Demosophia

Sliding Down the Polls

Both Dean and President Bush have declining poll numbers, and the explanations offered for both situations may have little substance. For the Deaniacs to imply that anyone other than Dean himself is responsible for the Dean implosion suggests the same kind of "out of touch" attitude that caused Dean to implode in the first place. He was never electable, and Bush never feared him. Bush doesn't fear Kerry either, or Edwards (much). It's really pretty easy to run against Democrats who have no better strategy than to propose New Deal Era programs dressed in New Era slogans. The real danger for Bush is the complacency that comes with that observation.

I don't know what the Dems are going to do, frankly. My thinking is still that the only viable opposition to a "conservative" Republican Party is a "progressive" Republican Party. I almost see the role of the Democrats as analogous to the classical role of third parties, attempting to influence one of the main factions in order to change their position. The Democratic Party is slowly sinking into the sunset.

And the notion that it's all related to the extensive coverage of "the scream" is yet another paranoid delusion. I didn't care about the scream, frankly. I sure don't think it's what kyboshed the Dean campaign. The fact that the campaign seems willing to blame anyone but Dean himself (and I don't mean just for "the scream" either) tells me, and also many other voters, that the guy just isn't very responsible. And believe me, I've worked for a lot of politicians in that same boat. Being "the candidate" does something perverse to your objectivity, and an extraordinary person is required to overcome that syndrome. Dean didn't cut it. Simple as that

However, the slide in Bush's popularity also needs explaining, and I don't think it's a matter of the voters "waking up to the truth." I submit that the press orientation combined with a certain Republican naiveté', has helped sew the seeds of a number of memes that have had a cumulative effect on Bush poll numbers. Off the top of my head the main ones are:

1. The logic that if there was no al Qaeda link, Saddam's Iraq didn't contribute significantly to the terrorist threat. (Only extraordinary conceit holds that the "neighborhood" Saddam helped to perpetuate was not making a huge contribution to maintaining the swamp's terrorist production potential.) This amounts to the failure to take the ecology of the situation seriously.

2. The assumption that it's a settled issue that there was no Iraq/Qaeda link, especially in the intelligence community. It is far from settled, and there's lots of evidence the link goes all the way back to the early 1990s, and may even include some collaboration on 9-11. At least the Czechs and a large contingent in the CIA think that.

3. There was only one reason to invade, put forth by the Bush Administration: WMD. (And together with this, the notion that "programs" weren't nearly as great a threat as the actual weapons stocks themselves.)

4. The notion that Bush Administration rested their case on the concept of "imminent threat," together with the generally unsubstantiated impression that "Bush lied." The press never really gets "on all fours" with these ongoing misinterpretations.

5. The idea that the intelligence services of both the US and other western nations doubted that Saddam had WMD stocks.

6. The second guessing involved in the failure to recognize that no one ever expressed a coherent theory explaining the actual behavior of the Ba'athist totalitarian system, other than that he had WMD. Specifically no one even considered the possibility that the Hussein regime was so inept that Saddam could have thought they had a WMD system that they didn't actually have. But there's some precedent for that situation. The "peace movement" never even considered it a possibility. (See Hitler's WMDs).

7. The notion that we're suffering big casualties in Iraq, and that the insurgent campaign is growing and becoming more successful. Both are patently false, but fueled by a certain laziness in the media.

Any one of these memes would have minimal impact on the Bush campaign, but the cumulative effect can be quite damaging. It's important to note that if these beliefs are responsible for the decline in Bush's popularity his lower numbers are fueled by a false and self destructive "second guessing" of the War on Terror. This isn't a good thing, unless you really despise the US.

Posted by Demosophist at February 11, 2004 12:15 PM | TrackBack