POLITICS-U.S.: Democrats Keen as Fight for Presidency Begins

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 4 2004 (IPS) - Almost exactly eight months before the Nov. 2, 2004 elections, Democrats across the United States are unusually optimistic they will evict Republican President George W. Bush and retake the White House in January 2005.

Their optimism is based on the belief that, in 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 between its various factions, has never in the post-World War Two 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 energised”, a Washington State Democratic activist told IPS this week. ”They really want to beat this guy”.

Still, party officials are girding themselves for what pundits predict will be an extremely close and bitter campaign, which officially got underway Thursday when the Bush team launched a 4.5-million-dollar, 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 Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The latest comprehensive polls, completed before the Super Tuesday results, showed Kerry leading Bush by a statistically nearly insignificant 48-44 percent margin. 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 to Bush and 10 percent to Kerry, with only six percent telling Pew Research Centre pollsters that they were absolutely undecided at that point in the campaign.

Bush goes into the race with three major advantages over the 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 dollars and counting.

Despite his nearly 20 years in the U.S. 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, Therese 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 Sen Edward Kennedy (which Kerry in fact is) and in the mould of former Governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate who blew a 17-percent lead in the polls to lose to George HW 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 in order to secure the support of key labour unions.

Kerry has also been very sceptical of big-ticket military items in the defence 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 1996, Kerry defeated a very popular liberal Republican governor, William Weld, in one of the most remarkable come-from-behind victories of the past decade.

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 authorising 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 long-time free-trader whose more recent concerns about the loss of U.S. 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 persuade 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 centre, he has appeared to play to his right-wing base, most recently by coming out in favour of a constitutional amendment that excludes gay 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-dollar deficit and the ”jobless” recovery, but that Kerry might also score points by playing on persistent public unease over the U.S. 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 9/11, Bush has since created the most polarised 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 and Yale University, and were even members of Yale’s secret ‘Skull and Bones’ society.

But while Bush, who prized 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, strived for top academic honours, was deeply involved in the anti-war politics of the time, and volunteered for the Navy’s most dangerous assignments in the Mekong Delta.

”On the personal level … the one-time Texas oilman and the diplomat’s son from Massachusetts have little liking for what the other represents”, according to David Broder, the Post’s veteran political analyst, in typical understatement.