As of Monday, November 1, it's been exactly 1,146 days since Osama bin Laden struck the United States.
I put it that way for two reasons. First, it's a number you probably don't know. And second, it's a number that, if Al Gore had been president, you and every other American certainly would know.
What's more, I'm guessing you know why you'd know it. Because every day since the end of the Afghan war, Rush Limbaugh and all the other Republican Party propagandists on the radio would have had a count going. They would have spent an hour a day on it.
They would have pointed repeatedly to the April 17, 2002, Washington Post article by Thomas Ricks and Barton Gellman that, running under the headline "U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight," described how we let bin Laden slip out of our hands. They would have read its lead paragraph to their millions of listeners dozens or even hundreds of times (except the name of the administration would be different): "The Gore administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al-Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with firsthand knowledge."
FOX News would have started, at some point around then, an “Osama Watch,” doing everything it could to ensure that every American knew exactly how many days the irresolute Gore administration had let this murderer elude its grasp. And President Gore would not stand a chance of being re-elected. Of course, if Gore had been president, he would not have launched a war against Iraq and may well have caught bin Laden by now. But let's say he hadn't caught bin Laden; we all know very well what the current political atmosphere would be like.
I've been surprised that the Republicans haven't come out with guns a-blazing since the bin Laden tape, screaming (or at least suggesting) that it proves that bin Laden wants you to vote for John Kerry. A few pundits have indulged in this idiocy, but by and large the administration and its surrogates have stressed that the bin Laden tape should not be politicized.
We're supposed to believe that they consider this above politics? Please. These people would politicize a bingo match. They're not politicizing this (although there's still one day to go) because the existence of the tape is not, contrary to the conventional cable wisdom on Friday night, a good development for them. They don't need the American public repeatedly reminded, in the campaign's last 72 hours, that the man who killed 2,700 Americans is still at large.
Some have said that any reminder of the terrorist threat helps Bush. Maybe; certainly one can't deny Bush's advantage in the polls on the issue. But basically his entire campaign has been about terrorism. His stump speech, his campaign's ads, and the talking points given to surrogates are all built around the argument that John Kerry won't keep the country safe. It's been his relentless theme for months. If that were working so well, wouldn't Bush be ahead by 10 points and cruising to re-election?
Bush wins on the terrorism question in polls for three reasons. First, he was there when September 11 happened.
Second, there hasn't been an al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil since, which is something his administration may or may not deserve a tremendous amount of credit for. (I tend to think they don't. Doesn't it seem likely that, if the Bushies had indeed prevented a major attack, they'd have found a discreet way to make sure we all knew about it, by leaking the details to FOX or something?)
Third, and most important, Kerry hasn't made the case on toughness. That's a hard case for a candidate to make; talk doesn't do it, only actions do, and as a candidate he's in no position to take action. So only Bush haters will choose Kerry on that question, and sure enough, the percentages that choose Kerry -- high 30s, low 40s -- just about mirror the percentage of the population that has no use for this president.
And none of this means that the 55 percent or so who choose Bush on the terrorism question think unanimously that he's doing a brilliant job. A large chunk of them, the Bush true believers who say terrorism is their top issue, do. But the others, while they may choose Bush over Kerry on terrorism when the question is posed that way, probably have some reservations about the fact that bin Laden is still at large. They're the ones still mulling it over. And while it's become conventional wisdom that the tape will have no effect on how people vote, well, what people say and what people do are two different things.
This campaign has been fought largely on terrain friendlier to Bush than to Kerry. In addition, the Bush campaign has been more effective than the Kerry campaign. (Of course, telling a lot of lies helps.) That there's a 50-50 chance that Bush will lose is testament to one simple fact: He's done a lousy job on a lot of fronts. No amount of propaganda, and no degree of trying to minimize the emergence of a tape that reminds us of what is undoubtedly this administration's biggest failure, can paper over that reality. Defeat, if indeed that's what awaits him, has never been more richly earned.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
