In the wake of all the dashed predictions following the New Hampshire primary, American political analysts have scrambled for a theory to explain Hillary Clinton's comeback.
Hillary's on-camera tears, the so-called Bradley Effect (the tendency of white voters to overstate their willingness to vote for a black candidate in surveys), and perhaps most plausibly, the income differential between Clinton and Obama supporters: all these factors have been invoked with some credence to explain her stunning upset.
Yet given that this is actually the second major predictive failure (John McCain's run in New Hampshire was prematurely declared dead by the pundits last Summer) and that the winners, McCain and Clinton, are not-so-arguably the most experienced foreign policy candidates of their respective parties—a few analysts are beginning to wonder if we are missing the obvious.
Perhaps this American presidential election isn't going to be that different from any others which followed 9/11.
In 2001, as Washington regrouped from the terrorist attacks, both parties assumed that foreign policy, national defense, and homeland security had superseded all other issues in the American presidential elections, perhaps for a decade or more.
In 2004, many Democratic Party operatives "dated Dean, but married Kerry" precisely because they believed that a convention built around John Kerry's Vietnam experience would neutralize any residual advantage for Bush as he went from bullhorn commander in the rescue efforts of the World Trade Center to rose garden commander of an Iraq war that was widely perceived to be throwing away American lives.
If Foreign policy was number one, the Democrats could make it work.
Election Day 2004 changed all that. In the space of several hours, Kerry campaign workers in Boston headquarters went from impromptu dances and laughter as the leaked exit polls glowed in their blackberries to disbelief, shock, and even tears as the actual results flashed on the television monitors.
Few believed that Diebold voting machines had been programmed to steal the elections, but in the trauma and recriminations that followed, the bedrock knowledge that foreign policy was always the central issue came subtly undone.
However sketchy the 2004 exit polls might be, it was indisputable that more voters (22%) had chosen "moral values" than any other category as the most important issue in determining their vote. Providing that one interpreted "moral values" as code words for opposition to abortion and gay marriage, it was theorized that the religious right had provided the victory to Bush, using immutable wedge issues that no Democrat could reasonably accommodate. The loss was preordained, perhaps existential in its tragedy, but also honorable; no Democrat was guilty.
Republican strategists saw a different story. Perhaps the Kerry campaign had been holed beneath the waterline by the "Swift Boat campaign" which challenged Kerry's account of his heroism in Vietnam but it was sunk by Kerry's inability to maintain an unequivocal stance on the Iraq War. Did these factors reflect Kerry's moral values? Perhaps, but they mainly gave voters reason to question his ability to manage international crisis.
The idea that Kerry had been beaten by evangelicals—gleefully reinforced by a few opportunistic religious conservative operatives at the time—sprung from a hidden bias in the exit polls. Actually 15% of the voters chose "Iraq" as the most important issue and another 19% chose "terrorism."
The exit polls were—perhaps subconsciously—constructed to provide an intellectual firewall between these two issues, reflecting the prevailing view of Iraq War critics that the Iraq invasion was a senseless reaction to the terrorist threat.
Which category did the Afghan war fall into? The exit poll language offered no clue, nor did it reference the view—quite possibly held by a majority of voters—that no matter how ill-conceived the Iraq invasion or how poorly run, the people killing American soldiers in Iraq were now mostly Al Qaeda.
If you put the "Iraq" and "Terrorism" categories together, say calling it "Foreign Policy," or just plain "National Security," fully 34% of the voters (approximately 30% of the Democrat-leaning voters and 38% of Republican-leaning voters) cared far more about security than "moral values."
In 2006, it was the Republican turn to duck and cover. The Iraq War was such a handicap that Democrats didn't even have to specify their plans in the Middle East much beyond the withdrawal of American troops. This thinking—or lack of it—carried into the current elections.
When the first returns on the surge—the policy that John McCain had pushed and openly bet his candidacy on—were beginning to emerge last summer, at least one prominent Republican pollster, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, said the results on the ground would not matter because "The American people have turned the page on Iraq."
Yet in New Hampshire it happened again: in exit polls, fully 42% of Republicans chose either the War in Iraq or terrorism as the central issue of the election, far outranking concerns about immigration or the economy. Even though John McCain is a blatant hawk in Iraqi war matters, he still managed to win the majority of Republican primary voters who no longer supported Bush or the war.
Even with the media offering little coverage of the surge's success, and a clear case of Iraq fatigue among the pundits, many American voters had not turned the page after all. They simply wanted a new ending.
What then, of the results of Iowa, of evangelical populist revolution, of the audacity of hope? Democratic opposition to the Bush Administration—an opposition that became increasingly personal over the course of eight years—really acted as a glue for both parties.
The release of the party faithful from Bush discipline has created a temporary feeling of liberation, which is largely being vented through identity politics, leading to the embrace of Mike Huckabee—hardly a traditional conservative—by Evangelicals in Iowa and, on the Democratic side, the embrace of a movement of utopian harmony, and generational change in Barak Obama.
Neither are poseurs. Huckabee's credentials as a man of the people running against the culture of Washington insiders was confirmed when he inadvertently revealed that he had not heard of the explosive National Intelligence Estimate paper on the Iran threat some 30 hours after it was released.
The South Carolina primary will determine whether voters still see such a campaign as a refreshing change or simply inept. On the Democratic side the liberation from Bush-solidarity may be more traumatic; it is premature to say how the current identity politics of race versus gender will shake down on Super Tuesday.
Obama has run an honest campaign. Yet Obama's statement that he would welcome a summit with Kim Jong-il or Ahmadinejad made him look inexperienced. He overreacted to this gaffe by making a bare-chested threat to launch American military operations inside nuclear-armed Pakistan. These mistakes may cost him the Presidency.
American voters were entitled to a short break from history. But voters may also realize that it is a dream. Presidents do not really control the economy or the outcome of social issues such as abortion. Their power—for better or worse—resides in America's impact on the world, in the President's power to gamble on war or peace.
Thus, even as economic anxiety is measurably rising among voters, a plausible background in foreign policy may still constitute the table stakes for any candidate to actually gain their Party's nomination and the Presidency.
Feeds