December 18, 2003
IF WE KNEW HE WAS COMING...:
For Bush, Saddam is icing on the cake: President has many advantages in his bid for re-election (Howard Fineman, Dec. 17, 2003, Newsweek)
I’ve been at this for a while now, and I have never seen a president more popular with his own party base. Even Ronald Reagan had to deal, from time to time, with the remnants of older iterations of the Republican Party. Bush doesn’t have to bother. They’re gone, and he’s united the new GOP. That means he won’t face an intra-party primary in ’04. Presidents who have to deal with one — Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush come to mind — lose re-election bids. [...]Yes Howard Dean is a Net-based money machine, but he’s still a mom-and-pop operation compared with Bush-Cheney ’04, which has raised $110 million since June, and has no primary opponent. Dean has some 550,000 names on its email list. “BC04” has 10 million. [...]
It’s a simple fact, but true: If you’re an incumbent, you have a better than 2-1 chance of winning re-election. You have the whole machinery of government at your disposal. You have inertia on your side. The late Lee Atwater, the enfant terrible of the GOP, once told me that an incumbent president is like the guy in the rowboat with a paddle. His main aim is to use that paddle to clobber anyone who tries to climb in. They usually (though not always) can do so. Of course, this president knows full well who one of the exceptions is: his own father.
The only interesting question left is can W carry D.C.. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2003 5:01 PM
George W. has learned well from the political mistakes his father made.
There's no chance that Dubyah will repeat them.
Posted by: John J. Coupal at December 18, 2003 7:42 PMHis main worry will probably be overconfidence going into the debates. He did that in 1998 running for re-election against Garry Mauro in Texas, and his performance was as bad as Reagan's first debate effort against Mondale in 1984.
Given the general attitude of the media and Bush's weaker skills with the camera compaired to Reagan, he would probably have a harder time turning things around in Debate II with a simple quip as Reagan did in his re-election bid (Bush survived the '98 debacle easily because the debate was only on PBS and the TXCN cable news channel, it was in a different time zone from the rest of the state way out in El Paso, and it was on a high school football Friday night in October. Crickets could be heard chirping in the audience on that one; for the presidential debates GWB won't have the luxury of no one paying attention).
Posted by: John at December 18, 2003 10:33 PMWhy would he debate?
Posted by: oj at December 18, 2003 10:51 PMA good question for Karl Rove, since there was no reason to let him debate in 1998, either, and Karl has to remember what happened there, aside from the final result (Bush by 49 percent).
Posted by: John at December 18, 2003 11:44 PMNot having presidential debates in un-American.
Posted by: EO at December 19, 2003 6:30 AMEO:
There were no debates prior to 1960 or between 60 and 76. One fails to note any improvement in the quality of the Presidents since debates were institutionalized.
Posted by: oj at December 19, 2003 8:24 AMInstead of a debate, have them write weblogs with comments open to the other candidates. Just knowing who they'd cite in their links would tell me a lot about them.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at December 19, 2003 9:20 AMIt's interesting that Dean has 550,000 names on his e-mail list; His goal was to have a million by this time.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at December 19, 2003 12:41 PMI still want to see a reporter dig around in Dean's claims of how much money he has raised. Are his totals pledges or cash in the bank? How much is based on estimates of growth for his donor lists? And how broadly-based are his supporters (geographically and economically)?
Whom will he tap when the money gets tight?
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 20, 2003 1:43 AM