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Mark Danner's article is long but worthwhile. He not only identifies the primary issues that propelled Bush in Florida and the Red States (exploitation and lies about 9/11 and Kerry), but points out that Bush's grasp on power is extremely tenuous. As Danner has smartly pointed out, Bush is in a no-win position with regard to the Religious Right, which is loudly demanding a big payback for what they and much of the corporate media (wrongly) concluded was their decisive role in Bush's slim margin of victory.
In fact, as Danner states, the evangelicals are the largest block of committed Republican voters, but they did not turn out for Bush in numbers that were proportionately greater than they had four years earlier.
If Bush makes too many overt concessions to the evangelicals on "moral issues" (abortion bans, Rightist judges, prayer in schools, etc.), this will alienate the moderate "security moms", the swing group who actually put Bush back in the White House. If on the other hand the evangelical Right is not immediately satisfied, they will turn on Bush with disasterous effects for the rest of the GOP in 2006 and 2008.How Bush Won By Mark Danner, Tomdispatch.com Posted on January 4, 2005, Printed on January 5, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20853/This piece appears thanks to the kind permission of the editors of the New York Review of Books who are letting Tomdispatch distribute it online. 1. "I have won what I call political capital and now I intend to spend it." – George W. Bush, Nov. 3, 2004 Driving north from Tampa on Florida's Route 75 on Nov. 1, as the battle over who would hold political power in America was reaching a climax but the struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down the top of my rented green convertible, turned the talk radio voices up to blaring, and commenced reading the roadside. Beside me billboards flew past, one hard upon another, as if some errant giant had cut a great deck of cards and fanned them out along each shoulder. Hour by hour, as the booming salesman's voice of proud Floridian Rush Limbaugh rumbled from the radio, warning gravely of the dangers of "voting for bin Laden" ("Haven't you noticed that bin Laden is using Democratic talking points?"), and other ominous voices reminded listeners of the "hundreds of votes" Sen. Kerry cast "against our national defense" ("In a time of terror, when our enemies are gathering ... can we afford to take that risk?"), I watched rush by, interspersed with the blaring offers of "Florida Citrus! One Bag $1!" and "Need Help With Sinkholes?," a series of perhaps 50 garish signs announcing an approaching "Adult Toy Café!" and "Adult Toy Extravaganza!" and then "We Bare All!" and finally, the capper, "All Nude – Good Food – Truckers Welcome!" It wasn't long before this billboard parade had acquired its stark spiritual counterpoint – "Jesus Is Still the Answer!" – and by the time I reached the promised "extravaganza" – a sad and windowless two-room shack just off the highway, smaller than most of the signs advertising it – I found, standing just down the road from the pathetic little house of sin, a resplendent white church more than twice its size. In the world of American hucksterism, the sin may be the draw but the payoff's always in redemption. This was perhaps 36 hours before an army of self-interested commentators, self-appointed spiritual leaders, and television pundits hot for a simple storyline had seized on the answers to a clumsily posed exit poll question – more than one respondent in five, offered seven choices, had selected "moral values" as their "most important issue" – and used those answers to transform the results of the 2004 election into a rousing statement of Americans' disgust with abortion, promiscuity, R-rated movies, gay marriage, late-night television, and other "Hollywood-type" moral laxity. Some, like the Rev. Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University, wrote the president with admirable directness to remind him what the election meant, and what he now owed: SNIP This rhetoric of risk carries forward a narrative that Republicans began shaping soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that came boldly to the fore as a political strategy the following May, when Vice President Cheney declared that the statements of several Democratic senators, who had rather timidly questioned some of the decisions made in conducting the war in Afghanistan, were "unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." Though this bold shot across the bow essentially put an end to any overt Democratic criticism of the administration on the conduct of the war on terror, Republicans clearly realized that when it came to terrorism and national security, as Karl Rove observed during a speech to the Republican National Committee in January 2002, they could "go to the country on this issue, because trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America."
That autumn Republicans triumphed in the midterm elections, largely because they effectively exploited Americans' apparent willingness to believe that the Republicans could better protect the country. This strategy was displayed most dramatically in Saxby Chambliss's victory over the incumbent Max Cleland in the Senate race in Georgia, in which the challenger portrayed Cleland, a highly decorated veteran who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, as an ally of bin Laden. Though the claims were obviously trumped up – they rested on the fact that Cleland had not instantly voted for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security – the images of Cleland's and bin Laden's faces side by side in effect doomed the incumbent.
The attacks of Sept. 11 restored to Republicans their traditional political advantage in matters of "national security" and "national defense" – an advantage the party had lost with the end of the Cold War – and Republicans capitalized on that advantage, not only by running President Bush as "a war president," as he repeatedly identified himself, but by presenting a vote for John Kerry – whom the Republicans succeeded in defining (with a good deal of help from the Swift Boat Veterans, and from Kerry himself) as indecisive, opportunistic, and untrustworthy – as a vote that was inherently, dangerously risky. The emphasis placed on Bush's much-promoted personal strengths – decisiveness, determination, reliability, transparency – served to base his candidacy at once on "moral values" and on "national security," in effect making possession of the first essential to protect the second. Bush's decisiveness was put forward as the flip side of Kerry's dangerous vacillation, the answer to the threat of weakness Kerry was alleged to pose. This equation was dramatized, perfected, and repeated, with much discipline and persistence, in thousands of advertisements, speeches, and "talking heads" discussion programs on conservative networks, especially Fox. (In Lake Butler, Miss Babs's husband, she told me, "watches only Fox News. He believes all the other channels are propaganda.") Despite all the talk about "moral values," the 2004 election turned on a fulcrum of fear.
