But the context is a paralyzing discussion on Iraq that has denied public oxygen to the continuing scandals of Harvey Pitt's sellout of corporate reform to the accounting lobby, the killing of serious prescription drug coverage, the assault by Bush on funding for Veterans (?!), and so on. With so little discussion of those alternative issues and why Bush might be criticized for those domestic failures, it's not surprising that the Dems get less traction on them.
Which is the point of the Iraq campaign as far as domestic political considerations. It absorbs the chattering classes and the energies of the political left, releasing any pressure to address the domestic concerns where Bush is inherently less popular.
Just the fact that we had a mobilization on October 26 on the Iraq war, rather than on demands for jobs or the end to corrupt corruption, shows the success of Karl Rove and Bush in defusing domestic opposition.
-- Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, November 04, 2002 6:04 PM Subject: war & the election
The New Republic - November 4, 2002
TRB FROM WASHINGTON Backfire by Peter Beinart
If there's one thing everyone knows about the 2002 elections, it's that Iraq helps the Republicans. "Democrats desperately need to erase Iraq as an issue," insisted election guru Charlie Cook in National Journal on September 21. "The prospect of war with Iraq is dealing Democratic candidates a triple blow," warned The Washington Post's Thomas B. Edsall on October 10.
But what if it's not true? On October 16 Gallup released a poll showing that likely voters who cited Iraq as their most important issue favored Democrats by a whopping 16 points. Five days later a poll by Democrat Stanley Greenberg and Republican Bill McInturff for National Public Radio found that voters were six points more likely to vote for a "Democrat who shows more caution about attacking Iraq" than a "Republican who supports President Bush's Iraq policy." The Senate race in Minnesota, which until Paul Wellstone's tragic death featured the war more prominently than did any other campaign, suggests the same thing. Pollster John Zogby released one survey on September 22, three weeks before Wellstone voted against authorizing unilateral force, and another on October 13, two days after: In the interim, Wellstone shot up 15 points. "The Iraq debate has boomeranged," says Larry Jacobs, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. "Far from providing unequivocal help to Republicans, it's created a new problem that's bedeviling Republicans, at least out in Minnesota." No one can confidently predict what will happen at the polls on November 5.
But it's just possible that the punditocracy is as wrong today about the political impact of the war as it was about the political impact of impeachment in 1998.
Two key assumptions have led the commentariat astray. The first is that this campaign is a struggle between "the economy," which favors Democrats, and "national security," which favors Republicans. That's misleading because "national security" lumps the war on terrorism and the prospective war on Iraq together. And politically, they couldn't be more different. In the Gallup poll, voters who cite the war on terrorism as their most important issue back Republicans by a massive 48 percent. Similarly, in a recent Minnesota Star Tribune poll, voters who cared most about the war on terrorism favored Republican Norm Coleman by 31 points. But voters who cited war with Iraq as their primary issue favored Democrats by 16 points in the Gallup poll and Wellstone by 32 points in the Star Tribune poll. The media is treating "national security" as one pro-Republican issue when, in fact, it's two-one pro-Republican and one, apparently, pro-Democratic.
The second reason the media assumes that Iraq favors the Republicans is that in national polls most Americans support the war. But for most war supporters, Iraq is not a voting issue. In the Gallup poll, 47 percent of respondents favor war, and 46 percent oppose it. When you limit the question to people who consider Iraq their primary issue, however, the numbers flip: 66 percent oppose war, and only 33 percent support it. In other words, pro-war feeling is broad, but it's not very intense. When you push war supporters a little-Do you support unilateral action? Do you support war if it means significant American casualties?-pro-war sentiment plummets.
The Democrats' Iraq strategy-raising concerns but ultimately backing the president-may have been intellectually incoherent, but it seems to have helped the party both with hardcore war opponents and nervous war supporters. Edsall and others have speculated that the party's me-too stance on the war will depress core Democratic turnout. But by emphasizing their reservations, the Democrats seem to be holding on to their base. Gallup estimates that the turnout gap between Republican and Democratic voters (Republicans always turn out in higher numbers) will be smaller this year than in 1998, when Democrats picked up five House seats. And reluctant support for the war (even Wellstone voted for an alternative resolution authorizing force in conjunction with the United Nations) also resonates with many soft pro-war voters. Polling by Democracy Corps, the Stanley Greenberg-James Carville-Robert Shrum consortium, shows that a Democrat who supports the war with reservations not only beats an unambiguously pro-war Republican 77 to eleven among Democratic voters, but 55 to 27 among Independents.
Iraq helps the Democrats in another way as well: It bolsters their argument for divided government. The more aggressive a president's agenda, the more inclined voters are to balance it by supporting the other party for Congress. That's partly why voters favored Republicans in 1994, after President Clinton overreached with health care, but not in 1998, when Clinton was on the defensive over impeachment. Bush's agenda seems aggressive today because of Iraq. Most Americans support the war, but not as strongly as the president, and divided government reflects their ambivalence. A September 29 Washington Post poll found that 56 percent of voters wanted Democrats to control Congress in order to balance President Bush, while only 34 percent wanted to elect Republicans to support Bush's agenda. Says Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Spokeswoman Tovah Ravitz-Meehan, "In almost every state, our strongest arguments are for divided government."
So if Iraq favors the Democrats, why aren't they doing better overall? One answer is that they are. During September and October, when the Iraq debate supposedly put the GOP on the offensive, Democratic prospects actually improved. The October 21 Greenberg-McInturff poll gave Democratic candidates a generic four-point advantage, the largest they've had all year. And conventional wisdom among political insiders-according to ABC's "The Note," which tracks it more closely than anyone-now holds that the Democrats will retain the Senate, something very much in doubt several weeks ago.
The Democrats probably won't win big because there aren't a lot of places to win big. Gerrymandering has only left between 30 and 45 competitive House seats, which means that even if Democrats won two-thirds of them, they still might fail to retake the House. They probably won't win big because the president with the highest-sustained approval ratings in American history is making a historically unprecedented push for Republican candidates. And they probably won't win big because they haven't developed a compelling message on the economy, the issue on which Republicans are most vulnerable. (Most polls show the Democrats with a slim to nonexistent lead on the issue.)
But, however well the Democrats do on November 5, Iraq is more likely to have helped than hurt. As someone who thinks the party's performance on the issue has veered between pitiful and pathetic, that doesn't fill me with partisan pride. But then, Bill Clinton's 1998 tryst with Monica Lewinsky didn't fill me with partisan pride either. And to the astonishment of almost everyone in Washington, it helped Democrats in that year's midterms too.