With a clear majority of the electorate saying that the country is headed in the wrong direction, beating the actually existing John Kerry would be very difficult. So George W. Bush has chosen instead to simply invent a different Kerry to run against. In his speeches, Bush denounces some murky candidate who plans to negotiate with al-Qaeda and organize a "government takeover" of the health-care system. Kerry proposes doing no such thing. It helps under the circumstances to find stand-ins for the actual Kerry, other people to attack instead of Bush's real opponent. Thus John McCain took to the podium at the Republican national convention to denounce Michael Moore, who isn't on the ballot or on anyone's shortlist for a cabinet post.
Now it's true that Moore is backing Kerry, but his line of criticism is too absurd for words. Else where at the convention one Bush supporter kicked a protester while she was down. Behavior that, I'm sure, most conservatives wouldn't condone. Nevertheless, they won't hesitate to vote for Bush on election day -- he, not the protestor-kicker is the one on the ballot. Similarly Kerry, not Moore, is the Democratic nominee. In a rational world this would be clear to everyone, but apparently we don't live in that world.
The Washington Post's Richard Cohen, for example, who really ought to know better, recently explained that he couldn't be Republican red because the Bush administration's policies have been disastrous. Nevertheless, he can't be Democratic blue, either, not because he has some problem with Kerry but because he thinks the sentiments expressed by a character in the new book Checkpoint go too far. But so what? Well, not much. But if it worked on Cohen, it may work on others, so I expect we'll keep hearing this sort of thing from Bush's supporters.
And, of course, the uglier the proxy, the more effective the attack. Now well-known is Tom Ridge's habit of hinting that if al-Qaeda attacks before the election, we should avert our eyes from the president's catastrophically failed counterterrorism policies and focus instead on Osama bin Laden's support for the Kerry campaign. The deteriorating situation in Iraq has created a new twist on this. The Iraqi insurgents -- not a group of pleasant fellows -- are apparently now the Kerry base. Insurgent strikes are up because these people want to "influence the election against President Bush," said Richard Armitage on Friday. Unlike the notion that bin Laden is sitting in his cave staring at a Kerry-Edwards poster, the idea that Iraqi insurgents might have more than a passing interest in U.S. domestic politics can't be dismissed out of hand. The outcome over here will surely make a difference over there, so one can assume that all factions are paying attention.
By the same token, of course, events in Iraq will affect the election in the United States. Recent reports of a deterioration of the American position threaten to derail the Bush campaign, hence the effort to perform a little jujitsu and make the argument that the worsening situation is a token of jihadists' love for Kerry. First and foremost, of course, the president must keep the body count low if he wants to win. Iraqi deaths and shifts of public opinion are the stuff of the inside pages of our newspapers. Dead Americans make page 1 and the evening news. When enough die, it may even lead the news, or make the local news. It wouldn't be prudent to let that happen. So Bush has adopted policies designed to keep the death count low, primarily by avoiding ground combat in the Sunni triangle. Good campaign tactics, needless to say, but, as ever, the Bush team seems better at winning elections than winning wars. By delaying any assault on the wily Salafi terrorists (read: Democratic campaign operatives) lurking in Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi, and Baquba until after November, we give them more time to dig in, prepare defenses, and strengthen their forces before the attack.
An important point comes next, so it gets a paragraph of its own: This plan will get people killed. If an assault is to be mounted, it should be done as soon as possible, before the adversary has been given months to prepare for it. The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they've been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It's appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists. We're waging war as an extension of an electoral campaign, exposing our soldiers to harassing attacks right now and to a more difficult fight later on in order to help secure the president's re-election.
It's behavior that fits a pattern. This is a president who was happy to see others conscripted to fight and die in Vietnam in order to better serve his convenience. But he was young then. He's a president who treats the civil servants in the Treasury Department not as professional economic analysts but as producers of crude campaign propaganda, sending out letters lauding his tax cuts on the government dime and ordering officials to gin up misleading analyses of Kerry's proposals. But that didn't get anyone killed. What we see now is the latest step in a progression of selfishness and arrogance that grows ever more dangerous as time goes on. Can anyone produce a single good reason why the recent National Intelligence Estimate (the whole thing, not just a few key passages pertaining to sources and methods), which makes a gloomy forecast about Iraq, was classified -- other than that its conclusions were politically awkward for the president? Or why Mike Scheuer's letter to Congress exposing dangerous understaffing at the CIA's bin Laden unit was similarly kept secret? While politicians may win re-election by producing a state of gross public ignorance about the course of events, this is not how democracies win wars.
But the president who imposed steel tariffs that his advisers said would hurt the economy, put forward an "ownership society" agenda opposed by his own economists, and signed a campaign-finance bill he believed to be unconstitutional -- all for the sake of his quest for re-election -- could hardly be expected to do otherwise.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
