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End-game
Yorkshire Post - 27
August
2006
So, on each side of the Atlantic, we approach the political end-game. Tony Blair returns to a country and a party which is interested in only one question: when is he going. In the U.S. the politicians have packed their caravans for the long campaign leading up to the mid-term elections in November which could see the President’s Republican Party losing control of both houses of Congress.
Blair’s crisis is the more acute; Bush’s the more predictable if only because the US Constitution sets down fixed dates for elections and fixed periods for office. Every American President is, in his second term, at least something of a lame-duck. If the Democrats were to take control of Congress – a hugely difficult task because defeating an incumbent is a rare event in US politics- the injury to Bush would be mortal.
The British Prime Minister faces a mutinous Parliamentary Party (the latest opinion polls show that the prospect of a Conservative government after the next general election has moved from fantasy to feasibility); an unsettled Cabinet; and a disaffected country. The public service reforms at home and the indelible identification with Bush’s policies abroad have widened the gap between No 10 and the party’s MPs and activists and with much middle-of-the-road public opinion.
Increasingly he seems to move in a parallel universe to the rest of the political planet. The party does not want to hear about the challenges of globalisation: it wants a timetable for his departure. It wants to know where it stands. It wants to get on with the Brown transition (forget John Reid – he may have experienced a Churchillian summer of response to the terrorist threat but he has no followers).
When the history of the Bush Presidency is written I suspect that two events will stand out. One was the making of the President; the other the unmaking of George Bush.
The making was 9/11 – the attack on the twin trade towers in 2001. The other was Hurricane Katrina one year ago. Bush had come into office with a minority of the popular vote and in the wake of the protracted battle over the Florida vote count. He was already derided as a tongue-tied intellectual light-weight. 9/11 rescued him. His response was measured and even magisterial.
His clumsy folksiness and moral simplicities struck a chord with middle America. His pollsters soon cottoned on to the need to appeal to the evangelical and religious right in American society. The War on Terror was made for a country which tends to identify itself collectively with a higher moral view of the world. While the Administration could persuade the country that it, alone, could be trusted with the nation’s security the Bush ascendancy was guaranteed.
Katrina, brutally and in horrific Technicolor, brought a different agenda. An America of anguishing poverty and racial divide. The homeless, dispossessed and poverty-ridden of New Orleans were overwhelmingly black. And Bush’s response was seen to be utterly inadequate. Americans saw images of the Third World on their television screens and realised that this was their own country.
Then there is Iraq. America is a hugely patriotic country. Millions of ordinary homes across the nation display the flag outside the gate or the porch. Support Our Troops bumper stickers proliferate. The instinctive response is to back the President and back “our boys.” Yet the incompetence of the Administration’s post-invasion strategy advertised daily by the images of civil war ( a term Bush refuses to acknowledge) is like an acid seeping into the White House rafters.
The Democrats are all too aware that they could self-destruct. How do they present themselves as equally as tough on terror as Bush whilst still sustaining an effective attack on his policies? They argue that the Iraq invasion has made it harder to tackle terrorism. They arraign the President and his inner team of Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for incompetence in Iraq. Yet they are desperate not to be labelled the “cut-and-run” party. They know that the Republicans are equally determined to turn the whole election into a referendum on terror.
The problem is that many Democrat activists do want to bail out or Iraq. A couple of weeks ago the long-standing Democrat senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 Presidential contest, was defeated in a primary election by a total unknown, Ned Lamont, running on a platform of bringing the boys home from Iraq and leaving Iraq to sort out its own mess.
For an established senator to lose a primary election is a seismic event, although Lieberman had been an outspoken supporter of Bush over Iraq. He is now planning to run as an Independent Democrat against the official Democrat in a race where the Republican candidate has dropped totally out of sight- even of the White House.
The Democrats have not produced the (albeit temporarily) charismatic leader to challenge the President in the way that Newt Gingrich offered a Republican programme for America when Bill Clinton was fighting to sav-e his Presidency. If they do succeed in demolishing the Republican majority in Congress it will be more because they have ducked and weaved successfully in the face of the charge of being soft on terror than because they have landed body blows on Bush.
But, for Bush, it is the beginning of the end. He has just over two years to run, possibly crippled, perhaps reinvigorated. For Tony Blair there is no such wager: the next Prime Minister is in waiting and all there is for him to do is to go.
© Yorkshire Post
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