By Patricia H. Kushlis
Did the “war on terror” decide the election after all?
Winning the “war on terror” may, in retrospect, have been a, if not the, determining factor in George W. Bush’s reelection – at least this is what several media analysts and columnists now suggest. They include John Harwood in his Capital Journal, “Terrorism Worries, not ‘Moral Values’ Decided the Election” in the November 24 Wall Street Journal and Michael Massing a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism review in the forthcoming December 16 New York Review of Books Article entitled “Iraq, the Press and the Election.”
In essence, then, the “values” issue was somewhat of a canard: “values” failed to sway many more voters in 2004 than they did in elections 2000 although one can debate this interpretation since in the closely fought 2004 election a two percent increase (22% vs.20%) over 2000 – certainly had an impact.
Apparently, though, what gave Bush the election more than anything were the images of his “standing tall” and “uniting the nation” in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. In short, his perceived ability to protect the U.S. from terrorists. Or was it terror?
Regardless, these Marlboro-man-images-sans-cigarette were picked up, played and replayed by Fox News, circulated and recirculated among the Christian fundamentalist right and the Republican faithful, and blared incessantly as Bush “authorized messages” – from radio and mainstream TV channels – including the local classical FM station I stopped listening to as a result - throughout the campaign.
OK. But what also threw Bush the election was the carefully crafted Republican campaign message that intentionally and fallaciously blurred and still blurs the “war on terror” – itself a misnomer - with the U.S. invasion and occupation in Iraq. Then there’s the purported link the Bush campaign publicists drew between Saddam Hussein and WMD that bore and still bears no relationship to reality.
All this, in the face of the publication of the bipartisan and widely respected 9/11 Commission Report that clearly separated the three foreign policy issues and discredited the Saddam-WMD link lie; not to mention the mainstream media’s increasing reports of a swelling Iraq insurgency over the summer and fall.
“You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time,” Abraham Lincoln told the people of Clinton, Illinois on September 8, 1858. How long, then, will the majority (albeit slim) of today’s American voters remain fooled?
Perhaps as the Iraq mess drags on, as more and more young Americans lose their lives in that distant and treacherous desert, and as fiscal constraints tighten their grip on the U.S. economy and reach deeper into taxpayer pocketbooks, enough American voters will join the ranks of the already disbelievers to make a difference. Who knows? It takes some people longer to catch on than others. Just maybe enough will - and in time for the 2006 mid-term elections.