Has America finally lost faith in Bush?

On Tuesday George Bush’s Republican party is expected to lose power in the House of Representatives and - possibly - the Senate.

Sarah Baxter in Washington considers whether we are on the brink of a new era in American politics

The first lady had just arrived in Ohio to shore up the vote. A choir of pensioners in star-spangled costumes welcomed her with a song about peace in front of a banner with the sign of a dove. Had they stumbled into the wrong Victory 2006 rally or were Republican times a-changing? Inside the hall, there were affectionate cheers for Laura Bush as she urged the audience to “go out and bring some more supporters to the polls”. Reeling off a list of her husband’s achievements, such as tax cuts, she continued: “Thanks to our troops, the Iraqi people are free from the oppression of Saddam Hussein and working to build a democratic country.” There was a stony silence and she quickly moved on.
The crowd was composed of hand-picked Republican supporters, yet even here there were defectors. “To be honest, I’m not as big a fan of President Bush as I was,” said Gloria Murray, 51. “I don’t know that it is his fault exactly, but there have been a lot of mistakes that have lost people’s respect.”

Where to begin? Perhaps with Hurricane Katrina, which sank New Orleans and Bush’s reputation for competence. Or the sleazy corruption and sex scandals, such as congressman Mark Foley’s suggestive e-mails to teenage boys under his tutelage. Plenty of disgruntled conservatives would cite the national debt, which is approaching $9 trillion, or this year’s projected government deficit of $300 billion.

Murray might have been willing to overlook one or more of these missteps but not the war in Iraq. It easily tops her list of grievances. “I’d like to see America pull out,” she said bluntly. “Young men are dying there every day. The Iraqis hate us. They absolutely loathe us over there.”

Disillusion with the war, once confined to the left, has entered the political mainstream. A lifelong Republican, Murray is thinking of voting for the Democrats on Tuesday. It is time Congress changed hands, she believes. “We need some checks and balances. It is common sense not to let one party run everything.”

Prominent neoconservatives have been joining in the Bush-bashing. Richard Perle, an advocate of toppling Saddam Hussein, told Vanity Fair this weekend: “If I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?’, I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies’.”

For this, Perle added, George W Bush was to blame. “At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.”

The verdict in this week’s mid-term elections could be devastating for Bush and turn him into a lame-duck president. With his reputation under fire, the ballot is shaping up to be a referendum on his presidency. “Put on your track shoes, we’re going to run to the finish,” Bush has been telling Republicans. But how many supporters has he left by the wayside?

IN 2004 many Britons were bewildered when Americans voted to give Bush a second term in the White House. “How can 54,054,087 people be so dumb?” the Daily Mirror wondered. In The New York Times last week, commentator Thomas Friedman, a former supporter of the Iraq war, said he did not believe the American public would be “stupid” enough to re-elect a team that has behaved with such “a level of deadly incompetence”.

Have American voters finally given up on their president? Or will Bush confound the obituary writers again? Seasoned pollsters are predicting a “wave” of losses that could signal a new era in American politics. A poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal and NBC last week found that voters wanted the Democrats to control Congress by 52% to 37%. According to Amy Walter of the independent Cook Political Report, the Republicans are holed beneath the waterline. “You have a bucket and your ship is filling up. But for every bucket you bail, another wave is coming in.” Not so fast, Republicans counter. In this final stretch, the Republicans are dumping millions into television advertisements and are deploying their vaunted 72-hour get-out-the-vote operation, overseen by Bush’s “brain”, Karl Rove. Every potential conservative voter is being funnelled towards the polling booth. If Rove can pull off one last victory, his mastery of the electoral arts will be complete.

Yet the Republicans’ internal polling suggests the House of Representatives is a lost cause. Republicans are lagging in as many as 22 seats: far more than the 15 needed for control to pass to the Democrats. In the Senate, the six seats necessary for a Democratic takeover hang in the balance.

Newt Gingrich, mastermind of the 1994 “Contract with America” mid-term elections when Republicans swept to victory in the House of Representatives, said all the Democrats had to do to win this year was to ask voters: “Had enough?”

THE answer in Ohio would appear to be a resounding “yes”. In 2004 the Midwestern state was crucial to Bush’s victory. Had John Kerry, the Democrat nominee, won an extra 60,000 votes there, he would be sitting in the White House today. Although the economy is doing well nationally and the Dow Jones index hit a record high recently, factories have been closing across the rustbelt state.

