Bush’s fate is tied to the outcome in Iraq, which continues to worsen. Two top Iraqi officials were assassinated in the last week; a bomb blast brought oil production to a standstill and dozens of Iraqis were killed and 100 more wounded by a bomb as they stood waiting at an Army recruiting station. Bush blamed the escalating violence on the approaching June 30 date to hand over sovereignty, as though the situation will improve once the interim government is in place.
The White House treats Iraq like a public-relations problem that can be addressed with the right spin. Bush is sticking by his story that there were high-level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Never mind that those contacts didn’t lead anywhere. According to the 9/11 investigators, Saddam rebuffed Al Qaeda’s entreaties to establish a training camp in Iraq. The secular Saddam had no interest in teaming up with religious fanatics like Osama bin Laden.
Bush is not going to let facts get in the way of myth. By perpetuating the story that Saddam somehow was behind 9/11, Bush is reinforcing a common perception among voters. According to a University of Maryland poll taken in April, 57 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein had given “substantial support” to Al Qaeda. Bush couldn’t do much better if he implanted a chip in everybody’s brain.
Bush’s happy-talk campaign about the transition of power in Iraq is working, at least for the moment. A Pew Research Center survey finds that the number of Americans who think the military effort in Iraq is going well jumped from 46 percent in May, when the prison-abuse scandal broke, to 57 percent now that the tales of torture have become background news to the Laci Peterson case and the 10th anniversary of the O. J. trial. Pew director Andrew Kohut says Americans are becoming “less connected to the news about Iraq and possibly more hardened to events there.”
Still, Bush is on borrowed time. Voters have the impression that once the transfer of sovereignty takes place in Iraq, America will have done its job. They’re not prepared to see large numbers of troops in Iraq for a period of years. “Frankly, people don’t give a damn about bringing democracy to Iraq,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “People want to bring the troops and the money back home. They don’t care what Iraq looks like. Their own country looks bad enough.”
Maybe a phased withdrawal is what Bush has in mind. It’s hard to tell whether he’s hunkering down for the long haul or has a secret plan to draw down the troops by Election Day. But Lake reports that Democrats are doing surprisingly well in rural America because of fallout from the war. Almost half (44 percent) of the casualties are men and women from towns with populations under 10,000. When a death is reported, it’s often the son of the local football coach, or a farmer whose family has been in the area for several generations, and the loss is widely known. Rural America has also contributed more than its share of reservists and National Guardsmen, a hardship felt throughout the community.
Lake says a presidential election turns on three key indicators–the direction of the country, the president’s job performance and the economy. Two thirds of voters think the country is on the wrong track, and Bush’s job rating is in the danger zone. The one positive area for Bush is that the economy is getting better according to the statistics, but he’s not getting any credit for the turnaround. “There’s no belief in those numbers,” says a Republican strategist. Two thirds of voters in the battleground states know someone who has lost their job. Presented with an upbeat view of the economy, voters in focus groups tend to say, “We’re sure glad you came to talk to us instead of those experts who don’t know what’s going on.”
Bush is in trouble on all the key indicators, but it may not matter this year. “People are voting more on perception,” says Lake. Bush has a reservoir of goodwill that he earned in the days immediately following 9/11. Despite the exaggerations and falsehoods that paved the road to war in Iraq, Bush is still seen as a strong leader who says what he believes. He’s also a familiar leader. The voters know the family, they know the book Millie the dog wrote, they know he has a hot nephew in George P. Bush and they love his mother, says Lake. “They don’t even know John Kerry has children.”
Americans are uneasy about where the country is headed, and they want to be reassured. Bush still has the biggest bully pulpit.
