It all comes down to economy
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The candidate has sharpened and simplified his message ever since the men who helped engineer Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 came aboard the campaign, but he’s still provided ammunition for Republican charges that their opponent is a flip-flopper who can’t be trusted with the nation’s security. If George Bush succeeds in turning this election into a referendum on John Kerry, the president will fulfill the repeated chant at the Republican convention of “four more years.”
Despite the spate of positive polls for the Bush-Cheney ticket coming out of Madison Square Garden, the surveys show some big vulnerability for the incumbents. And Kerry has brought on board the tacticians who know how to exploit those weaknesses, including James Carville, author of the famous motto from the 1992 campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” If Kerry can keep this campaign focused on the economy combined with health care, another economic issue, he could turn the election around.
Republicans are basking in the success of their convention, looking at the president’s approval rating rising to the levels that usually mean re-election. But a closer look at the numbers reveals some fertile territory for Kerry. When Time magazine asked if it is “time for someone else to be president,” independent voters answered affirmatively by an almost 10-point margin. More voters continue to say that the country is headed down the “wrong track” rather than “in the right direction.”
Kerry’s trying to take those numbers and run with them. He’s shifted his stump speech to a tirade against the president on the economy, invoking — as every Democrat has since Franklin Roosevelt — the ghost of Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s name is likely to play more and more of a role in this campaign, along with a number of other Republican bogeymen — Ken Lay, for example, and all the other Bush-era corporate charlatans. With Clinton advisor Stanley Greenberg visiting the campaign bus, Kerry will be encouraged to pepper his talks with populist rhetoric.
On the very day he launched his new “‘W’ stands for wrong” domestic policy diatribe, Kerry provided fresh fodder for his opponents.
When asked for the umpteenth time where he stands on Iraq, he came back with a line straight from Howard Dean that it’s “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The president pounced, proclaiming that the senator had yet again changed his position as the crowd cheered, “Flip-flop.”
The flip-flop drumbeat is clearly having an effect. In a Gallup poll released earlier this week, on the question of who is a “strong and decisive leader,” Bush bested his opponent by 28 points. Kerry went into this campaign, like all legislators turned presidential candidates, carrying the albatross of a voting record that could be caricatured as inconsistent. But his own statements throughout the political season have only added to the sense of him as a wishy-washy weakling.
There’s no way he can win the presidency without turning around that perception. That’s something that will be hard for the Clinton team to help him do. They’re experts on economic discontent, on fueling the furor of the “little guy” against the fat cats. But these are different times from 1992, or even 2000, as the Republicans relentlessly reminded us throughout their convention. Right now, most voters cite the war on terrorism as the most important issue, and they overwhelmingly prefer Bush to handle it. Unless Kerry can change that, this year it’s NOT the economy, stupid.
Cokie and Steven Roberts are syndicated columnists.