Optimism energizes Democratic
campaign By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Almost exactly eight months before
the November 2 elections, Democrats across the United
States are unusually optimistic that they will evict
Republican President George W Bush and retake the White
House next January.
Their optimism is based on
the belief that, in Senator John Kerry, who clinched the
presidential nomination after winning nine of the 10
state primaries held on "Super Tuesday" this week, they
have their most "electable" candidate, whose "war hero"
status earned in Vietnam will make it very difficult for
Republicans to attack him as a typical "liberal".
Their optimism is also based on the fact that
the Democratic Party, with a long history of conflicts
among its various factions, has never in the post-World
War II era been as united coming out of a primary season
and as determined to beat an incumbent Republican.
"I have never ever seen the grassroots so
energized," a Washington state Democratic activist said
this week. "They really want to beat this guy [Bush]."
Still, party officials are girding themselves
for what pundits predict will be an extremely close and
bitter campaign, which officially got under way on
Thursday when the Bush team launched a US$4.5 million,
17-state television ad campaign designed to take the
media spotlight off the Democrats and identify the
president with the patriotism that swept the country
after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington.
The latest comprehensive
polls, completed before the Super Tuesday results,
showed Kerry leading Bush by a statistically nearly
insignificant 48-44 percent. Kerry also led 38-33
percent among registered voters who said they were
committed to their choices.
Of the remaining 29
percent - the critical "swing" voters who will decide
the eventual outcome - 13 percent said they were leaning
toward Bush and 10 percent toward Kerry, with only 6
percent telling Pew Research Center pollsters that they
were absolutely undecided at that point in the campaign.
Bush goes into the race with three major
advantages over his challenger: the familiarity that
comes with being president for four years; his ability
to "make news" virtually any time of his choosing; and
the largest campaign treasury in history at this stage
of a race - nearly $200 million and counting.
Despite his nearly 20 years in the US Senate,
Kerry is still not nearly as well known, and has far
less money in his campaign war chest, although the
consensus that he has a real shot at defeating Bush will
certainly attract big contributors, including his
Mozambique-born wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who inherited
much of the Heinz ketchup fortune when her first
husband, a former Republican senator, was killed in a
plane crash in 1991.
Kerry's lack of a strong
public identity has already been seized on by
Republicans as an opportunity to depict him as a
"Massachusetts liberal", close to Senator Edward Kennedy
(which Kerry in fact is) and in the mold of former
governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential
candidate who blew a 17 percent lead in the polls to
lose to George H W Bush (the current president's father)
in 1988.
Kerry has indeed voted as a liberal -
he has been a strong supporter of civil liberties,
affirmative action for women and minorities, women's
reproductive rights and environmental protection. He has
also been a reliable supporter of free-trade agreements,
a position from which he retreated somewhat during the
primary campaign to secure the support of key labor
unions.
Kerry has also been very skeptical of
big-ticket military items in the defense budget,
supported a "nuclear freeze" in the 1980s and first came
to national attention after his return from Vietnam when
he became an outspoken and often passionate leader of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
Republicans are already resigned to the fact
that it will be impossible to depict Kerry as a
warmed-over Dukakis, both because of his distinguished
war record and because he has a reputation as a fighter;
in the 1996 race for the Senate, Kerry defeated a very
popular liberal Republican governor, William Weld, in
one of the most remarkable come-from-behind victories of
the past decade.
Thus, the Bush campaign will
instead focus its attacks on changes in Kerry's
position, suggesting he is a "typical Washington
politician" who takes money from "special interests" and
casts his votes on the basis of political advantage
rather than conviction. In that context, Republicans
will point out that Kerry voted for authorizing Bush to
invade Iraq last year, only to turn against the war when
it suited his presidential ambitions.
Similarly,
they will argue he is a longtime free-trader whose more
recent concerns about the loss of US jobs is politically
convenient, particularly in the key battleground states
of the so-called "Rust Belt" - the upper Midwest and
mid-Atlantic - whose electoral votes could well
determine the outcome of the election.
Kerry and
the Democrats, on the other hand, will try to convince
undecided voters that Bush's policies on a range of
issues - from civil liberties to fiscal and foreign
policies - have been "radical" and "outside the
mainstream", rather than traditionally Republican or
"conservative".
Surprisingly, to many analysts,
Bush has recently fed this image. Instead of moving to
the political center, he has appeared to play to his
right-wing base, most recently by coming out in favor of
a constitutional amendment that excludes homosexual
marriage, a proposal that is believed to have no chance
of approval.
Recent polls show Bush is
particularly vulnerable on economic issues, especially
the record $500 billion deficit and the "jobless
recovery", but that Kerry might also score points by
playing on persistent public unease over the US
occupation of Iraq and the way Bush has carried out his
"war on terrorism".
All agree the campaign could
be particularly divisive and bitter. Despite his 2000
pledge to be a "uniter, not a divider" and the unifying
effect of September 11, Bush has since created the most
polarized electorate ever measured, according to Pew's
director Andrew Kohut.
"People on each side
think the other guy is the devil incarnate," Republican
consultant Paula Woolf told the Washington Post this
week.
And while Kerry, who is two years older,
and Bush do not know each other well personally, their
common backgrounds and very different choices in life no
doubt give them a familiarity with each other of the
kind that breeds deep contempt. Both men had privileged
upbringings, attended elite New England private schools
as well as Yale University, and were even members of
Yale's secret Skull and Bones Society.
But while
Bush, who prided himself on his identity as a Texan, was
a socially gregarious, apolitical, "frat brat" with
worse-than-average grades who avoided the Vietnam War by
using his father's influence to get into the National
Guard, Kerry, a New England Yankee, strove for top
academic honors, was deeply involved in the anti-war
politics of the time and volunteered for the US Navy's
most dangerous assignments in the Mekong Delta.
"On the personal level ... the onetime Texas
oilman and the diplomat's son from Massachusetts have
little liking for what the other represents," said David
Broder, the Post's veteran political analyst, in typical
understatement.
Optimism energizes Democratic
campaign
