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Trailer trash: fightin' mad, want Dubya
On the face of it, it seems ridiculous that George Bush should have any chance of re-election next week. He is the first president to oversee a net loss of jobs in the US economy since the Great Depression. He has led his country into the most controversial war since Vietnam. Yet he has an excellent chance of winning four more years. The polls are confused, signalling a close contest. At one extreme, Bush has a 7 percentage point lead, according to the Fox News poll; at the other John Kerry has a 3 percentage point advantage, according to the Associated Press-Ipsos survey.How does one of Washington's leading professional political analysts interpret the data? "I have no idea who is going to win this election," Charlie Cook, publisher of The Cook Political Report, confessed forlornly to his clients this week. "I really don't." The betting shops are more emphatic. The punters on the Iowa Electronic Market, an accurate predictor of the outcome since its inception, covering the last four presidential elections, are pricing Bush as the favourite with odds of 60:40. What is Bush's secret? With such a poor record, how can he still be in the race, much less the favourite? The first point to make is that while John Kerry has sought to fight much of the election campaign on the economy, it is not the dominant issue. There is something else preoccupying the American mind: "Nobody asked Abraham Lincoln what the unemployment rate was in 1864, as the Union forces marched to victory in the Civil War," quips Walter Russell Mead, one of America's foremost analysts of foreign policy. The dominant theme of this presidential election, the first since September 11, 2001, is national security. The No. 1 issue of importance to voters is the Iraq war, according to Gallup, and the No. 2 issue is the threat of terrorism. So the two top issues in the minds of the American voter are both national security matters, and here we begin to unravel the mystery of Bush's political resilience. Posted by: tipper 2004-10-29 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=47238 |