey barriers, the waits at the airport, the metal detectors. That has changed us as a nation. Psychologically, we are more insecure. But we know we have to cope and to win."
Psychologist Mary Margaret Frederick, whose home and practice are four blocks from where the twin towers stood in Manhattan, has a more chilling outlook. "In the 25 years since I started working in mental health, I have never experienced the intensity of focused fear on the outcome of an election as I am experiencing this year," she says. She admits that that most of her patients are "left-leaning Democrats," so their dislike of Bush is hardly surprising. What is surprising, however, is the depth of their feeling. "Many of my patients are as afraid of having another four years of a Bush presidency as they are of the terrorists," she says. "And they are very, very afraid. Some are having a recurrence of the textbook symptoms of anxiety and depression that they experienced after 9/11. Some are suffering from near paralysis in their everyday lives as the election draws closer."
Likable. Working against this, Republicans insist, is George W. Bush's trump card: his natural, easygoing likability. It may not appeal to Democrats, they say, but it will appeal to enough persuadable voters to carry the day. "Americans want to like their presidents," Duberstein says. "Ronald Reagan was likable. Bill Clinton (news - web sites) was a likable rogue. People may agree viscerally with what Kerry is saying, but they don't want him in their bedroom when they are watching the 11 o'clock news. He fails the bedroom test. The country has sometimes been ambivalent about Bush's leadership, especially about Iraq, but is there an acceptable alternative? Kerry is not likable and Bush is." As Arthur Miller said in Death of a Salesman, "And that's the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!"
Yet, even likability has it limits. And the Iraq war may be testing that limit. Walter Lippmann once wrote that the "acid test" of a foreign policy is whether it unites the American people. By this standard, the Bush foreign policy in Iraq has been far from a success, not just with Democrats but with members of his own party. "Iraq was a mistake," says Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative activist whose direct-mail fundraising efforts have helped elect Republicans for decades. "It took our eye off of bin Laden and al Qaeda . . . . In some ways, the Democrats have a point there." Says Paul Weyrich, a central figure in the American conservative movement, "I wish [Bush] well and admire his courage. But I'm not convinced this is going to work." Yet few Democratic activists are making any confident predictions for victory in the last days of the election. "Bush's low favorability ratings, especially in the battleground states, suggests to me we should win," says one senior Kerry adviser. "But if we don't win, it was the power of the war card and the power of fear."
More than 70 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt told the American people that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." This year, fear itself is plenty.
War, peace and politics: Why this campaign matters
Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
War, peace and politics: Why this campaign matters
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