This year Ohio has been virtually written off by Republicans, who have pulled their campaign funds out of key races and switched the money at the last minute to threatened Republican “red” states, such as Montana and Colorado, which were not supposed to be in jeopardy.

The Ohio governorship, a Senate seat, and up to three seats in the House of Representatives look vulnerable to a Democratic takeover. One house seat is virtually certain to fall after local congressman Robert Ney admitted corruption in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. “There is heartbreak in the heartlands,” smirked Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, the nearest television programme in America to Have I Got News for You.

At the Army and Navy club in Coshocton, a small town in Ohio with a mix of farming and industry, George Wright, 57, a retired steelworker and army veteran, reflected sadly over a drink: “I liked Bob Ney. I really did, but he lied to us. I don’t see how any Republican can get elected around here after that.”

Wright is a typical “Reagan Democrat”: a blue-collar worker who mistrusts big business, but is contemptuous of East Coast liberals. “I’m strong on defence. We’ve got to keep on the offence against the terrorists in Iraq because they want a Muslim takeover of the world,” he said. But he is sick of the sleaze-ridden Republicans as well: “What we need is a grassroots third party that isn’t for corporate America.”

In these elections the Democrats have been shrewdly running God-fearing, gun-toting moderates in some of the most vulnerable Republican states, such as Tennessee and Montana, where the Democrat contender for Senate has based an entire television advertisement on the manly “buzz cut” he got at the barber shop. If the polls are to be believed, the tactic is working.

One of the biggest surprises of this election has been the potentially fatal implosion in Virginia of Senator George Allen, once a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, in the face of an onslaught by James Webb, a Vietnam veteran and decorated marine, whose son is serving in Iraq.

Webb, a former secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, is also the author of a highly regarded book, Born Fighting, on the Scots-Irish. In an article for The Sunday Times after the 2004 election, Tom Wolfe, the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities and a Bush supporter, cited the book as a brilliant example of why Bush won.

Bush, Wolfe argued, represented the values of Scots-Irish America — a land of stock car racing, country music, Protestantism, guns and fighting — and that, he concluded, “was what the liberal elite and critics abroad can’t stomach”.

Yet the hyper-macho Webb, who once opposed women joining the military, is now a Democrat, having joined the party in disgust at the Iraq war. Vietnam, he said, was a more defensible conflict.

If Webb, who wears his son’s combat boots on the campaign trail, is comfortable with the Democrats, then perhaps there has truly been a change in American politics. Could the Republicans be facing an electoral debacle comparable to Britain in 1997 when the Tories were swept out of power by new Labour? Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington who was at Blair and Bush’s side through the Iraq war, warns against jumping to conclusions. “People are getting a bit excited about this because it looks as if the Democrats will take one or both houses, but the polling evidence is not at all clear,” he said.

In Britain people went to bed on election night in November 2004 thinking John Kerry was the next president, only to wake up to news of Bush’s second-term victory. Pundits who had underestimated the support for Bush in middle America soon devised a reason for his victory: God, guns and gays (opposition to same-sex marriage).

It is certainly part of the story, but there is also a lingering affection for Bush in the heartlands, which could yet motivate Republicans to turn out on Tuesday. Wright still likes the guy, feeling he has more in common with the folksy president than he does with most Washington politicians. “He’s got a thankless task,” he said, sympathetically.

Evangelical churches remain a formidable vote-gathering machine. Irene Krall, a devout member of the Church of the Nazarene, works behind the counter at the Good News bookshop in Coshocton. “I am a Republican and I say that unashamedly,” she said. “I like President Bush, I like Laura Bush and I like their values. They’re more for the family and they are more for us, period.”

On Sunday Krall’s pastor addressed the congregation about their duty to vote. “Don’t you forget,” he told them. “This is your freedom. Use it.” Christian radio has been pumping out the same message, telling listeners to “vote your values”: code for the candidates with the strongest anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage platform (invariably the Republicans).

It doesn’t wash with everybody. According to Murray, “I feel that issues such as abortion are less important this time because we’ve got young men dying in Iraq every day.” A recent poll showed that although 57% of white evangelical Christians still supported the Republicans, that number was 21 points down on 2004.

