It's the War, Stupid

...But in those same years, a marked loss in confidence in President Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam war coincided with a 47-seat loss in the U.S...

...Under just about all foreseeable circumstances, American voters are unlikely to agree...

...If voters did not believe us to be in wartime, it's hard to imagine any real interest in a candidate who not only has minimal political experience, but who apparently entered the race having given little thought to the simplest questions of why he is running and what he believes...

...But if the central political assumption of the Bush administration is true—that we are in the midst of a world war that is far from over—the relief may prove premature, if not irrelevant...

...They regard the failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction as a devastating indictment of Bush's decision to invade...

...But this is less surprising if the preponderance of voters see the invasion less in legalistic terms than as one element of a Bush strategy of taking the battle to the enemy in a much larger war...

...If election history is any guide, the rules are simple...

...A few Democratic strategists have been heard expressing exasperation with the fact that opinion polls taken in the wake of the failure to find the weapons have shown popular support for the invasion largely unchanged...

...One of Bush's chief advantages since 9/11 is that his view of the war has seemed to coincide roughly with that of the electorate...

...In 1966 and 1968, Democrats were presiding over the sixth and eighth years, respectively, of the strongest economic expansion in U.S...

...But if the president's view of this as a vast, unfinished world war is still the view of most voters, attempts to wish away unpleasant realities will come to grief...

...But all year, polls indicated instead a status quo election, and toward the end of the campaign Democrats found themselves on the defensive on the war-related issue of homeland security...

...electorate, retired general Wesley Clark, has mounted a candidacy that will almost certainly live or die based on his ability to make sense of the war...

...The intensified resistance to our occupation of Iraq is indeed a crisis point in the war debate, if only because these are the first politically significant military setbacks suffered by the Bush administration since 9/11...

...Everything that has happened in the Democratic party since tells us that they will not repeat that mistake...

...If a role reversal takes place—that is, Republicans gain an advantage on domestic issues while Democrats gain the upper hand in the war debate—Bush and his party will be net losers...

...It would be ironic if in the months ahead, it is Republicans who find themselves hoping that 2004 will be a peacetime election...

...For example, Democratic elites tend to see the invasion of Iraq as an issue that is separable from the rest of the war on terrorism, perhaps even a diversion from it...

...The extreme version of this approach is the idea that the response to 9/11 should be mainly one of law enforcement— bringing terrorists to justice—and that efforts at regime change almost invariably overreach the bounds of A few Democratic strategists have been heard expressing exasperation with the fact that opinion polls taken in the wake of the failure to find the weapons have shown popular support largely unchanged...

...He also sees the enemy as implacable and irredeemably evil...

...He has seen the enemy as protean, resourceful, and crossing the usual sectarian, regional, and ideological barriers...

...international law and justice...

...Critics of Bush's war policy, who include most of the Democratic elite, see many of our wartime challenges as fundamentally unrelated to each other, or at least analytically separable for purposes of formulating a U.S...

...But if the electorate sees Bush losing his grasp of the war, economic strength will not prevent political setbacks...

...The same spectrum of attitudes can be seen concerning the guerrilla war being waged against the U.S...

...House in 1966 and with a decline in the Democratic presidential vote from 61 percent to 43 percent between 1964 and 1968...

...American voters behave very differently in wartime elections than they do in peacetime elections...

...Someone at the other end of the spectrum might be just as surprised at the intensity of the enemy campaign, but nonetheless see the military struggle for post-Saddam Iraq as a challenging, unavoidable new phase of a complicated world war...

...BY JEFFREY BELL THERE WERE SIGHS of relief in Republican circles last week when the third quarter's economic growth rate was announced as 7.2 percent...

...The Democrats found that out in November 2002...

...For the first time, Bush administration voices—and not just the usual suspects in the State Department and CIA—can be heard implying that rapidly phasing down our Iraq effort—in the Vietnam-era phrase of George Aiken, declaring victory and going home—might be the political path of least resistance...

...response...

...He believes we must put pressure on the terrorists and their rogue-state allies and facilitators all over the world before they come after us to inflict another 9/11, or worse...

...role as soon as possible...

...occupation in Iraq...

...A candidate mainly associated with opposition to the Bush administration's conduct of the war, Howard Dean, has vaulted from the back of the pack to frontrunner status...

...history...

...In one way, the escalating violence reinforces the Bushite analysis of Iraq as one battleground in a global war that is far from over...

...For President Bush and the Republicans, strong economic growth would nicely complement a continued GOP advantage on war policy...

...The result—historically surprising GOP gains, including the recapture of the Senate—suggested an electorate focused on war, not the sluggish economy or other domestic issues that mildly favored the Democrats...

...In that election, by the normal criteria of economic data and domestic issue debate, Democrats had every reason to hope for at least modest gains in the House and Senate...

...The only other contender seemingly able to excite elements of the Democratic Jeffrey Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consultingfirm...

...Their answer, therefore, is to attempt tacitly to undo the invasion by turning the occupation over to others and minimizing the U.S...

...Another sign of uncertainty is the seeming willingness of the White House to pursue amicable negotiations with Iran at a time when that country has apparently tolerated the establishment of a new base for al Qaeda within its eastern border...

...The course of the Democratic nomination struggle this year suggests that the war-centered mood of the electorate hasn't changed...

...If America sees itself at war, war-related issues trump domestic issues when the two are in conflict...

...Little more than a year ago, key Democrats were betting that voters were focused not on the war, but on issues like prescription drugs...

...Democrats who see Iraq as a stand-alone issue regard the intensity of resistance as still another sign that the invasion was misconceived...