While the British media have been hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction and Hutton, an event of infinitely greater importance — to global security, to the prevention of terrorism and to the cause of honest politics — has been unfolding in America almost unremarked. American democracy has been slowly and unsteadily groping towards the obvious resolution for all the geopolitical and financial turbulence of the past few years: George W. Bush’s eviction from the White House.
It is, of course, too early to hang out the Democrats’ blue bunting or even to be certain that John Kerry will be their candidate; but Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses in Missouri, South Carolina and five other states strongly suggested that the Democrats will unite around a credible nominee. Bush will thus face an even tougher contest in the forthcoming election than he did in 2000 against Al Gore. Given that almost all political experts, not only in Washington and Wall Street, but also in London, Brussels, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing and the Middle East, still seem to take a Bush re-election for granted, the global implications of what has happened in the past few weeks could be immense. Yet, as I found last month in Davos, the global political and business elites did not seem even to recognise the possibility of US regime change.
Quite why the global chattering classes have been so unanimous in assuming Bush’s re-election has always been a bit of a mystery, at least to me. As is often the case with conventional wisdom, the belief in a Bush victory seemed to owe far more to simple repetition than to logic or evidence.
After all, Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million and he would have been more than a million votes behind, had it not been for the quixotic Green Party candidacy of Ralph Nader. Immediately after Bush’s election, the US eco- nomy sank into recession and, just as the recession ended, the nation plunged into a permanent state of war. Given that “peace and prosperity” has traditionally been a successful political slogan, it is hard to understand the confidence in the re-election of a president whose record could be summarised as “war and want”.
Until the past few weeks, how- ever, such arguments could be dismissed as wishful thinking, at least by regular readers of this column. Like the few US commentators who questioned Bush’s manifest destiny to stay in the White House, I have been attacking Bush ever since he became a candidate four years ago. Back in the summer of 2000, I wrote that he was the least trustworthy and most divisively radical candidate ever to have a serious run for the US presidency and therefore that he was bound to be rejected by the American people, even despite the obvious inadequacies of Al Gore.
In suggesting that Bush will probably turn out to be a one-term president like his father, I may still be indulging in wishful thinking, so let me switch from hunches about the future to facts about the present and the recent past.
The most obvious, but least important, of these facts are the opinion polls, which now show Bush trailing Kerry by 46 to 53 per cent and John Edwards by 48 to 49 per cent. While such numbers, along with the presidential approval ratings, which have fallen below 50 per cent for the first time in Bush’s presidency, are certainly worrying for the White House, they are by no means disastrous. Most voters have not yet thought seriously about the election and eight months is a very long time in politics. But Kerry’s emergence as the Democratic front-runner is dangerous for Bush for more fundamental and durable reasons.
First, Kerry is not Howard Dean. Dean would almost certainly have proved unelectable, both because of his erratic personality and his overly emotional opposition to the war in Iraq. The latest opinion polls show Dean as the only candidate who would be easily beaten by Bush. Kerry may be dismissed by the Washington commentariat as uncharismatic and soporofic, but he is exactly the kind of reasonable centrist politician that democracies often turn to after a period of turbulence — and the same is true of Edwards, the only other Democratic contender still seriously in the running. While the Bush political machine will try to brand Kerry as an ultra-liberal Yankee extremist, he is in fact a moderate with a good knowledge of national security and international issues, a respectable personal image and a voting record on economic and social issues which is well within the mainstream of American politics. As for his dull personality, there is no evidence that voters are looking for excitement at present — and Bush is hardly an orator in the style of Roosevelt or Lincoln, or an endearing entertainer in the Truman or Reagan mould.
A second reason why the White House should be anxious is that Kerry’s success has proved that money does not guarantee success, even in modern American politics. Conventional wisdom in Washington holds that Bush has made himself impregnable by accumulating an enormous campaign war chest, currently $150 million and swelling by the day. Kerry, by contrast, ran out of money even before the first primary ballots were counted. Nevertheless, he overturned the commanding lead enjoyed by Dean, who was spending more money than any candidate in the history of the Democratic Party and was therefore declared unbeatable by many of the same commentators who now claim that Bush is invincible because of his financial advantage. Instead, we are already seeing that vast sums of money flow quickly into the coffers of whichever candidate emerges as the Democratic front-runner.
That so much money started flowing to Kerry as soon as he became the front-runner points to the third reason for believing that the Democrats are now well placed to win the White House: the Democrats are more determined than ever to win this election and they will back to the hilt anyone who looks as if he may be capable of beating Bush. To put the point more bluntly, there are tens of millions of Americans who hate their President and will do anything within their power to get rid of him, even if that means backing a second-best candidate, swallowing some of their principles and accepting some policies which they do not particularly like. As a result, the turnout in this year’s election is set to be the highest in living memory — another fact which should worry the White House, since in the past Republicans have been much more likely than Democrats to turn out to vote.
Why do so many Americans hate Bush so intensely? To answer this question in detail would take me into the realm of conjecture, rather than hard facts, so let me shift to a related issue, which also happens to be the fourth and most important reason for believing that Bush faces serious electoral trouble this year.
Whether they hate Bush or love him (and to judge by all the surveys, US opinion is divided 50-50 on this point), most Americans agree that the forthcoming election will be a referendum on the Bush Administration, in which attention will focus almost entirely on the President and his record, rather than on the Democratic candidate. A second-term election in America is always more of a vote of confidence or othewise in the incumbent — and today this is truer than ever because of the unprecedented polarisation of American opinion over Bush. History is often said to show that incumbency is a big advantage. Indeed, this is the main reason, along with money, cited by Washington experts for expecting Bush to win. But logic suggests that the impact of incumbency depends entirely on how well a president has performed during his first term, as the defeats of Presidents Ford, Carter and Bush Sr demonstrate.
The only thing that could save the Bush Administration, its security policies, its financial entanglements, its environmental record, its social attitudes and its tax reforms, from a microscopic examination in the forthcoming election would be a decision by the Democrats to nominate a highly ideological and controversial figure. This was the outcome the White House had hoped for with the emergence of Howard Dean. But given a stolid, respectable opponent such as Kerry or Edwards, this year ’s election will become a straightforward referendum on the Bush record. Will this be good news or bad for the Bush Administration? Let the American people judge.
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