Larry Sabato's cracked crystal ball
With all due respect to Larry Sabato, he's wrong about the supposedly dire state of President Bush's prospects.
Sabato writes:
There are two fundamental reasons for Bush's sharp decline in job approval and the dramatic increase in people saying the nation is on the "wrong track." First, Bush's presidency is--by his own admission--inextricably bound to Iraq, and things are going very badly there. Second, he is receiving no credit at all for the substantial, very positive rebound in the economy.
While it's true that the President isn't getting the credit he's due for the turnaround of the economy, that is because- as Sabato, to his credit, notes- the Bush presidency is so completely identified in the public mind with Iraq. But despite the general perception to the contrary (for which thank the media), in fact things in Iraq are going well, after a few very rough weeks- and have actually been going considerably better than the media have led us to believe all along.
Until fairly recently, the trouble was pretty much confined to a single, small region- the so-called Sunni Triangle- and only in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal has Iraqi public opinion as a whole turned against us. The al Sadr uprising has been an unforeseen obstacle, but the fact is that al Sadr's "Mahdi Army" of is very much on the run, that the Coalition has decisively regained the military initiative in Iraq, and that- while American prestige in Iraq is toast- the point the President made in his speech the other night is sinking in to the Iraqi people: that the fastest way to get the Americans to go home is to play nice, and to give them as little reason as possible to think they need to stay, thank you very much, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
I predict that the handover of power to the interim Iraqi government will go far more smoothly than Sabato, the media, or the American people generally expect. I have a hunch that to those for whom such a surprise will, in fact, be pleasant, the smoothness with which the transition is carried out will be a pleasant surprise indeed. And for good or ill, certainly the situation in Iraq will look a great deal different on the other side of June 30. I, for one, won't be surprised if President Bush's re-election prospects don't look a great deal healthier.
The media will continue to accentuate the negative, and to their best to convince the American people that things are growing ever worse in Iraq. Every incident between now and November 2 will not only be exaggerated and blown out of proportion, but lovingly dwelt upon. The degree to which the media's anti-Bush bias is either conscious or voluntary is debatable, but the real question at this point is how successful they will be at pulling off the "Michael Moore trick:" selling partisan fiction as documentary.
I do not underestimate the ability of the media to sell the American people a wholly misleading view of this war. That the silly notion that a year-long struggle in which we have lost fewer than a thousand troops is a "quagmire" or in any way resembles Vietnam could achieve any currency at all is a testimony to the power of the American media to sell the American people the Brooklyn bridge if the sales pitch is simply concerted enough and persistent enough. Those who remember how little time it took to lose eight hundred men in Vietnam, let alone World War II (weeks in the first case, and days in the second) ought to be laughing at the absurdity of the comparison.
That they aren't is President Bush's real problem. The question at this point is how great a disconnect between events in Iraq and the perception of those events by the American people the liberal media can foster.
That, and one other thing. As has been said over and over again, the events at Abu Ghraib prison of which all decent Americans are ashamed pale in comparison with what takes place routinely at the hands of most militaries around the world, and certainly in the Islamic world. We should be ashamed of the misdeeds of Americans at Abu Ghraib, and we must do anything we reasonably can to repudiate them. But while the Democrats and the media can be counted upon to fight him every step on this, President Bush badly needs, as Scrappleface half-jokingly suggested earlier this week, to declare that "major self-loathing operations are over."
Appropriate shame is one thing; an inappropriate degree of national masochism which simply serves the partisan agenda of the Democrats is another thing. Dubyah can't let his enemies continue the national orgy of self-recrimination. The culprits need to be appropriately punished, and seen to be appropriately punished. But beyond that, it's time, to coin a phrase, that we "move on."
Then, too, I could be wrong. Things could go badly from here on out- in which case Dubya is, indeed, toast. But if Sabato is right, and George W. Bush is going to have to be Harry S Truman to win this thing, don't be surprised to see him posing with a copy of an early edition of some newspaper- not of the Chicago Tribune, perhaps, but maybe of The New York Times or the Boston Globe- on the morning of November 3, wearing a big, big smile.