SNIP
Margins of Victory: Republican Presidents Re-elected During the Last Hundred Years
1904 Theodore Roosevelt: 17% Popular Vote; 196 Electoral Vote
1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower: 16% Popular Vote; 384 Electoral Vote
1972 Richard M. Nixon: 23% Popular Vote; 503 Electoral Vote
1984 Ronald Reagan: 18% Popular Vote; 512 Electoral Vote
2004 George W. Bush: 2% Popular Vote; 34 Electoral Vote
As these numbers show, incumbency is a huge advantage; nonetheless, Bush's reelection was a squeaker, the closest for a Republican in more than a century. Four years after the historically close election of 2000, and after a hard-fought eight-month campaign in which the candidates, the parties, and so-called "independent" groups spent more than a billion dollars to woo voters, the electoral map hardly changed. Only three small states switched sides: the Democrats picked up New Hampshire (four electoral votes) and the Republicans very narrowly won Iowa (eight) and New Mexico (five). Bush had a net gain of only nine electoral votes, which, added to the seven that the Republicans gained through reapportionment, gave him his narrow margin of victory.
Had fewer than 60,000 Ohio voters decided to cast their ballots for the Democrat rather than the Republican (and according to the exit polls one voter in twenty decided whom to vote for on election day), John Kerry would have won Ohio's twenty electoral votes and with them the presidency – and would have entered the White House in January 2005, as George W. Bush had done in January 2001, having won the votes of fewer Americans than the man he defeated. About 2,991,437 fewer, which, as I write, is George W. Bush's margin of victory, out of 122,124,783 votes cast for president.
SNIP
Kerry's indictment of Bush's stewardship of the war was strong, but he offered little by way of an alternative; his "new course in Iraq" amounted to bringing "other nations to our side" to train Iraqis. He would "do whatever it takes to defend America" – a broad, empty assertion that depended entirely on the trust a prospective voter was willing to grant him. And though Kerry struggled to separate Iraq and the war on terror, not just the imagery of the war – the descent of Iraq into a kind of terrorism that, ironically enough, seemed to confirm the President's insistence that it was in fact "the central front of the war on terror" – but Kerry's own discussion of Iraq and terrorism only seemed to bring them together.
For Kerry, this proved fatal. If Bush had succeeded in joining Iraq and terrorism and then wrestling to the very center of the election his chosen question – whom do you trust to protect you and your family from terrorism? – he had also succeeded, for too many of those famous "swing voters," in providing the answer. The exit polls make this clear: nearly six in ten voters said they trusted Bush to "handle terrorism." Nearly six in ten said they did not trust Kerry to do the same.
SNIP
The Democrats had come remarkably close. They had matched the Republicans in fund-raising dollar for dollar and had mounted an unprecedented "ground game." On election day they managed the impressive feat of bringing eight million more voters to the polls than they had four years before. But the Republicans managed to bring in eleven million additional voters. George W. Bush, having gained half a million fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000, defeated John Kerry by three million votes.
Still, the victory was "narrow but clear," as William Kristol described it, with candor rare among Republicans after the election. For all the talk of "moral values," had 60,000 Ohioans made a different choice on election day, we would now be discussing the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the President's failed economic policies. After his narrow but clear victory, George W. Bush remained a popular leader promoting unpopular policies. And though he managed to convince enough Americans that Iraq was "the central front in the war on terror," the truth remains that he has saddled himself and the country he leads with a worsening, increasingly unpopular shooting war that offers no obvious means of escape.
Now he faces a newly emboldened set of claimants. Though several million more evangelical voters turned out in 2004, and thus were critical to Bush's victory, they do not seem to have formed a higher percentage of Republican voters than they had four years before. Still, having accounted, in their increased numbers, for a third of Bush's margin of victory, the evangelicals unquestionably form the Republican Party's most reliable and aggressive base of supporters. Their leaders have been quick and aggressive in claiming full credit for the triumph and the press has been happy to play along. As so often in politics, the appearance, through repetition, becomes its own reality.
Leaders like the unabashedly direct Rev. Bob Jones III now demand, in the name of moral values and the political redemption they claim to have brought the President, that Bush "pass legislation defined by Biblical norms" and that he "leave an imprint of righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God." This is a tall order, and one fraught, like the war, with considerable political peril – from moderate voters, who, for example, support outlawing "partial-birth abortion" but oppose outlawing abortion itself; and even, perhaps, from Democrats who may one day come to focus on what they have gained in this election rather than what they have lost. After all the recriminations and all the analyses of how the party must change, the fact remains that the Democrats came very close to bringing off an almost unprecedented achievement: turning out an incumbent president in a time of war. They failed, but not entirely; they now confront a narrowly reelected president, encumbered with a grim and intractable war, constrained by a huge deficit of his own creation, and faced with increasingly extreme demands that will be satisfied only at great political cost.
xxx
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