Feed the trends in political demography into a computer and you’ll find Godinez in the spot where the lines intersect. She is the kind of late-deciding Latina both parties covet in, say, the surprisingly competitive Senate race in Texas, to which the president traveled last week to decry Saddam Hussein and tout the virtues of the Republican candidate in a downtown Houston ballroom across the street from what used to be Enron.
Midterm elections usually are a low-turnout, insiders’ affair. This one may well be different. It will, for one, be a close-run thing, with control of the House (where the GOP has a narrow, six-seat advantage) and the Senate (where the Democrats have a one-seat margin) being decided by the late returns in the wee hours of election night. Texas, where voters are choosing a successor to Phil Gramm, will be central to that drama: a closer-than-expected, potentially decisive Senate race in the heart of the Bush empire, where a multicultural Democratic ticket (a black for Senate, a Latino for governor) will test the GOP’s staying power in the face of demographic change. The story line has a dynastic element, too, as the president seeks to protect the twin pillars of his empire, not only in Texas but in Florida, where his younger brother Gov. Jeb Bush is in an unexpectedly tough race.
If the 9-11 terrorist attacks launched a new kind of war, this election is the first real test of our political response to it. Bush and his military advisers have wanted to take out Saddam from day one. But by placing the ramp-up to war in the midst of the election season, Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove have raised the stakes–of partisan bitterness if the strategy succeeds in protecting Republican power in Congress; of a global loss of face if Bush turns out to fall short. The election also will be the first test of the president’s ability to expand the GOP’s demographic reach beyond its predominantly white, Protestant redoubt in the Middle Kingdom of “Red States.” Theorists such as author John Judis see a secular, multicultural and socially tolerant suburbia of brainworkers leading to an “Emerging Democratic Majority.” To blunt it, Republicans will have to draw in minorities, especially Latinos, in greater numbers than they have so far. Bush is genuinely popular among Hispanics, but can he lend that to the GOP?
The widespread assumption in Washington is that Bush has masterfully cornered the Democrats with “national security,” pumping the bellows of war in a classic wedge-issue move that is dividing the opposition and changing the central topic of the election from the economy and health care (the Democrats’ strongest suit) to the one that highlights the president’s popular role as commander in chief. “We had the chance to clobber the Republicans this November on corporate scandals and the economy,” one Democratic senator lamented. “That’s gone.”
But the world outside the Beltway is not a channel changed by remote. Impugning the patriotism of foes is dangerous. And it’s possible that all the talk of war with Iraq could end up hurting the Republicans if it pushes the stock markets and the global –economy into panic. In fact, if you talk to patrons of The Village–an upscale cultural crossroads near Rice University that draws matrons in Escalades, developers in Ray-Bans and students in flip-flops–you hear a leitmotif of doubts about war and concerns about the economy in an uncharacteristically gloomy Houston. There are, to be sure, young men such as Michael Wheatley, 19, a Kentuckian who plays college basketball and hopes to be a pilot. “Bush is a hell of a president,” he says, “and if he says we go to Iraq, I’m ready.”
But that wasn’t the dominant view, even in the Bush family’s political spawning ground of Houston, where Poppy broke into the game by joining the Harris County Republican committee. More typical was James Williams, 24, a University of Houston student who works part-time in a Banana Republic stockroom. “The new guy working with me back in the stockroom just graduated with an M.B.A. from the University of Texas,” he said. “What does that tell you? If going into Iraq will cost us $50 billion, I say spend it here.” There are even some born-and-bred Republicans who wonder what’s up. “I’d like more information, frankly,” said Carl Fredericks, a retired oil executive, who sounded as if he’d listened–and dismissed–many a wildcatting scheme in his days with Phillips 66. “I’m not learning much from the Rumsfeld briefings. Do I have to rely on Blair?”
The sentiments of The Village are writ large in the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Bush continues to get high marks for his leadership in the war on terror, and voters express strong support for limited airstrikes against Saddam and/or an international coalition to remove him. By a 66-27 margin, Americans think that Saddam poses an “imminent threat” to “U.S. interests.” But only 24 percent think that ousting Saddam is the most important next step in the war on terror. And as they think about how they will vote in November, the war isn’t at the top of the list. Forty-one percent said that the decisive factor for them will be the candidates’ “proposals to help the economy,” compared with 34 percent whose decision hinges on “the issue of war with Iraq.”
