Tuesday, October 12, 2004

 Better Safe?

In the famous "Saturday Night Live" skit satirizing one of the debates between Vice George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, Dana Carvey as Bush runs out of things to say with fifty seconds left in his time allotment, and begins to babble campaign cliches– "On track, stay the course, a thousand points of light. Stay the course"–before petering out. The moderator calls on Dukakis, played by Jon Lovitz, for a rebuttal. Lovitz grins his Dukakis grin and says, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

That’s pretty much what Democrats are asking about President Bush’s tenacious hold on the loyalty of more or less half the country’s voters. They’re running against a president who:

  • Started a war based on the intelligence version of vaporware; 
  • Has presided over an occupation that becomes not less but more dangerous and chaotic;
  • Inherited the largest budget surplus in history and turned it into the largest deficit in history; and
  • Will finish his term as the first president since Hoover to preside over a net job loss.

Running against this seemingly lethal combination of bad judgments and bad luck, Democrats can’t figure out why Bush isn’t buried under a landslide of epic proportions. They can’t believe they’re–not losing exactly, the race is much too close to say that–but they can’t believe they can’t pull ahead of this guy.

That’s a problem in itself, Democrats’ inability to understand, six years after George W. Bush mounted the national stage, what it is about him that people like and value. Without knowing what about him people respond to, how can you show them they’re wrong?

It isn’t that people agree with Bush’s policies. Poll after poll shows that on a fairly wide range of foreign and domestic issues, people prefer Kerry’s policies to Bush’s.

So if people don’t favor Bush’s policies, and his first-term record is rife with misjudgment and mismanagement, there must be something about Bush himself that keeps his hold on half the electorate.

And there is. There are two things.

The first is that you always know what he thinks. It’s not just his consistency–or his stubbornness, if you prefer–although that certainly helps. It’s that on the issues that are important to him, his positions are clear, un-nuanced, and unhedged. He’s for tax cuts. Sadaam’s sins amply justified going to war to drive him from power. The law should not allow same-sex marriages.

It may seem unfair that George W. Bush benefits from applying his broad-strokes-and primary-colors approach even to highly complicated issues. But it’s not unreasonable for voters to want to know what candidates think with enough clarity that they can predict what those candidates, if elected to office, are likely to do when confronted with as-yet unimagined circumstances. It may even be important enough that some voters would prefer a candidate whose views they know but disagree with to one whose views are so hedged and nuanced as to be unpredictable.

And if there’s one thing they know about Bush–and this is the second thing that maintains his hold on about half the electorate--it’s what I’d call his attitude of national belligerence.

Most people don’t base their vote on the examination of policy papers, or an analysis of legislation introduced, passed or defeated. They vote their pocketbooks, and they vote their hearts. This year, a lot of people are voting their hearts. And nothing strikes fear into Americans’ hearts like terrorism, not in Israel or Spain, but here at home.

So a lot of people are looking this year for the candidate most likely to back the terrorists off, to show them what happens to people who assault the most powerful country on earth.

Would that be the most prudent candidate, the one who would judiciously sort the evidence against our various international enemies, and exhaust all diplomatic remedies before striking back?

Or would it be the toughest candidate, the one likely to shoot first and ask questions later? Did Iraq turn out not to have weapons of mass destruction, not to have conspired with al Qaeda? So what? If Saddam Hussein wasn’t guilty of those things, there was plenty he was guilty of. Maybe sometimes you have to pick out the toughest guy in the opposing gang and take him out, like Napoleon said, to encourage the others.

A couple of caveats are in order. Even if I’m right about what so many find so compelling about Bush, the sentiment is hardly universal. If the polls are to be believed, the toughness pheromone that Bush gives off is working on half the electorate, but only half. If Kerry hasn’t been able to pull ahead, neither has Bush.

Nor do the Democrats have a monopoly on the inability to comprehend their adversary’s appeal. The Republicans could never grasp why voters stayed loyal to Bill Clinton. They kept thinking that if people really knew the depth of his licentiousness, they’d desert him in droves. But they never did. And the Republicans never understood.

Which is why they could never beat him.

 


3:54:46 PM    comment []