Sabato writes:
There are two fundamental reasons for Bush's sharp decline in job approval and the dramatic increase in people saying the nation is on the "wrong track." First, Bush's presidency is--by his own admission--inextricably bound to Iraq, and things are going very badly there. Second, he is receiving no credit at all for the substantial, very positive rebound in the economy.
While it's true that the President isn't getting the credit he's due for the turnaround of the economy, that is because- as Sabato, to his credit, notes- the Bush presidency is so completely identified in the public mind with Iraq. But despite the general perception to the contrary (for which thank the media), in fact things in Iraq are going well, after a few very rough weeks- and have actually been going considerably better than the media have led us to believe all along.
Until fairly recently, the trouble was pretty much confined to a single, small region- the so-called Sunni Triangle- and only in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal has Iraqi public opinion as a whole turned against us. The al Sadr uprising has been an unforeseen obstacle, but the fact is that al Sadr's "Mahdi Army" of is very much on the run, that the Coalition has decisively regained the military initiative in Iraq, and that- while American prestige in Iraq is toast- the point the President made in his speech the other night is sinking in to the Iraqi people: that the fastest way to get the Americans to go home is to play nice, and to give them as little reason as possible to think they need to stay, thank you very much, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
I predict that the handover of power to the interim Iraqi government will go far more smoothly than Sabato, the media, or the American people generally expect. I have a hunch that to those for whom such a surprise will, in fact, be pleasant, the smoothness with which the transition is carried out will be a pleasant surprise indeed. And for good or ill, certainly the situation in Iraq will look a great deal different on the other side of June 30. I, for one, won't be surprised if President Bush's re-election prospects don't look a great deal healthier.
The media will continue to accentuate the negative, and to their best to convince the American people that things are growing ever worse in Iraq. Every incident between now and November 2 will not only be exaggerated and blown out of proportion, but lovingly dwelt upon. The degree to which the media's anti-Bush bias is either conscious or voluntary is debatable, but the real question at this point is how successful they will be at pulling off the "Michael Moore trick:" selling partisan fiction as documentary.
I do not underestimate the ability of the media to sell the American people a wholly misleading view of this war. That the silly notion that a year-long struggle in which we have lost fewer than a thousand troops is a "quagmire" or in any way resembles Vietnam could achieve any currency at all is a testimony to the power of the American media to sell the American people the Brooklyn bridge if the sales pitch is simply concerted enough and persistent enough. Those who remember how little time it took to lose eight hundred men in Vietnam, let alone World War II (weeks in the first case, and days in the second) ought to be laughing at the absurdity of the comparison.
That they aren't is President Bush's real problem. The question at this point is how great a disconnect between events in Iraq and the perception of those events by the American people the liberal media can foster.
That, and one other thing. As has been said over and over again, the events at Abu Ghraib prison of which all decent Americans are ashamed pale in comparison with what takes place routinely at the hands of most militaries around the world, and certainly in the Islamic world. We should be ashamed of the misdeeds of Americans at Abu Ghraib, and we must do anything we reasonably can to repudiate them. But while the Democrats and the media can be counted upon to fight him every step on this, President Bush badly needs, as Scrappleface half-jokingly suggested earlier this week, to declare that "major self-loathing operations are over."
Appropriate shame is one thing; an inappropriate degree of national masochism which simply serves the partisan agenda of the Democrats is another thing. Dubyah can't let his enemies continue the national orgy of self-recrimination. The culprits need to be appropriately punished, and seen to be appropriately punished. But beyond that, it's time, to coin a phrase, that we "move on."
Then, too, I could be wrong. Things could go badly from here on out- in which case Dubya is, indeed, toast. But if Sabato is right, and George W. Bush is going to have to be Harry S Truman to win this thing, don't be surprised to see him posing with a copy of an early edition of some newspaper- not of the Chicago Tribune, perhaps, but maybe of The New York Times or the Boston Globe- on the morning of November 3, wearing a big, big smile.
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