From "United We Stand" to "Divided We Are"

Inroads, Summer 2004 by Bergstrom, Hans

Only after having secured and energized the base can parties think about reaching out to swing voters. And when trying to reach swing voters, which is after all necessary in the general election phase, the parties are less likely to soften their message for centrist voters than to direct their basic message at particular groups. Thus Democrats hope to attract blue-collar workers in the "rust belt" and in the South by emphasizing jobs and class struggle, while Republicans try to keep them by talking about the War on Terror and cultural issues like gay marriage. More than ever, both parties will use sophisticated databases and other electronic tools to mobilize their voters and to identify particular "lifestyle clusters" for selective messages.

The outcome of the next presidential election seems far less certain now than it did at the end of 2003. Bush has been weakened by the problems in and costs of Iraq; at home, loss of manufacturing jobs and pressure of health care costs on the middle class are providing Democrats with a message of some resonance in pivotal industrial heartland states; record deficits undermine the Republicans' reputation as the party that knows how to handle money; prescription drug reform is not as popular among the elderly as the President had hoped, as its contribution to the perception of Bush as a "compassionate conservative" is overshadowed by the suspicion of giveaways to Big Pharma; finally, the Democratic primaries have produced a nominee whose victory was based on his "electability" more than on his emotional appeal to party activists - evidence in itself of the drive among Democrats to unseat George W Bush.

A nation still in peril?

Against this background, several elements will be very interesting to follow as the campaign unfolds:

1. security

The President claims that the nation has been at war since September 11, 2001. If this is true, the ability to handle that war should be the dominant criterion for choosing a president. George Bush has made the fight against terrorism the single most important task of his presidency, the task by which he is to be judged by history. Americans are constantly reminded of threats to their security. In the 2002 congressional elections, voters severely punished the Democrats for prioritizing security for public employee unions over reorganizing homeland security.

Under Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, Democrats have a history of international activism; the Republicans have been the party of isolationism. But this has changed over the last 35 years. When Democrats won the popular vote in the presidential elections of 1992, 1996 and 2000, the nation was not in peril. This was the brief period between the end of the Communist threat and the rise of the Terrorist threat. The 2004 presidential election will be the first one in this new security era. To what extent will President Bush be judged on his effort and ability to shelter the American people from new terrorist attacks?