Looming Largely Over '04 Race: Bin Laden: Marie Cocco

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Looming Largely Over '04 Race: Bin Laden
Marie Cocco
January 13, 2004 http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpcoc133623807jan13,0,2737490.column?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

But one man's shadow is so long and so dark it obscures all else. Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attack, is the power broker of the 2004 presidential election.

He is the reason national security is the single issue that dominates the landscape, despite the Democrats' attempts to turn attention to a hemorrhage of jobs, a spiral in health-care costs, a pension system in crisis, a federal budget out of whack. He is the reason, according to President George W. Bush, that the United States went to war in Iraq and now occupies a Middle Eastern nation for the indefinite future.


Now political activists and pollsters say it's dead even, an equilibrium Republicans - despite Bush's ascension to the White House - did not achieve until after the terrorist attacks, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The gains have come in the "red states" Bush won in 2000, but also in swing states and traditionally Democratic states that are crucial in presidential contests - Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, West Virginia, even Minnesota.



There hasn't been a presidential election in a generation that will turn so obviously on the question of America's security and its standing abroad. The last election season so dominated by events overseas - indeed, by events in the Middle East - was in 1980.

George W. Bush is no Jimmy Carter. The president's approval rating as the election year starts got a boost from the capture of Saddam Hussein, and his support is higher, at this point, than each of the last four incumbents. It is a cautionary point of history, though, that Bush's approval rating of 60 percent is a mere four points higher than what Carter received, nine months before his defeat.