A great New Jerseyan, Yogi Berra, once said that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. The last month of American politics ought to remind everyone just how correct Berra was.
A month ago President Bush, a man with a command of words somewhat poorer than Yogi's, was riding high in the polls after the capture of Saddam Hussein. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean looked like the favored candidate for the Democratic nomination and then to lose to Bush. If anyone were to stand in Dean's way it would be Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, D-Ark. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, was trailing Dean in the polls in his home state and had to put some of his own fortune into his campaign due to a total loss of momentum. A month changes everything.
After Dean fell, Clark was unable to adapt to a new environment against Kerry. With his military credentials he was a man from central casting for the role of facing Dean, but against a fellow veteran and more experienced candidate Kerry couldn't keep up. His original rationale of being anti-Dean was worn out once Dean had made that case for everybody else. And so, after a string of losses, Clark has withdrawn from the race. In the end, Clark's Army was only slightly less ragtag than McHale's Navy.
After the last month showed just how foolhardy it really is to attempt grand predictions in politics, let's try it out anyway. The conventional wisdom for most of the last two years has been that Bush is unbeatable in the election; his record on national security would render him nearly invulnerable to Democratic attacks. That conventional wisdom also became predicated on the idea that Bush would face Dean, whose good points on foreign policy were overshadowed by his lack of overall credentials in the matter and his erratic personality.
That conventional wisdom has since been turned around completely, with the admissions that Iraq had no weapons. Allegations that the war was pre-planned before the Sept. 11 attacks, a crusade in search of a cause, make things even muddier. Pre-emptive wars, the centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy, have been shown to be a bad foundation for America's approach to the world. The continuing controversy of the extent of Bush's service in the National Guard also takes away much of his luster in military matters.
Further complicating Bush's re-election is Dean's collapse. Assuming he faces Kerry, a decorated war hero, Bush's record on defense, both his policies and his own service, will be in deep contention.
Another piece of conventional wisdom we usually go by is that a good gross domestic product growth for the economy means a popular president. The GDP numbers lately have been outstanding, but Bush's approval numbers continue to decline. However, the current economic situation is unlike the common type. We are going through what has been termed a jobless recovery, where more money is going around the economy but job growth is tepid and individuals are still pessimistic on the matter of their own security. One can throw around numbers, but in politics Ronald Reagan said it best: a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours. Thus the stock market can do well, GDP can be high, but as long as the man on the street experiences an anemic job market the president's approval numbers will continue to be poor.
The politics of the last few years has been exceptionally strange. Every watchword of political observation, such as the advantages of fundraising, or the particulars of economics, or the foreign policy advantages of an incumbent president, have all been eroding in importance.
In order to win, though, the Democrats can't just play a passive part in this. Candidates up and down the ballot need to emphasize just how much of a mess Bush has made of our country, and just how duplicitous his administration has been in the war on terror. Kerry is in an excellent position to ask why spending on military equipment has gone up while money was cut for detecting chemical agents like ricin in our mail. Someone like Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., can discuss how the average family finds their economic future less secure than four years ago. One piece of conventional wisdom should remain true- that if Democrats abandon the offense and just take it as the Republican money machine piles on attack after attack, they will lose.
