RALEIGH — Back in the spring, with American and British troops rolling up enemy troops and Islamofascist paramilitaries in Iraq, another round of tax cuts coming out of Washington, and the Federal Reserve board keeping the monetary stimulus on full throttle, exuberant Republicans in North Carolina and around the country were celebrating their party’s good fortunes.
Now, with President Bush’s approval numbers continuing to drop — most recently in a new statewide poll of North Carolina voters by the folks at Elon University — excitable Republicans are getting gloomy. His re-elect number is in the low 40s. In a Republican-trending state such as our own, approval of his economic policies is down to 35 percent. Overall job-approval numbers for the president are back to pre-9/11 levels. The administration’s foolish round of steel tariffs last year haven’t “locked down” industrial states, as the political pros confidently predicted. Instead, they have cost far more jobs in manufacturing industries than they “saved” in steel production, enraging corporate leaders and hampering economic recovery.
Still, the gloomy are just as wrong now as the giddy were last spring. The 2004 election was always going to be intensely competitive. The Bush people always knew it. The Democrats figured it out this summer, as did the sillier of the talking-head crowd on cable.
Nothing that has happened since the 2000 election has resolved the fundamental divide in post-Cold War, post-Clinton American politics. About as many voters favor Democrats as Republicans nationwide, with small groups of states solidly aligned, at least in federal elections, with either party. Somewhat larger groups of states are modestly aligned with a party (as North Carolina is with the GOP) and can swing under the right circumstances. A few states are truly on the razor’s edge, including such big states as Florida and Pennsylvania.
It is impossible at this juncture to rate Bush’s chances of re-election. They depend on a host of events that may or may not occur between now and November of next year. They depend on the Democratic nominee. In my opinion, they depend most on the prosecution of the Bush foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many analysts say that voters care far more about their pocketbooks than they do about foreign policy. I think that’s true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as to explain presidential politics. Wars, crises, and foreign-policy positions have played a significant role in electoral outcomes. The president has influence over domestic policy, but he exerts far more direct control over foreign policy — and is thus more personally accountable for it.
In this case in particular, Bush risked a great deal to take resolute action in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, stretching the American military thin and challenging a broad array of effete or duplicitous critics and governments along the way. His risk-taking has largely determined the parameters of the political decision in 2004. If one or more of the terror thugs we are after — Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, etc. — get killed or captured in the coming months, Bush will recover. If evidence of Saddam’s program to produce or smuggle dangerous weapons is found and publicized, Bush will recover. If something approaching decent and peaceful governments appear on the horizon in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush will recover.
Sure, Bush will also see improvement in his political fortunes if the economy, as currently projected, grows at a rapid clip through the end of the year. More growth in stock values and a turnaround on the job front will strengthen his position in wavering GOP base states like North Carolina. But for Bush to clinch the win, and to extend beyond that to something approaching a Reagan-like re-election, his foreign-policy choices will have to appear to voters by Election Day as the right ones.
If the terror masters remain at large and the rationale for military action in Iraq remains as controversial as it is now, President Bush could lose the election. Being a grown-up, he’s known that all along. That’s what makes some of the loopier criticism of his policies so, well, loopy. Far from being the safe political course, the Bush policy is a gamble. I’m not saying that it was an irresponsible gamble. It wasn’t a bet on roulette or slots or some other blind chance. It was a calculation, a hand of stud poker where a card remains uncovered.
Perhaps it will be the Ace of Spades.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.