But those numbers won’t dissuade Bush and Rove from using national security in merciless fashion this fall, halfheartedly extending olive branches to Democrats in the capital while knifing them on the Red State campaign trail over congressional issues such as the new Department of Homeland Security, an administration proposal for a massive increase in defense spending and a resolution authorizing war with Iraq. It’s a perfect menu as far as Rove is concerned, and one that the Democratic-run Senate helped create by insisting (how dare they!) on carefully examining all three items. “It’s a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’,” crowed a top Bush aide. “They’re stuck.” And Rove &Co., trolling for Red State votes, love to see liberal Democrats rising up in anger–led last week by Al Gore and Sen. Ted Kennedy.
In Washington, Bush turned conciliatory, at least in tone. As he negotiates a war resolution, he is reaching out, exhibiting grave (and nonpolitical) humility to a bipartisan delegation of House members in a private meeting last week. “I am the one who has to hug the widows and comfort the children,” he told them, insisting that war was his last, not his first, anti-Saddam option. And after weeks of accusing Democrats of caring more about “the special interests than protecting American security”–a line of attack that sent the city’s top Democrat, Sen. Tom Daschle, into a husky-voiced tirade–Bush finally allowed as how it was not unpatriotic to disagree with him over work rules for the new Department of Homeland Security. “Fine senators from both parties” are “struggling with the issue,” a suddenly Solomonic president said in Houston.
But that’s not the Johnsonian “come, let us reason together” tone in, say, the pivotal U.S. Senate race in Texas, the foundation and anchor of the modern GOP. There, Rove is out to destroy Ron Kirk, the popular, politically moderate and business-friendly Democratic mayor of Dallas. The task for Bush’s longtime friend and handpicked GOP candidate (Attorney General John Cornyn): don’t allow the affable Kirk to claim philosophical or political membership in Club Bush. And while you’re at it, make him lose his cool–a precious commodity for any candidate.
The best way to do both: attack him on national security. Last August–back when Enron and WorldCom were news–the GOP’s senatorial committee began bombing Kirk, among others, with ads denouncing their ties to the Council for a Livable World, which champions cuts in defense spending. Cornyn followed up by accusing Kirk of “foot-dragging” and, by implication, of lacking the proper patriotic zeal. The attacks had their desired effect: Kirk blew up, at a raucous meeting with black and Hispanic war veterans in San Antonio. “I am ready to stand behind this president and go to war,” Kirk declared. But he didn’t stop there. It would, after all, not be the children of Cornyn’s wealthy friends who would fight this war, he said. “I wonder how excited they’d be if I get to the United States Senate and put forth a resolution that says the next time we go to war, the first 500,000 kids have to come from families who earn $1 million or more?” Cornyn solemnly denounced the remarks as divisively race-conscious, and Kirk eventually was forced to express “regret” at having made them.
The Kirk-Cornyn contest isn’t over, and Roveans certainly aren’t behaving as if it is. The contest remains close in most polls. Waves of Bushes (who are also needed elsewhere) descend on the campaign, including Ma and Pa, who live in Houston. Cornyn, in an interview, vows to seek substantial Hispanic support–a task made arduous after the Democrats nominated Tony Sanchez, a wealthy businessman, for governor. Kirk exudes a sense of destiny. “I’m the New England Patriots,” he says.
In the end, the key moments may not be in Texas, but in Washington, where Rove and his Democratic counterparts will decide, in the Wild West atmosphere of soft money’s final days, where to spend their money on TV ads. Bush is trying to defy history, which says that the White House party usually loses seats at this juncture in a new administration. If he succeeds, he will be able to push his agenda on the Hill more easily in the next two years–which may or may not help his own chances in 2004. If he fails, expect emboldened Democrats to loudly challenge Bush at every turn. History’s next turn will soon be in the hands of the voters. Elizabeth Godinez is listening, but so far Bush has not made the sale.
