Barring an extraordinary upset, Sen. John Kerry will win the Democratic presidential nomination in July. The fight for the US presidency is going to one of the toughest and most interesting in years. It effectively begins this week when the Bush campaign begins its media blitz using a war chest of $100 million for advertising alone. Bush’s phone call to Kerry congratulating him on effectively sewing up the Democrat nomination is likely to be the last gentlemanly gesture in this campaign.
Powerful lobbies behind the Republican Party are committed to keeping their man in power. Big business has done well under the Bush administration. Virtually his first act was to spare them costly environmental reforms when he repudiated America’s accession to the Kyoto Agreement on the control of climate change. He has been prepared to use tariffs, albeit abortively in the case of US steel makers, to protect American industries and jobs. Under Bush, the approach to the World Trade Organization has been as confrontational as the rest of the White House’s foreign policy. In the wake of Sept. 11, most Americans appreciated a tough president pursuing the war on international terrorism. The angry public reaction against the French for their opposition to the Iraq invasion and the wide popularity of Britain’s Tony Blair for being America’s steady ally demonstrate the level of backing Bush has enjoyed.
Yet most US elections are fought and won on domestic issues. George W. Bush was one of America’s most untraveled presidential candidates but it did not count against him. The more worldly John Kerry, with his Vietnam war decorations, would not have been able to fight Bush on foreign policy issues had it not been for the Iraq invasion. That difference means that between now and November anything that goes wrong for America in Iraq is likely to go well with the Democrat campaign. Yet Kerry himself voted for the invasion. His attack must therefore be based on the conduct of US policy before and after Saddam’s ouster. He will seek to make the election a question of trust. He will question Bush’s motives and seek to make much of the non-existent WMD programs which formed a major excuse for Washington’s assault on Iraq.
Success for either candidate will rest with the relatively small number of swing voters. As evidenced by the Republican’s two-seat majority in the Senate and 13-seat margin in the House of Representatives, American opinion was pretty well split down the middle four years ago. Then as now, the Green Party candidate, the veteran consumer campaigner Ralph Nader stood. In 2000 he mostly won votes from Democrats fed up with predictable bipartisan politics. Kerry will need to convince Nader’s supporters that a vote for their man will be a wasted vote and simply return an avowedly anti-Green Republican president.
