The Mess They're In

A new poll released on Friday, May 14 has Kerry leading Bush, 51% to 46%. (With Nader, Kerry drops under 50, but still leads Bush by a few points.) This is the first one I've seen since the race was truly joined in which the Democrat is over 50 percent in a head-to-head.

That's big, but I think the real story here--overlooked in all the Iraq mishegas--is that some of Bush's policy chickens are finally coming home to roost. The other major political news of the day was that Kerry won the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, a union with a pretty good recent track record: they endorsed Bush in 2000, and backed Clinton in 1992 and 1996. The reason they're back with the Democrats this time is pretty straightforward: Kerry will pay to put more cops on the streets. Bush can't, and won't.

Why can't he? Four words: tax cuts and deficits. The same four words that are likely to haunt Bush every day between now and November.

Typically, presidents (and other incumbents seeking to stay in power) like to spread the jack around in the months leading up to an election. Government services improve, tax cuts appear, and so on, all with the purpose of making things seem just dandy up to the moment when you go into the booth and reward the incumbent with your vote. But record deficits have a way of chilling the enthusiasm for election-year goodie distribution--especially when the conservatives whose turnout and enthusiasm are key to any re-election hopes already think the government is spending too much.

Why are the deficits so huge? The tax cuts. The same reason we’re having trouble paying for the war. Putting the ideology aside for just a moment, Bush and his advisors made a big bet on the tax cuts actually providing enough economic stimulus to avoid truly ugly deficits--or, more accurately, they made a big bet on a sufficiently strong and timely economic recovery to make it look like the tax cuts, which actually had minimal stimulus value (giving money back to people who haven't had to put off any spending anyway doesn't do much to stoke demand or circulate dollars through the economy), had turned the tide. They’re getting some job creation now, but the jobs being created are largely crap--service work, temp hiring--and tax revenues haven’t grown enough to re-fill the coffers.

Congress won’t spend for putting more cops on the streets, more teachers in the classrooms, or any other measures that might provide a tangible counter-argument to Americans' growing sense that the country is moving in the wrong direction. The Republicans are ostensibly in control of the entire federal government, and they know that anything they do to worsen the deficit will be political manna from heaven for the opposition. So they’re stuck. Kerry, who’s planning to repeal the most egregious of the tax cuts anyway, can look like Santa Claus--the truth is, repeal of the highest-end tax cuts might not even pay for his health care plan, let alone additional domestic spending. But he’s not yet responsible for the numbers; if in 2007 he has to face a disappointed police union threatening to endorse Bill Frist or somebody, that’s a problem to worry about later.

Bush’s absurd and counterproductive tax cuts are sucking the oxygen out of his re-selection bid. Now that’s satisfying.

Perhaps even more satisfying is that Karl Rove’s cultural wedge strategy is similarly foundering on the rocks. The bad news from Iraq seems to be amplifying all the ways in which different Republican constituencies are already dissatisfied with Bush, and they all want satisfaction. The wacko Right wants a stronger push on the anti-gay marriage Hate Amendment; the NRA wants him to kill the proposed extension of the assault weapons ban. But if he moves to satisfy these elements of the base, he makes it much harder to hold on to the “security moms” and other moderate groups who aren’t hot to demonize gays or put automatic weapons in every teenager’s hand. And they’re all upset about the war anyway. The whole idea was to present the moderates with a successful and "moral" war (whoops!) and a tangibly improving economy--in other words, to offer sufficiently good conditions that they wouldn't revolt over throwing a little red meat to the haters who comprise the GOP base. Now the administration has to choose, and either way they could lose.

The dream scenario is that either Roy Moore or a strong Libertarian candidate--or, please God, both--jump into the fray and really shred the center-right coalition. If things start to look bad enough for Bush, his Congressional allies will jump ship, and just maybe some of these groups on the Right will decide that the difference between Bush and Kerry is negligible enough that they can either sit it out or vote third-party (like, um, many of us did in 2000. Mea culpa, except that I lived in a safe “Blue” state anyway.)

It’s ironic that the same guys who once asserted that “Hope is not a plan” are now reducing to basically wishing for Iraq to stabilize somehow, while the economy continues to grow without inflation or an untimely end to the housing bubble. Dependent upon events they can no longer really control, hope is all they have left.