Saturday's New York Daily News reported that Republican operatives regarded Friday's tape from Osama bin Laden as "a gift" because "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps [George W.] Bush." This is what's known in the business as a "Kinsley gaffe," when a political figure makes a mistake by inadvertently telling the truth.
The truth is that on September 10, 2001, the then-new Bush presidency was already heading for failure. The president's decision to ignore the message of the 2000 election -- that America was a divided country in which a small majority existed for left-of-center policies and that the public was hungry for an end to the extreme partisanship of the later Clinton years -- had provoked an unprecedented disaster, as Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched parties, bringing with him control of the entire Senate. The president's approval rating was low and falling. National-security hawks were up in arms at the revelation that the Bush tax cuts left no room for upgrading a military that even then was showing signs of overstretch. The Bush domestic agenda was going nowhere fast, and the president's legislative strategy consisted entirely of trying to get the House leadership to kill popular bills -- McCain-Feingold, the Patients' Bill of Rights -- backed by Democrats and moderate Republicans alike. Where this strategy failed, the president's political position was so weak that he found himself signing bills that he opposed and, in fact, regarded as unconstitutional.
Then came September 11.
Contrary to repeated statements by the president's national-security team, the attacks were neither unimaginable nor unpreventable. That al-Qaeda was planning attacks was well-known, and that the World Trade Center was the most likely target was conventional wisdom in the counterterrorism community. Field agents from the FBI had in their possession key pieces of information that could have unraveled the plot had leaders in Washington known what to be looking for. And the CIA was trying -- hard -- to warn the president that the government should be looking for something along the lines of what did eventually take place. But Bush ignored his Presidential Daily Briefs, no extraordinary action was taken, and key information remained lost in the bowels of the bureaucracy. Thousands of Americans died, and the president's approval rating skyrocketed.
Thus was born the poisonous dynamic that led to the weekend confession that Bush's political operatives want people to feel as threatened as possible. No one can know whether or not quicker action on the president's part would have foiled the 9-11 plot. But everyone can see that if Bush had foiled the plot, he would have been far worse off politically than he is.
Rather than being punished for failure, he has been rewarded. New warnings of attacks and new elevations of the Homeland Security Department's threat level boosted the president's ratings. Vicious murders committed abroad -- in Indonesia, Spain, and Russia -- became excuses for a renewed push on Bush's behalf in the right-wing media. People died, and the human tragedy benefited Bush.
This is, needless to say, all backward. Incumbent presidents never campaign on the basis of how bad the economy is doing. They know that, all else being equal, they will be punished for poor economic performance. At times, this leads to unfair outcomes. The president influences, but does not control, the state of individuals' financial well-being. Still, when voters use the heuristic technique of backing the incumbent when the economy is strong and backing his challenger when it's weak, the democratic process puts good incentives into place. Officeholders have good reason to try as hard as they can to make the economy perform.
On terrorism, however, Bush's incentives are all wrong; the worse he does substantively, the better he does politically. When attacks increase around the world, people are reminded of the threat, they feel less safe in their own homes, and this -- or so Bush's aides believe -- benefits the president. If the administration had captured bin Laden at Tora Bora as it should have, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to release the series of videotaped threats that the president's staff believes are helpful to the Bush campaign. When the terrorism alert level goes up, this is regarded not as an embarrassing and potentially damaging admission of failure but as a beneficial reminder that the threat is still out there.
Back in the fall of 2001, this might not have been such a bad thing. Bush could have used his unexpectedly strengthened position, and the sense that "9-11 changed everything," to make some about-faces that would otherwise have been politically awkward. It was a second chance to become "a uniter, not a divider" and abandon the GOP's obsession with trying to defund the government without cutting any popular spending programs. Instead, the president chose to use his newfound popularity to simply press harder on the domestic front, pushing a hard-line partisan agenda with little ideological coherence or popular support. As a result, the Republicans have become terrorism addicts, with each new warning, tape, attack, or whatever giving them a desperately-needed pick-me-up to get through one more legislative session, one more election, one more week of bad news from the front in Iraq.
The problem here is obvious. As the GOP becomes ever more dependent on evidence of its own failure to provide for Americans' personal safety, it becomes ever less likely that it actually will provide it. Fortunately, weekend polling seems to indicate that this time the trick hasn't worked, as just as many people are now wondering why bin Laden is still on the loose as are turning in fear to Bush. But the final truth won't be known until the election results are in Tuesday night. If, once again, bin Laden proves to be Bush's political savior -- this time at the president's greatest moment of need -- we'll all have plenty of cause for worry over the next four years.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
