Over at TPM Cafe they are discussing the question what caused Bush's spectacular political fall? Katrina? Stymied on Social Security? Schiavo? Obviously all of the above played significant roles but more than anything, it was Iraq - which delivers Bush's lowest approval ratings of all issues. But Iraq could have been Bush's downfall in 2004, if Dems would have fought the election on that issue earlier and harder. Ed Kilgore says some of us did not understand how Iraq worked for Bush in 2004:
I'm not sure how well Democrats (particularly those who thought a stronger anti-war Democrat would have won) have ever understood the role Iraq played in Bush's 2004 re-election. . . . In retrospect, it's reasonably clear the Bush-Cheney campaign understood something about the public attitude toward Iraq that the pollsters and the opposition never quite figured out. Again and again, the GOP reinforced a simple if fatally flawed line of "reasoning:" . . . George Bush went over to the Middle East and killed a whole lot more Arabs, and lo and behold, we were not attacked again.
Ed is so wrong on that. More.
The problem was not that we did not see how Bush/Rove were using Iraq. The problem was Kerry did not see what he had to do to counter on Iraq soon enough. Indeed, most Dems did not. They wanted kitchen table issues. They including the DLC AND Jesse Jackson:
. . . Later, Mr. Jackson said he told Mr. Kerry in a private meeting Friday that he should try to move the public debate off the topics that the White House wants to talk about -- "taxes and terror," as he put it -- and broaden the discussion to matters like education, health care, poverty and voting rights.
I strongly diagreed with Jesse:
Now, if you don't know what I think Kerry should be talking about, read this --
Iraq. Iraq and the BushCo failure in the War on Terror. And Iraq. and BushCo's failure in the War on Terror. Oh, and did I mention IRAQ!!!!
As for Ed Kilgore, AFTER the election, he conceded as much:
At an analytical level, John Kerry did a creditable job of handling national security issues, especially towards the end of the campaign when he consistently blasted the administration for an Iraq adventure that distracted from the war on terrorism, essentially adopting the Bob Graham-Wes Clark "right idea, wrong Arabs" approach of opposing the war on national security grounds. But he never achieved the simplicity of the Graham-Clark message, in part because of his own wandering views on Iraq, and in part because the other elements of his national security agenda sounded like a Foreign Service School master's thesis, which a lot of fine detail but little in the way of a clear overarching theme.
The problem was in bold - "especially towards the end." It should have been the issue in the beginning, middle and end of the campaign. But Kerry and his team did not get it:
. . . Friends say Kerry believes he has passed a national security threshold with voters that has freed him to tap a vice-presidential candidate who compliments him in other ways. In 2000, Cheney was seen as a wise choice for Texas Gov. George W. Bush because he brought foreign policy credentials to the ticket.
Pfft.