Fred Barnes, executive editor
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THE MEDIA'S NEW WORD for President Bush is "vulnerable." A Gallup Poll last week found he trails Democrats Wesley Clark (49 percent to 46 percent) and John Kerry (48 percent to 47 percent) in presidential race match-ups. His job approval rating dipped to 49 percent in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey. The consensus in the press is that President Bush is in deep political trouble, and many Democrats and some Republicans share that view.
A more accurate word for President Bush's political condition is "normal." Bush has slumped in his third year in office just as most recent presidents have. A slump is the rule, not the exception. For President Bush, the glow from enacting his major initiatives (tax cuts, education reform) has faded. The economy is soft. His foreign policy, especially in postwar Iraq, has become controversial. And complaints about his presidency from Capitol Hill, even from Republicans, have grown.
Still, there's far more reason than not to expect him to recover and win re-election, perhaps easily. His slump, assuming it's hit bottom, has been milder than the slumps other presidents faced and his prospects are brighter. President Bush is lucky on the economy. His recession came early, giving the economy time to revive before his re-election campaign in 2004. And his foreign policy crisis is hardly as threatening as Vietnam was for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economy is almost certain to look better in 2004 than today and chances are Iraq will too.
THE MEDIA'S PROBLEM in
assessing a president's future is invariably seeing the future as a straight-line projection of the present. It rarely works out that way. When President Ronald Reagan moved into his third year in 1983, Lou Cannon of the Washington Post referred to his "embattled presidency." His administration's "opportunities," Cannon wrote, "were severely limited by the failure of the economy to respond to Reagan's remedies." Even conservatives were grousing. President Reagan's approval rating fell to 47 percent, but in 1984 he won in a landslide. The same was true for President Nixon, whose approval sank to 49 percent in 1971, only to be followed by an overwhelming re-election victory a year later.
President Clinton was driven into retreat by the Republican blowout in the 1994 midterm election. There were doubts about his "relevance" as a leader. In August 1996 his job rating was 44 percent and he dropped behind Bob Dole (48 percent to 42 percent) and Colin Powell (47 percent to 37 percent). Yet Clinton won re-election comfortably the next year.
It's true that two presidents, Johnson and Carter, failed to pull themselves out of their third-year slumps. Johnson was bedeviled by the national anxiety over the war in Vietnam. President Carter was beset by a stagnant economy and sky-high inflation and appeared helpless to solve the Iranian hostage crisis.
President Bush's decline doesn't match that of his father, George H.W. Bush. The elder Bush's case was anomalous. After winning the Iraq war, he was riding high well into his third year, 1991. But, again, the future turned out unexpectedly. Though the economy was growing, President George H.W. Bush slumped in his fourth year and lost.
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