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About a year before the 2004 campaign hit its frenetic pace, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was huddled in a private room at a French restaurant just blocks from the White House. There, one of the Republican Party’s sharpest strategists spent more than two hours arguing with professional neoconservative hawk Paul Wolfowitz about the future plan in Iraq, the strategy in the region to counter extremism, and its interplay with Bush’s impending re-election bid. Cheney. . At the same time, Steve Herbits, a longtime adviser to Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, continued to chime in with a message that no one disagreed with: “This president is going to get his ass kicked if they don’t change this.”
Gingrich understood what was at stake and went to the White House with a strategic memo to reverse the political situation in Iraq. Alongside Karl Rove, the strategist often referred to as “Bush’s brain,” Gingrich had a straightforward message for his Republican colleagues, a message that barely needed to be articulated: “Losing a war is bad.”
But there was a corollary to this: winning is much, much better.
Plainly stated, it is really difficult to defeat a president in time of war. The last 72 hours in Washington after Iran released The failed drones and missiles targeting Israel that triggered global condemnation served as a stark reminder that there is no pulpit from which more power flows to every corner of the globe than the American presidency. Controlling a national security apparatus that trumps all other concerns – foreign powers, global markets, even domestic polls – is part of US power and gives the incumbent resident of the White House unparalleled advantages, especially at the start of an election cycle.
History supports this. Although the Bush 43 team did not fully heed Gingrich’s dire warning – all of this is chronicled in Bob Woodward’s third volume on the Bush years, State of denial—Vietnam veteran John Kerry couldn’t beat him in 2004. Despite the disaster in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, then-former Massachusetts governor and future Utah senator Mitt Romney couldn’t do it against Barack Obama with troop levels in Afghanistan. triplicate and Osama bin Laden dead. Ronald Reagan, who was laying the groundwork for the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, gain 49 states during his 1984 re-election bid against former Vice President Walter Mondale. Four years later, with Vice President George HW Bush essentially running for a third Reagan term and the former Evil Empire collapsing under its own weight, Americans served their last term. landslide election with the defeat of Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis. (Bush 41, it must be said, broke the wartime government when it lost in 1992 despite the crushing defeat of Iraqi forces in the First Gulf War.)
Therefore, although polls show President Joe Biden in a complicated position net negative approval ratings and a neck and neck-but narrowing—in the fight against former President Donald Trump, Biden has a crucial advantage until at least January 20, 2025. Only one of the candidates has the nuclear launch codes. Only one of them has the institutional gravitas to summon world leaders on the phone to consult on the fastest developments. Only one can launch a coordinated response from global alliances. And, embedded in this formula, only someone can use the enormous national security shadow of the White House to assert American dominance that gives even the most skittish or bitter voters some measure of comfort in the midst of global chaos.
Rising global tensions over the weekend could prove to be a pivotal point in the election. Will he responded to the assassination of senior paramilitary leaders by launch 300 drones and missiles towards Israel on Saturday night; with US help, the vast majority of them fell from the sky like shrapnel. In Russia, oil refineries have been targeted across Ukraine in an effort to push Russian troops back to their own land – moves that complicated the White House’s proposal to lawmakers on a long-delayed $60 billion aid package for Ukraine. And recent visits to Washington by the leaders of Japan and the Philippines have revived Biden’s concerns about Chinese aggression in the region, requesting the State Department to send a delegation to Beijing over the weekend to head off anxiety over potential escalation over Taiwan.
Biden’s team contemplated a national speech on the Middle East, but ended up keeping that asset in reserve, concluding that it would not be useful at a time when Washington and allies in the region have been pressuring Hamas and Israel to reach an agreement to release hostages now held for more six months. Instead, Biden commented on the region on Monday during a photo op before an Oval Office meeting with the Iraqi prime minister. The White House knows it doesn’t need to play its cards right away, especially in a high-powered national address.
They may not want to keep them for long, however. The warning signs for Team Biden are real and many. His campaign organization has been slow to come together, although advisers are recently optimistic that they are closing in on a winning package of advisers, strategies, ads and travel. Trump remains a unique political figure; No one missed the fact that jurors on Monday were beginning to prepare for Trump’s criminal trial in New York. Still, polls suggest that Americans aren’t sure which of their two options is more appealing – or, perhaps, less off-putting – and Biden’s deep unpopularity, at more than 16 points of net negativity, is worrying for Americans. Democrats. To put this unpopularity into perspective, the last three incumbents to lose re-election were all doing better in their presidencies than Biden has today.
But with the skies over the West Bank and Israel ablaze with Iranian rockets and drones, a lingering war in Ukraine, and tensions between Taiwan and mainland China renewed, Biden has an opportunity to position himself as a wartime president even without US troops officially involved. . Political observers and observers alike are watching Tehran, Moscow and Beijing for clues about what the true contours of U.S. decision-making will be, both in the Situation Room and at the polls. Foreign relations rarely matter in presidential elections unless things are going very, very wrong.
That’s why Gingrich was absolutely right when he warned Rove with the most basic message that can be summed up as: Strong, good; weak, bad. It’s not very sophisticated, but it’s worth remembering that nothing is as powerful as the image of a US President taking leadership on the world stage. Americans tend to like this vision of power, and we all know that they also tend to vote more on sentiment than on any objective marker. Any presidential candidate – both incumbent and challenger – would do well to learn this lesson.
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