WITH 132 days before the election, how is George W. Bush doing? If you clear away the partisan brush, which is almost impossible at this point, you’d have to say his prospects look pretty good.
Before you assume I’m just a Bush fan who can’t see straight, consider this recent historical parallel. The last Republican president to lose a second term was, of course, Bush’s father in 1992. I spent the year 1992 reporting on the first Bush White House for a book I published after the Elder’s defeat. And let me assure you that at this point in the 1992 campaign, people in the White House knew they were in deep trouble.
For months before, most staffers close to Bush the Elder had pooh-poohed the threat of Bill Clinton on the grounds that the country couldn’t possibly go for a draft-dodging philanderer over a World War II hero whose wife was the most popular person in the country. That foolish confidence had long since evaporated. Everybody in Washington thought the re-election campaign was poorly run, that the White House itself was dysfunctional and that some drastic steps needed to be taken to save the president.
The most talked-about idea was that Dan Quayle should be dumped as vice president – but since Quayle was the only reliable conservative in Bush’s inner circle and Bush was having huge problems holding on to conservative voters, this was a solution palatable only to Republican moderates who had already driven the Bush presidency into a ditch.
Everybody was also talking about how Bush couldn’t make it through unless he insisted that Secretary of State James Baker resign his post and take over the management of the White House – which did happen, to no avail.
The point here is that things looked desperate in June 1992, people felt desperate, and the administration was acting desperate. That’s not true now, even though the mainstream media want you to believe it ought to be.
The New York Times is claiming, hilariously, that the vast sums of money the Bush team spent to define John Kerry as a flip-flopper didn’t make much of a dent. That’s simply absurd. That money was extraordinarily well-spent. Everybody with a scintilla of political awareness in the United States now has the sense that John Kerry speaks out of both sides of his mouth on every issue.
Bush wasn’t trying to buy ads to get himself in the lead. He was buying ads to change the political dynamic of the winter and spring, during which he was bashed and bashed – and offered little or no response.
He successfully put Kerry on the defensive, to the point where the Democratic nominee is far better off if he just keeps his mouth shut and lets the media, the 9/11 Commission and Richard Clarke types do his campaigning for him.
But at some point John Kerry is going to have to come out of the shadows and get to work making the case for himself – and he ain’t good at it.
As things stand right now, Dubya’s approval rating in most polls is back over 50 percent. He’s taken the lead back from Kerry in almost every national survey in the past week. The Harris poll, which has long had a reputation for skewing liberal, shows Bush ahead by 10 points. Another left-leaning pollster, Stanley Greenberg, has the race at 49-48 in a survey done for National Public Radio.
More important than these raw numbers are some answers on specific issues. In the Greenberg poll, Bush has pulled even with Kerry when it comes to who would best handle the economy. Democrats had a 20-point margin on the economy only a few months ago – and the president’s numbers can only get better with time, as the depth and breadth of the economic recovery becomes more and more evident.
Even more striking are the Greenberg poll’s findings on health care. After fairly summarizing the positions of both candidates, Greenberg asked which candidate would do better on health issues. Kerry and Bush tie. Health care is a subject on which Democrats have tended to poll 15 to 20 points higher than Republicans.
There’s no reason to believe that the American people have suddenly discovered that George W. Bush signed a prescription-drug benefit into law. Rather, these poll numbers suggest that the discomfort conservatives and Republicans were feeling toward Bush, which depressed his numbers a month ago, is now over with.
Could the discomfort come back? Of course. Could the numbers get bad for Bush again? Of course.
But right now, all things considered, with 132 days to go, you’d want to be George W. Bush and not John Kerry.