A new opinion poll for the first time puts President George W. Bush clearly ahead of his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. Analysts caution that the Time magazine survey which gave Bush an eleven-point lead is almost certainly a reflection of the boost that conventions always give a candidate’s rating. Kerry also enjoyed a surge of support during and after the Democratic Convention.
Bush’s message to the electorate is now clear: He is the strong leader that Americans need at a time of international peril. He has already proved this in both Afghanistan and in Iraq. He has confronted the menace of global terrorism across the globe so that Americans will not have to confront it again at home.
At the same time, the Republicans are hoping that the economy will come right in time to help with the election. In the archetypal disposable society, American labor is economically highly disposable. As American business turned down post-Sept. 11, the factory gates closed for the last time on some 2.7 million US workers. Unemployment has since fallen to 5.4 percent. Bush aides point eagerly to the creation of over one-and-a-half million jobs in the past 12 months. Their figures and methodologies are naturally questioned by the Democrats. One of the keys to US recovery has been defense orders. Washington is now spending more on its armed forces than at any time in the last 50 years, including the long-doomed struggle in Vietnam. This injection of taxpayers’ money has, however, come with a steadily increasing budget deficit. Bush inherited a budget surplus in 2000 from the Clinton years. By the end of this year, he will have transformed that surplus into a record deficit of some $445 billion.
Even though voters sense the economic discomfort, their real concern is the country’s safety. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security struck a powerful chord with Americans. Panicked by the previously unthinkable Sept. 11 assault upon their commercial and political heart, Americans have embarked upon one of their illiberal phases, akin to the post-Pearl Harbor roundup and imprisonment of some 200,000 ethnic Japanese-Americans.
Bush’s key message to delegates at the end of the Republican Convention was that he was on the offensive against terrorists abroad so that Americans would not have to face them at home. He was, he said, building a safer world. This plays well with the voters who may yet return him to the White House.
Unfortunately many aggressive Bush policies have made the world less safe, both for Americans and America’s friends and allies. The Afghan invasion destroyed Al-Qaeda’s main base but brought neither peace nor safety to Afghanistan. The Iraq invasion unleashed a torrent of new violence while Washington’s slavish support for Israel and its abandonment of the Palestinians has only compounded its misjudgments and errors. Yet come November, US voters, obsessed purely with their own immediate security, may not have grasped these basic truths.
