Commentary: The war hawks of 2002?

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (UPI) -- Can a war, or the run-up to war, help keep a party in power?

That seems to be the political question of the moment. After a disastrous summer in which a slumping economy and big business corruption dominated the headlines, President George W. Bush has regained the political initiative this month by putting the question of a war with Iraq on the front burner.

Polls show that by changing the focus from domestic issues to foreign policy issues, Bush has made a recovery and the Republican Party a lesser one.

There's a well-known expression, "wagging the dog," which allegedly shows that presidents in trouble use foreign affairs to change the focus of issues away from from domestic ones (literally, in the case of President Bill Clinton).

Most of the evidence for this is circumstantial, and it rarely works anyway. Consider -- if Clinton's missile had hit Osama bin Laden in 1998, would the Republicans have said anything different and would the American voters that year have noticed?

As it was, the Republicans got their wish and the election of 1998 turned on Monica, not the embassy bombings.

The "dog" legend grows from reality. Presidents generally gain from taking strong positions -- almost any strong positions -- on foreign affairs, in which they are seen as speaking for the entire nation, while they lose support by taking strong positions on domestic affairs.

That's why almost all 20th century presidents have tended to start with domestic affairs and then move into foreign affairs as their presidency proceeds.

However, the historical evidence is that this shift usually doesn't work. Foreign involvements have not saved presidents in trouble and have often gotten them into worse trouble.

Indeed, campaigning as a "peace candidate" is usually more successful than campaigning as a "war candidate."

Woodrow Wilson won one of the narrowest elections in American history in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war," and he entered the war he had kept us out of just a month after he began his second term.

Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1964, ran against the hawkish Barry Goldwater as the peace candidate, and he, too, entered a war in the first month of his second term. Both these presidents lost effective control of Congress in the next mid-term election and were massively repudiated at the polls in the next presidential election.

Being in power during a war or a run-up to a war rarely has helped the incumbent party.

The president's father found that a victorious war couldn't even get him re-elected. LBJ found that a long slow loss in Vietnam destroyed his presidency, and Harry Truman met the same fate from a long slow draw in Korea, which kept him from running for re-election in 1952. FDR took a hard hit in the off-year election of 1942 just a year after Pearl Harbor, and Harry Truman, despite winning World War II, was smashed in the off-year elections of 1946.

World War I was a political disaster for the Democrats who fought it.

Even in the off-year elections of 1898, just after the "splendid little war," the Spanish-American War, the Republicans lost 21 House seats (although gaining seven seats in the Senate because they controlled state legislatures that they had not won in the disastrous year of 1892).

The Mexican War, another lopsided triumph of American arms, cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1846, and of the presidency in 1848.

Are there any cases on the other side of the ledger?

One often hears that JFK's good showing in 1962 (plus three in the Senate, minus four in the House) was a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But what one doesn't hear is that JFK had no coattails in 1960, and his party lost near two dozen House seats that year, thus having little left to lose in 1962, or that the Senate class coming up in 1962 had been elected behind Ike's huge 1956 landslide.

In the first party system of America, which was mostly about foreign policy, there does seem to be some connection of election results to foreign policy. The run-up to the War of 1812 actually revived the Federalist Party, which was committed against fighting a war with Britain. The Federalists, who had well-nigh vanished during the European truce that coincided with Jefferson's first term, gained votes during the years from 1806 right down to 1816.

One often hears about the "War Hawks," the Democratic-Republicans elected in 1810, who counted among their ranks both Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Clay, who had already served as a senator twice, for a single year each, was elected speaker of the House in his first day in the House, Nov. 4, 1811.

He appointed similar war-like figures to all the committees, and over the next half-year, took the country into a war that was opposed by the entire Federalist Party and some members of his own party.

What one doesn't hear is that the 1810 results weren't bad for the Federalists, but that the significant change was in the activists of the Democratic-Republican Party, humiliated by the failure of their leader's foreign policies over the previous four years.

It is often said that the Federalists collapsed after the war because of their opposition to it, but it is more accurate to say that the end of the European War in 1815 finished off the cause of their revival.

Indeed, one reason that the "War Hawks" of 1810 are so remembered is that there haven't been many war hawks in American history.

There is, in fact, only one clear case in that history when being associated with a war helped the party in power -- and that was the first war in America's history under the new constitution: the undeclared war with France over the "XYZ Affair" in 1798. The Federalists rode that war to a sweeping victory in that year's election.

They used the victory to pass the Alien and Sedition Laws, to create a vast standing army, to pack the courts.

There was one minor problem -- these weren't the policies that the country wanted or expected when they voted for the Federalists.

In 1800 the Federalists lost the presidency and both houses of Congress and never came to power again.

This isn't exactly an inspiring precedent for the Bush administration. Many Republicans, like the Federalists of 1798, hope to win an election on foreign issues and then use it to pass a domestic agenda that otherwise wouldn't stand a chance.

The claim that "foreign policy is so important" that it ought to override domestic considerations overlooks the fact that the entire congressional role in the Iraq adventure will have been completed when it shouts through Bush's blank check next week.

The 2003 Congress will spend almost all of its time on the polarized issues of the domestic debate.

There's a lot of historical evidence suggesting that the only thing worse for the Republicans than this strategy fail would be that it succeeded.

If it succeeded, the Republicans would repeat, squared, the results of 1995, or of 1977. Because their party commanded a majority not reflected in popular ideology, they would pass from hubris to panic in a few short months, as did the Gingrich Republicans and Carter Democrats.

The mere fact that their party doesn't want to fight the election on domestic issues is damning in itself. The conservatives of 2002, like the liberals of 1976, or the Federalists of 1798, have done what the American people wanted them to do, and what is left on their agenda are things the American people don't want to have done.

Changing the subject to foreign policy is unlikely to work, but if it did work, it would set the stage for a major domestic crack-up in 2003, when it would turn out that the new Congress, like all Congresses, would be working on domestic matters, not foreign policy.