Friday, 19 December 2003

Deja vu. History will remember this past week as a high-water mark for the Bush Administration: The humiliation of Saddam Hussein puts Bush's Iraq policy in the best possible light, and the right-wing pundits are already crowing that Bush will be unbeatable in the next election. President Bush's most likely opponent is a small-state governor with no foreign policy experience, who is currently making his first real impression on the American people; the "big name" players in the Democratic Party are sitting this election out, hoping for a better opportunity four years from now, and conventional wisdom says that we might as well call this election off.

I'm describing the first week of March 1991, of course. The President is George H. W. Bush, the opponent is Bill Clinton, and the big names on the sidelines are Cuomo and Kennedy and Nunn. Pundits who think Dubya has the 2004 election all wrapped up would do well to remember 1991—and to remember that, once the rosy afterglow of Saddam's capture wears off, Dubya will still be sitting on the tiger's back.

Bush the Younger has committed America's military might, moral prestige, and international leadership in what's now a bid to pacify a nation where two-thirds of the population is under the age of 25. Saddam's capture will eventually raise the pressure on the Bush administration, rather than lowering it: With Saddam in the dock, his dead-end supporters are supposed to dry up and waste away. Each car bomb from this day forward becomes a straw on the camel's back, a breach of the neocon promise that Iraq will turn into Sweden-on-the-Euphrates in the immediate future, and a reminder to the American people that The George W. Bush Story has some serious plot holes that may need addressing at the ballot box.

And Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean is this year's Ross Perot, as Everett Ehrlich suggests in this thought-provoking Washington Post article. Perot spent millions in 1992 to build a grassroots network; Dean harnessed the Internet to achieve the same result, and did so from within one of the two major parties. Perot won eight million votes in '96: Half of those people voted for Dubya in 2000, a fourth went with Gore, a tenth went to Nader, and the rest stayed home. If Dean picks up the ex-Perot vote in 2004, then the scales will tip in his favor.

Meanwhile, Bush will have a challenge holding his coalition together in 2004. He'll still have the unqualified support of his party's howling-mad right wing, the people who read Ann Coulter for the articles—but the small-government advocates who voted for Bush in 2000 are already fleeing his camp in horror. Libertarians and others are appalled by Bush's civil liberties record, and the gay marriage issue may force his hand: He can't rally his socially conservative base without alienating the more tolerant mainstream, and vice versa. The conventional wisdom is that whichever candidate turns out his party base will win next year's election; Bush may have more of a problem doing that.

Dean is getting pummeled this week, in part because of Saddam's capture and in part because that's what always happens to front-runners. But Dean's campaign is a juggernaut: Where his opponents are each preparing to make a desperate stand in one state, Dean is closing the deals in Iowa and New Hampshire and playing for keeps everywhere else. He's going to win the nomination, barring a major blowout, and—if he plays his cards right—he has as much chance to win the election as a little-known Arkansas governor did in '92.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:34 am. comments.