The resignation on Friday of Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, in an alleged gay sex scandal may also encourage social conservatives to stay at home.

Yet the Democrats may be over-complacent. As Bush put it recently, they should beware of “measuring the drapes”. Despite claiming to have learnt their lesson in 2004, their get-out-the-vote operation is still weak compared with the precision targeting of Republican supporters.

THERE are other problems for the Democrats. In Britain in 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had carefully laid the ground for new Labour’s victory over a series of years. And unlike the Democrats, the Labour party remained disciplined and on message. The Democrats have neither a plan for achieving victory nor getting out of Iraq. On the economy, some are protectionist, others for free trade.

Their signature issues in this campaign are raising the minimum wage and support for stem cell research, which hardly amounts to a full-scale manifesto.

The closest the Democrats have to a nationally recognised leader is Senator Hillary Clinton, who is running for re-election in New York state. She is romping to victory there against a hopelessly outgunned Republican opponent and the mid-term polls might well turn out to be a launch pad for her long-awaited 2008 presidential campaign.

At former President Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday celebrations last month, Mick Jagger picked up a microphone and announced to a cheering crowd: “I’d like to welcome President Clinton and I see she’s brought her husband.” It has been an exhilarating turnaround in fortunes for her.

Washington insiders say Hillary has made enormous strides in polishing her image and appearing a more sympathetic figure. Even Dick Cheney, the right-wing vice-president, acknowledged last week that she made a “very serious candidate for president”. Yet significant doubts remain about Hillary’s ability to reach the White House. A Gallup poll on Friday found that 56% of Americans thought she was unlikely to win the presidency — with 43% of Democrats among the sceptics.

Campaigning in upstate New York last week, Hillary talked persuasively at a military veterans’ club about her work on the Senate armed services committee and how she shamed the Pentagon’s generals into improving pay for Iraq wounded.

This very co-operation has earned her scorn from left wingers in her party. “She’s a shill (stooge) for the Bush administration on Iraq,” complained Gale McGovern, who joined a small band of protesters outside the veterans’ club. “I really wanted a woman president and that’s why I am so angry at her. I would have overlooked a lot, but I can’t overlook Iraq.”

Some Democrats are in a vengeful mood. If they win the House of Representatives, they could descend into an orgy of recrimination over the war. Nancy Pelosi, a wealthy San Francisco liberal who would take over as speaker, is well to the left of many in her party. Although she has ruled out impeaching Bush, there are plenty of unruly committee chairmen lining up to take pot shots at the president and the conduct of the war.

SOME Republicans are actually savouring the prospect of defeat this week on the grounds that the Democrats will go on to shoot themselves in both feet. “Bring on Pelosi,” the right-wing commentator Bruce Bartlett wrote recently. Giving such an “inept leader” a higher profile would be “gift to conservatives everywhere”.

In Britain a government adviser echoed that sentiment: “A meltdown in the mid-terms may not be that bad for a Republican presidential candidate as the Democrats will have two years to mess up and the Americans often like to have a different party in the White House from Congress.”

According to Meyer, a drubbing for Bush will not have much of an impact on Britain. “Say the Democrats take both houses. Is it going to make a difference on Iraq? Probably not, because the Democrats are split a thousand ways on Iraq.”

Brown and David Cameron, the Tory leader, may feel emboldened to distance themselves somewhat from Bush’s foreign policy, but they will be careful not to stir matters too much.

“Whoever the prime minister is, when Bush goes he will have to get on with the incumbent, so both Brown and Cameron have to be damn careful to show no preference for one or other of the presidential candidates,” Meyer noted.

Dennis MacShane, the former Foreign Office minister, said: “I am sure people will say that if the Democrats do spectacularly well this proves that Iraq was a disaster electorally, but the fact is that Iraq was not doing well last year and we went on to win the general election.”

It is a useful caution. The Republicans have been in power for six years, long enough for voters to feel fed up for a variety of reasons. Ronald Reagan in the 1980s lost control of the Senate in the mid-terms during his sixth year in office, and he is now widely acknowledged to have been one of America’s most popular presidents.

Bush is hoping the verdict of history will be kinder than that of the American electorate. It is a long shot, but it is keeping his spirits up.