George looking good

All the signs point to President Bush's re-election, but he will remember howhis father messed up in 1992, writes Conor O'Clery…

All the signs point to President Bush's re-election, but he will remember howhis father messed up in 1992, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor

At this stage in the US electoral calendar 12 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that George Bush senior would win office for a second term by simply showing up. He was enjoying the highest popularity ratings of the century after ousting Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. He appeared so invincible that leading Democrats such as Al Gore and Dick Gephardt declined to seek the Democratic nomination.

They left it to a little-known governor from Arkansas who was plagued by "bimbo" eruptions. Even when Bill Clinton emerged from the pack, a private Democratic National Committee poll showed that he trailed Bush by 24 points in ratings for honesty and trustworthiness. It seemed a hopeless quest for the Democrats.

But in 1992 the Republicans ran one of the worst re-election campaigns in presidential history. George Bush, who started the year by throwing up over the prime minister of Japan as he begged for greater market access, couldn't do anything right. Conservative Republican Pat Buchanan challenged him for the nomination in New Hampshire, reminding the voters of Bush's broken electoral promise: "Read my lips, no new taxes." When Bush appeared at a panicky last-minute rally in New Hampshire, the crowd, I recall, was largely made up of party officials bussed in from neighbouring states.

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Then maverick independent Ross Perot declared his candidacy on CNN's Larry King Live and jumped into a lead in the polls by scolding Bush for the red ink in the budget and the "great sucking sound" of jobs going to Mexico.

Unaccountably, Bush One seemed to have no stomach for the fray, and was much criticised for making this obvious in small ways, such as glancing impatiently at his watch during a debate. His vice-president, Dan Quayle, became a national joke when he famously misspelt the word "potato" for a classroom of kids. On top of everything the Republican National Convention in Houston was a disaster which alienated moderate Republicans by allowing Pat Buchanan to call for a jihad against those who did not hold fundamentalist Christian views.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, repackaged himself in a PR operation called the Manhattan Project, and overcame his scandals. The Democrats focused on "the economy, stupid", touching a chord with Americans hit by a recession. With the promise of a better tomorrow when people would "wake up and smell the coffee", he won the White House with 43 per cent of the vote, against 38 per cent for Bush and 19 per cent for Ross Perot.

As the first step in the process of selecting a Democratic candidate to oppose George Bush junior gets underway in Iowa on Monday, many are wondering if history will repeat itself in 2004. Once again, the conventional wisdom is that the sitting Republican president is unbeatable. He has been enjoying high approval ratings. He finished the job that his father started, by deposing Saddam Hussein.

On the basis of polls, however, the younger George Bush should be as vulnerable as his dad. A recent Gallup poll showed that the US remains just as polarised between Republicans and Democrats as it was in 2002, when he needed the Supreme Court to help him over the line. Some 45.5 per cent of voters said they identified with the Republican Party and 45.2 per cent with the Democratic Party. A dead-heat, it would seem.

But the Republican party is not fractured as it was in 1992. Its core constituency, the Christian right, which despised the first George Bush, is solidly behind his son. They like his frequent references to God, his appointment of conservative judges, his opposition to abortion and his promotion of conventional marriage. And he kept his promise to cut taxes. This time there is no Pat Buchanan pissing inside the tent.

A recent poll by the independent research group based in Washington, the Pew Center, underscored this Republican unity. It found that 91 per cent of Republicans approved of the president's performance to date, more than his father ever enjoyed, and 85 per cent said they supported his war in Iraq.

Moreover, the Republican base is growing. Republicans now hold nearly a two-to-one advantage over Democrats among white evangelical Protestants (44 per cent to 23 per cent), and have drawn even with Democrats among white Catholics, who include Irish-Americans. Many of the Republican gains among these groups have occurred since the 2000 election.

If Karl Rove had been around in 1992, history might have been different. Rove is George Bush's top political adviser. Known as "Boy Genius" by the president, he has a reputation for ruthlessly eliminating Democrats in his native Texas. Rove has ensured that his client has remained presidential by not publicly engaging in the political fray, though he and Bush are consumed by the re-election campaign. For most of last year the president has been methodically criss-crossing the US to raise a war-chest of more than $200 million for the fight in the autumn. This Bush does have a stomach for the fray.

Harvesting campaign cash is also an obsession with Dick Cheney. Rarely seen in public, the vice-president spends much of his time at Republican black-tie fundraisers. His stump speech focuses on the two issues that the Republicans hope will win them re-election: national security and the economy.

National security was not an issue for Bush senior in 1992. The Cold War had just ended and there seemed to be no serious external threat to the US.

