The New Republic Online: Campaign Journal

June 9, 2004

06.08.04

DO DEAD PRESIDENTS HELP THE INCUMBENT?: It's doubtful Reagan's death will have any long-term impact on the presidential race. It just doesn't seem to be the kind of event from which Bush can suck any lasting benefit. (Although, it's not as if his campaign isn't trying.)

If anything, dead presidents seem to be a curse rather than a blessing for incumbents. The last ex-president to die was Richard Nixon, on April 22, 1994, and Bill Clinton certainly didn't profit from any rally-around-the-leader effect. Clinton's approval rating was 51 percent that April, and it sunk the rest of the year until it hit 40 percent in December, the month after Clinton's party lost 52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of Congress.

Fine, you say, but that was Nixon. What about the last time a popular president passed away? Well, that didn't work out so well for the incumbent either. On December 26, 1972, Harry Truman died. Less than a month later on January 22, 1973, Lyndon Johnson died. A week later, President Nixon's approval rating hit a peak of 67 percent. LBJ's funeral turned out to be the absolute highpoint of Nixon's abbreviated second term. The following month, his approval rating began its downward, Watergate-fueled spiral that ended with his resignation in August of 1974.

If this history is a harbinger of things to come we should expect Bush to suffer the greatest defeat of his career within the next six to 18 months.

The serious point is that isolated events like this rarely affect the broader political currents of an election year. There's no reason to believe that Reagan's death will have a lasting change on voters' opinions of Bush. If anything, the saturation coverage of Reagan is crowding out positive news on the two subjects that will decide Bush's fate. This week, the Bush campaign was planning on highlighting the recent spate of good economic news. (Cheney tried his best today at the Money Magazine Summit.) At the United Nations, Bush is about to win passage of a new resolution on Iraq. It would be better for Bush if the media were focused on his accomplishments rather than Reagan's.

posted 12:08 a.m.

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06.03.04

ELITE CONSERVATIVES VERSUS AVERAGE REPUBLICANS: Bruce Barlett over at National Review Online speculates that what's driving Bush's recent slippage among Republicans is not actually the war in Iraq but domestic issues. Specifically, Bartlett recites the now familiar litany of complaints about Bush from the Beltway's conservative establishment:

-President Bush supported "compassionate conservatism," which implied that unqualified conservatism is uncompassionate, as liberals have always charged.

-He rammed through Congress an education bill written by Ted Kennedy that did almost nothing to improve education. It just threw more money at the problem. And now liberals are complaining that he didn't throw enough.

-He signed a campaign finance "reform" bill that almost all conservatives view as blatantly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court's endorsement notwithstanding.

-He has supported vast increases in domestic spending, including a huge amount of utterly unjustified pork-barrel spending and an unconscionable expansion of Medicare that has added trillions of dollars to the nation's unfunded liabilities. Moreover, he has asked for increased spending on ridiculous programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, which ought to be abolished, not expanded.

-Although he twisted arms strenuously to get the Medicare drug bill passed, President Bush has done almost nothing to get conservative judges confirmed.

-He has been ambivalent on trade some days a free trader, other days a protectionist. He has succeeded only in alienating all sides on this issue.

This seems like a ridiculous analysis, a kind of wishful thinking that conservative elites indulge in when they are confronted with the fact that they are out of touch with average Republicans. Polls taken precisely during the worst stretch of news from Iraq show that some Bush supporters, especially in rural areas, are having second thoughts about the president. It must be because of his heresies on steel tariffs two years ago! I'm sure this is what bothers Bartlett about Bush, but I have trouble believing that this is what is causing angst in the grassroots.

Obviously this is just one anecdote, but I think this reader who e-mailed me today gets closer to the truth:

I am a rural voter and a Republican. I grew up in Mississippi and I now live in Southern Illinois, near the Missouri border. The people that I know are, for the most part, Republican.

There is no real mystery to the disillusionment with Bush in my part of the country. It's about Fallujah. In particular, there is a widespread feeling that the President is wasting the lives of our sons and daughters while negotiating with killers. Both of my sons have served, one in the 82nd Airbourne 1st of the 504th and [one in the] 1st Marine Division Infantry Lt. serving in Iraq. The idea of losing those children in the pursuit of a "political" settlement is beyond comprehension.

posted 7:45 p.m.

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06.02.04

BUSH'S MAN IN BAGHDAD: In light of recent events, this item from the September issue of The Washington Monthly sure does make interesting reading:

Another person whose name certainly deserves to be better known is Pentagon official Harold Rhode. When we first met Rhode, in the early days of the Bush administration, he was the "Islamic affairs advisor" to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz who got into some trouble for poking Saudi diplomat Adel al Jubeir in the chest during an argument.

Rhode later landed on his feet in Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon's in-house intelligence shop charged with uncovering sundry links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Rhode got another big break when Pentagon hawks sent him to Baghdad this spring as their chief liaison (read: handler) to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmed Chalabi, the hawks' favorite exile.

But problems cropped up then, too, when, during his stay at the occupation headquarters in Baghdad, Rhode quickly alienated most of the American military and civilian pros in the country by saying all manner of unfortunate things about Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims in general.

Later he holed himself up with Chalabi at the latter's hunt-club headquarters and bombarded Washington with faxes about plans to install Chalabi as the George Washington of Iraq. Following his subsequent recall--not so voluntarily, we hear--Rhode showed up sitting next to Chalabi in the front row at Vice President Dick Cheney's rally-the-neocon-troops speech at the American Enterprise Institute in July. Most recently, Rhode landed in the news again for a series of meetings he held in August with one of the most colorful characters from Washington's last major foreign policy scandal: exiled Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, of Iran-Contra fame. But with certain journalists and congressional investigators starting to dig, we think we may be hearing more about Rhode very soon.

posted 6:26 p.m.

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