(Part of UPI's Special Report on Election 2002)
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- As President George W. Bush got ready for his annual August vacation in Crawford, Texas, the outlook for the Republicans in the midterm elections was bleak.
Bush knew to begin with that history was not with him. In the last 100 midterm elections, the out party had gained an average of 30 seats in the House and four in the Senate. Only a handful of presidents had been able to offset that. The Democrats in 2002 needed only one more Senate seat to solidify the control of the Senate and only eight seats in the House to retake that chamber.
With the Nov. 5 election looming, Republicans like former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich are privately telling lobbying luncheons in Washington that the GOP could end up with a 10-seat majority in the House and retake the Senate. The White House is not openly buoyant, but at a recent black dinner, the president's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, was so jovial, the newspaper reporters included it in their pool report of the dinner.
Whatever the outcome on Nov. 5, the story of this fall is a tale of an artful campaign to shift the attention of 281 million people from their own lives and financial well being to the prospects of a war that may never be waged.
The midterm election is vitally important to George Bush not solely because of his pending bid for re-election in 2004, but to sustain the nascent Republican conservative movement that he had carried to the White House in 2000. Preserving and increasing the $1.35 billion in tax cuts, control of the Supreme Court, reviving his faith-based initiatives and rolling back abortion, all would hinge on who controlled Congress.
"In the absence of a Senate majority," New York's Democratic senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, grimly pointed out last month, "there will be no check on this administration and its domestic and foreign agenda priorities."
By August, the national debate had swung away from the Republicans. Though Bush had come out of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with some of the most astounding approval ratings in history, the political impact of the war on terrorism was waning. The successes in Afghanistan had slipped from public view and the war there had ground down to squabbling between political factions, the U.S. backed political factions.
Part of Bush's problem was an indeterminate enemy. With the exception of a clumsy Jamaican who tried to ignite his exploding shoes on an American Airlines flight from Paris to the U.S. and the detention of a Chicago man who was thought to be plotting nuclear attack, al Qaida terrorism seemed dormant.
Osama bin Laden had disappeared from public view even on al Jazeera Arabic television and a lot of the world presumed he was dead.
In January, Bush had tried to revive intense public support of the war on terror by extending its definition to nation states Iraq, Iran and North Korea. An "axis of evil," he called them and they became part of a steady rhetorical alert on the dangers surrounding the United States.
As Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney moved about the country campaigning in June and July, they hardly missed an opportunity to lambaste Saddam Hussein and mention the war. By August, Bush had campaigned for 30 candidates and raised $100 million; but despite his honing in on the war, the national debate had shifted out from under him.
For the first time since Sept. 11, the Democrats had seemed to gain their footing. They were able to resist a Homeland Security Department in Bush's image and had held the line on several key judgeships and other GOP measures.
The economy remained gloomy and the stock market volatile. Corporate malfeasance, from Enron to WorldCom to Tyco, cast the Bush-Cheney regime in sharp relief. In late July and early August, Bush found himself trying to explain actions he took at Harken Energy over a decade earlier and Cheney was jousting with questions about a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Halliburton Corp., a giant energy service company, where he had been chief executive officer.
Fearful that corporate earnings would continue to decline and a deadline for corporations to certify that their financial statements were truthful would reveal more corporate malfeasance, Bush put together a hasty "economic conference" in hot and sticky Waco, Texas, in mid-August. But the long-winded dissertations of Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, and the private briefings of budget man Mitch Daniels and economist Lawrence Lindsey, seemed only a slight distraction from market realities.
Several top congressional Republicans told the president that if he couldn't shift national debate, the party would be marginalized.
For several months, the war hawks in the Bush administration had been leaking different versions of battle plans against Iraq to the news media. Democratic Sen. Joe Biden held hearings on the issue in the Senate Foreign Relations committee that revealed that the notion of an unprovoked attack on Iraq, particularly without allies, would sharply split the very core of the Democrats. The administration had sent no witnesses to those hearings and whatever the president's real plan was, he was holding it close to his chest -- but the White House had learned a lot.
The president's political advisers had seen daylight. When Bush returned from vacation in September, the White House issued a new national security doctrine for the United States, dredging up an address he had made to the West Point graduating class in June. The United States, he said, would reserve the right to strike an enemy that it feared would attack America or its allies.
"Preemption" became the catchword of the news broadcasts and talk shows. Wouldn't it have been right if the United States had learned about the Sept. 11 attacks for it to preempt them Cheney would ask rhetorically? Maybe Pearl Harbor could have been prevented? Or Hitler stopped by a French Army invasion?
Critics charged it would change the fundamental posture of the United States in the world from the arsenal of democracy to a predator state. From his father's old adviser Brent Scowcroft, to German Chancellor Gerhardt Schoeder, the environs of 21st century discourse were suddenly dominated by the idea that the United States would start a war without being attacked! One German woman minister suggested that Bush was like Hitler, trying to distract his people from their real problems. She had to quit her job after that, but the thought had been posed in the world's mind.
From that time on, the president was seldom asked about economy, Harken Energy or corporate malfeasance.
Bush's tactic was certainly not new. He had used it successfully to back out of Kyoto, end the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and to push Star Wars missile defense. Take the hard position and make the debate come to you.
At the United Nations on Sept. 12, the president ameliorated his position somewhat. The United States wanted the U.N. to take action, to stand up for itself and stop letting Saddam Hussein kick sand in its face, but if it didn't, the U.S. would do it alone.
The next week, Bush asked Congress to sweep aside three decades of hand wringing over the War Powers Act and give him the authority to attack Saddam Hussein without advising Congress beforehand. He and his political advisers had read the Democrats correctly.
Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Vice President Al Gore's running mate in 2000, who is a strong supporter of Israel and hawk on Saddam Hussein, came around early. He saw his fortunes in not appearing to oppose such this cause. House minority leader Richard Gebhardt followed suit.
One top flight New York Democratic pollster told a small private gathering at a New York school that he had advised his clients not to oppose the president. "The president has the power anyway," was his point, "and the longer the debate lasts over Iraq, the longer before the campaign on other issues cannot be waged."
But crusty old Democratic senators Edward M. Kennedy and Robert Byrd did not follow this political tactic. They and others, some in Bush's own party, fought the measure down to the wire and the president's war resolution wasn't passed until Oct. 11, less than a month before Election Day.
By the end of September, a Washington Post poll showed that the tactic was working. "Democrats Ability to Use the Economy Against GOP Wanes," read the headline. The election had become a referendum on war, not on the president's handling of the economy.
There has been, as there always is in politics, good fortune as well. New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli's embarrassed exit from the race made a Democratic loss of the Senate possible. The al Qaida suddenly seemed more than an occasional somber report from Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge or Vice President Cheney, when a French vessel was attacked in Yemen followed by the shooting of a U.S. Marine in Kuwait and then on Oct. 15th the devastating attack on a Bali Nightclub.
War with Iraq has come to dominate daily discourse even outside of Washington. In a family gathering in upstate New York last weekend with members from California, Washington, New York City and points in between, whether there would be a war far outstripped talk of job prospects and investment difficulties.
All this may not last until Nov. 5. What Republicans may not know until then is whether the American people feel safer with Bush in the White House and the Democrats in control of at least one house.