But after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, everything changed. The president adopted a belligerent attitude to the world, which played well in the heartlands. George Bush junior is personally very popular among Republicans for his toughness on national security. His administration constantly reminds Americans that they are engaged in a "war on terror" (and you don't change presidents in wartime). It is a war, Cheney emphasises, between freedom and its enemies, between the US and terrorists.

Cheney portrays every post-9/11 event as a victory. This is how it will be in the election campaign. Al-Qaeda is on the run; the brutal Taliban regime is no more; Iraq has been liberated from a cruel dictator; Iran has seen the light and agreed to allow UN inspections of its nuclear facilities; Libya looked at what happened to Iraq and gave up its weapons of mass destruction; North Korea is coming to heel. No quarter is given on the discredited claims about weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

In a typical speech this week, Cheney said: "In Iraq a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, gave support to terrorists, defied the demands of the civilised world - and that regime is no more."

It's a line that always gets applause.

The economy, too, is turning around just at the right time for the Republican campaign. In 1992 the end of the recession came too late to help George Bush senior instil confidence after a decade of declining expectations. Twelve years ago this month he admitted in an unguarded moment that "this economy is in free-fall", helping ensure his campaign would go the same way.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan all had recessions early in their first terms and got re-elected. Bush the younger is getting the same break. His recession ended in November 2001. The economy grew at an annual rate of 8.2 per cent in the third quarter of last year, and growth will continue in 2004. Alan Greenspan, the US Federal Reserve chairman, has allowed the dollar to weaken with his policy of low interest rates, and this has helped fire up the US economy and the property market. Confidence is rising among consumers/voters.

The Republican road-map to a second term is, like all political campaigns, subject to accidents and unforeseen events. American voters are so volatile that if Osama bin Laden were to be captured just before the election, Bush would undoubtedly coast to victory, even though his inability for so long to capture the man responsible for nearly 3,000 American deaths is the biggest single failure of his presidency. Likewise, Bush's ratings rose after Saddam Hussein was found in his spider-hole.

On the other hand, bloody failure in Iraq or another deadly al-Qaeda attack could throw the whole thing up in the air.

The Democrats start their selection process fighting over Bill Clinton's legacy, the "third way" of centrist values that challenges the stereotype of Democrats as soft on defence and likely to tax and spend. Some candidates argue that Republicans have moved so far to the right that Democrats should not try to govern as "Bush Lite". Others say that Clinton's policies worked and will not go in a different direction.

In the ranks the party is also split on cultural issues such as gay marriage and on economic issues such as free trade. And they are not so united against the war as one might think.

Some 31 per cent of registered Democrats say they would prefer a candidate who opposed the war in Iraq, but 27 per cent would like someone who supported it. More than half of Democrats - 52 per cent - support Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

What unites Democrats is a resentment of the contempt Bush has shown for the United Nations and the way the administration's arrogance has turned the world against the US. Many also agree with Senator Edward Kennedy that the war has been marketed as a political product to help elect Republicans.

One thing Democrats also share is a visceral dislike for George Bush personally. Where his supporters see him as a figure of moral certitude saving the US from evil, Democrats see him as an affront to the best American values, a president who has imposed ideological conservatism without a proper mandate (one-third of Democrats believe Bush stole the 2000 election, according to a USA Today survey), who has favoured wealthy Americans, ignored the growing number of poor, and diminished civil liberties. Many believe he cut taxes to force cutbacks in spending on social programmes the Republicans don't like. Time magazine, in a December cover, called Bush the "Love-him, Hate-him President", underlining the fact that the country is polarised in a way it has not been since the Vietnam War.

The Democrats will fight on issues such as escalating health-care costs, the future of social security, the environment and lost jobs. There are 2.3 million fewer workers in the US today than when George Bush took office three years ago - a worse record than his father. They will remind voters that Bush has managed to transform a $127 billion budget surplus inherited from Bill Clinton into a projected deficit of nearly $500 billion in 2004. They will urge rolling back the Bush tax cuts that benefit the wealthy. This leaves the eventual nominee open to Republican charges of increasing taxes, but such a policy may not in fact be so unpalatable. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week showed that six out of 10 Americans approved reversing the tax cuts for the wealthy to help balance the federal budget.

One other concern of Democrats is that a third candidate, Ralph Nader, may decide to run and could siphon off Democratic votes in crucial swing states. Nader was the consumer watchdog who, in 2000, won 97,488 votes in Florida, the state Bush was awarded with only 537 more votes counted than Gore. Nader's share of the presidential vote in a total of eight states exceeded the margin between Bush and Gore.

Whether or not Nader runs, George Bush junior seems in better shape heading into re-election year than his father did 12 years ago. Americans tend to agree. In opinion polls, voters say, by three to one, that they expect Bush to win re-election in November. At this stage, these are probably about the right odds.