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09-11-2004 – THE NATIONAL JOURNAL
Politics - Battling to Be Protector-in-Chief
Siobhan Gorman (E-mail this author)© National Journal Group, Inc.
Three years after the 9/11 attacks, most Americans say they're not terribly worried about terrorism. Yet as an issue, it is alive and kicking -- hard -- in the presidential campaign.
On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney wielded the threat of terrorism as a battle-ax against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. At a campaign stop in Des Moines, Cheney ominously warned that if voters "make the wrong choice" on Election Day, "then the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists. The Democratic reaction was strong. Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, for example, called the Cheney statement "a stunning example of this administration exploiting the war on terror for political gain."
The definitive judgment on which side won that round will have to wait for the next polling cycle, but the fierce exchange is the latest indication that both sides think that the protector-in-chief mantle will not be won in a Lincoln-Douglas-style policy debate. And talk of terrorism has become the Republicans' vehicle of choice for character adulation or assassination.
Prime-time speeches at the Republican convention were laced with depictions of President Bush as a hero of 9/11. Bush's own acceptance speech brimmed with reminders of the 9/11 attacks and portrayed virtually every step the president has since taken as a courageous response to them. "I've tried to comfort Americans who lost the most on September the 11th," Bush said at the end of a speech that capped a week of such emotional appeals -- from 9/11 survivors, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and others.
Casting Bush as the 9/11 president apparently is working; he ended his convention ahead in the polls. A Newsweek survey taken during the convention and a Gallup Poll conducted afterward disagreed on the size of the incumbent's surge, but both found a double-digit increase in the percentage of voters saying that, in the handling of terrorism, they trust Bush more than Kerry. What's more, Bush's "leadership" ratings rose while Kerry's declined sharply.
All this while 66 percent of voters have told Gallup that they're not particularly worried that they or someone in their family will be a victim of terrorism.
"Terrorism in the post-9/11 world is the context through which this [campaign] is being waged," says Lee Miringhoff, director of the Marist College poll. But, he adds, issues linked to the war on terrorism have "become surrogates for [candidates'] character and personal qualities. I think voters would be hard-pressed to come up with lots of differences in the policies of the candidates over terrorism."
In his acceptance speech, Bush capitalized on terrorism not by enumerating new policy proposals but by talking about it in personal, I-feel-your-fear terms. And he got a running start. Immediately before the convention, his campaign launched a television ad in 19 swing states that highlighted the empathy that the president and his wife feel for parents who on 9/11 had to choose which child to pick up first from school.
Expressing such empathy "is important, because people want whoever is going to be in office to understand how I deal with the threat to my family and my kids," says Republican pollster David Winston. "I haven't seen that from the Kerry side."
Just as important to the Bush campaign, Winston says, was its success in recruiting such respected figures as Sen. John McCain of Arizona to say that they see a link between the 9/11 attacks and the threat posed by Iraq -- a link strong enough to justify the Bush administration's decision to go to war. (The 9/11 commission and other investigative panels have challenged the administration's assertion that Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks.)
Kerry campaign pollster Mark Mellman dismissed Bush's terrorism numbers as "a temporary boost" that can be expected to evaporate as memories of the GOP convention fade. He contends that Kerry does not need to rate as high as Bush on terrorism. Rather, he says, Kerry just has to convince voters that he's strong enough to handle the terrorism threat.
"The American public also wants a president who is going to be able to do two things at once," Mellman continued. "The concern about Bush is that the only thing he cares about is protecting the country."
What's inarguable is that terrorism is one of this campaign's most volatile issues -- or, perhaps more accurately, themes. Voters' views of the importance of terrorism when they cast their ballots may well hinge on outside events -- real or imagined -- beyond the control of either contender.
Currently, that volatility favors Bush. The Newsweek poll found terrorism overtaking the economy as voters' No. 1 concern -- 28 percent ranked terrorism first, compared with 21 percent for the economy. Gallup's voters still ranked the economy No. 1, at 32 percent; terrorism passed Iraq to fill the No. 2 slot, with 28 percent of voters deeming it their top issue.
In voters' calculations, three main forces are now at play -- the economy, terrorism, and Iraq, says Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He described a three-way seesaw (if such a thing is possible) in which overwhelmingly good or bad news on any one of the three topics can tip media and voter attention away from the other two.
"The wild card in all this is events on the ground," Doherty says. Although another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be the most destabilizing "event on the ground," news out of Iraq or on Wall Street could also raise or lower terrorism's importance as a campaign issue. And, of course, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would reverberate through the electorate in unpredictable ways -- probably to Bush's favor.
Conventional wisdom says that a terrorist attack on this country before Election Day would prompt voters to fall in line behind their current commander-in-chief. Voters' reactions, however, could depend on the nature of the attack. A good argument can be made, said pollster John Zogby, that Bush would suffer -- provided a quick and convincing case was made that he should have anticipated and could have thwarted the attack.
The polling, what little there is of it, on this question does not paint a clear picture. A poll released in March by the conservative firm Andres McKenna Research indicated that a new terror attack would actually hurt Bush, with 46 percent of registered voters saying an attack would make them less likely to vote for him and only 29 saying it would make them more likely to support his re-election. But in an interview, Gary Andres, a principal with the firm, shrugged off his poll's results and argued that if the question offered Kerry as the alternative to Bush, voters would have favored Bush.
Still, a new study by a pair of Michigan State University political scientists also raises questions about whether another attack, or the fear of another attack, would help Bush in the voting booth. Professors Darren Davis and Brian Silver found that in recent national and Michigan polls, voters expressing the most concern about terrorism were more likely to view Bush unfavorably -- a reversal of a trend they had seen ever since the 9/11 attacks. But for the shift to help Kerry, Silver said, the Democrat would have to position himself to capitalize on it.
Even distant events, such as the recent terrorist massacre of hundreds of children at a Russian middle school, could have an impact on the presidential election, pollster Winston says, because such events can increase voter anxiety, especially among the 11 to 14 percent of the electorate he calls "security moms."
To be sure, timing is everything in politics. Adding yet another layer of uncertainty to how voters will factor terrorism into their assessments of the presidential candidates is the rising use of early voting. Voting by mail begins next week in Idaho. And 24 states will allow no-excuse absentee or other sorts of voting before November 2.
As the 2000 post-election wrangling made painfully clear, the presidency could come down to a handful of states or a single state. Pollsters like Zogby note that concerns about terrorism remain, in many respects, regional -- confined to selected, and not very contested, states on the East Coast.
Still, perhaps the most notable campaign lesson of Bush's post-convention ascent in the polls is that voters not only see 9/11 as a legitimate campaign topic, but they're also willing to reward Bush for tapping into their memories of that day. Despite all the inside-the-Beltway criticisms of the Republicans for holding their convention a few miles from Ground Zero just days before the third anniversary of 9/11, voters appear unfazed by the politicization of Bush's response to 9/11.
Even 9/11 family members angered and upset by the Bush campaign's earlier television ads playing off the events of that day seem resigned to such exploitation now. "I personally am not interested to hear what he did on 9/11. I, too, walked the streets," said Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband, Richard, in the World Trade Center. But, she said, "the evoking of 9/11 was expected."
Such resignation highlights the conflicted nature of Americans' feelings about terrorism three years after the attacks that killed a record number of Americans. Most voters don't seem to flinch when 9/11 is packaged as a campaign issue. Yet on the campaign trail, accusing an adversary of being soft on terrorism packs a powerful emotional punch.