Des Moines
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE chairman Ed Gillespie spent last weekend in Iowa as the lone prominent defender of President Bush. Arrayed against him were the Democratic presidential candidates and their allies, who scorched Bush (and each other) on the eve of the state’s caucuses. This was not unusual. For months now, Gillespie has been the only top Bush operative regularly combating Democrats in public. Bush himself has attended fundraisers, but hasn’t made overtly political appearances. His reelection campaign has yet to broadcast a single TV ad, though the Republican National Committee aired a pro-Bush spot briefly in two states. Nor have Bush aides organized squads of well-known surrogates to tout the president’s reelection around the country. And the Bush camp has been largely silent in the face of gang attacks by Democratic candidates at televised debates. This above-it-all stance will end with a bang when the Bush campaign begins. Democrats expect a robust Bush effort, but they may be shocked by the sheer firepower of the Bush onslaught. The president already has $99 million in the bank to spend between now and the Republican convention on Labor Day weekend, and he’ll raise millions more. He intends to spend it all. Most will go to finance TV spots at a saturation level normal for the fall general election season, but unprecedented in the primary and preconvention periods. Also, big-name surrogates and “truth squads” will suddenly appear everywhere, blitzing Bush’s Democratic opponent. And of course there’s the president. His campaign appearances are bound to attract enormous media attention. So will his official appearances, such as the G-8 meeting in June at Sea Island, Georgia, with leaders of the seven other leading industrial democracies.
Bush is delaying the start of his reelection drive until a winner emerges in the Democratic race. That means February at the earliest, probably March, but possibly not until early April. That’s later than Ronald Reagan, the first President Bush, or Bill Clinton kicked off his reelection. But why jump in sooner? Bush’s job approval (60 percent in the Gallup poll) points to reelection. Even in California, a predominantly Democratic state, his approval has jumped to 52 percent in the Field poll. And the public now feels the country is headed in the right direction (55 percent in Gallup) after months of thinking otherwise.
“There’s no need” for Bush to enter the race formally, a Bush adviser insists. “There’s no utility to it, no advantage on a cost-benefit basis. He gets to be president as long as possible and not president and candidate.” If Bush were faltering politically, he might crank up a full-blown campaign. But the way the Democratic contest is unfolding helps Bush. “It diminishes the Democratic candidates and makes them look like midgets,” the adviser says. Another Bush adviser theorizes that the California gubernatorial recall grabbed the political spotlight from the Democratic presidential race last year, aiding Bush. “The only way for the Democrats to get attention then was to talk louder, louder, and louder,” the adviser says, and the contrast favored Bush.
Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has concentrated on organizing at the state and local level for the fall. The effort is premised on the notion that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because Democrats did a better job of getting their voters to the polls. The RNC spent $1.5 million to figure out the best way to improve the voter drive. The answer was obvious: personal contact. This was emphasized in the 2002 midterm election with a “72-hour plan” for contacting voters in the three days before the election. It worked well and is being expanded for 2004. The Bush campaign has already trained 5,500 local leaders and expects to mobilize 10,000. It has amassed 6 million names of Bush supporters on its website, 10 times the number Howard Dean brags about collecting. The RNC is aiming to register 3 million new Republican voters.
“We’re light years ahead of where we were in 2000,” says Ralph Reed, Bush’s Southeast coordinator. “This is the most extensive grassroots campaign I’ve ever seen in the Republican party. It’s without precedent in the modern age of campaigns.” It may need to be. Campaign officials are obsessed with averting the dip Bush experienced in the final week of the 2000 campaign. Reed can tick off the states where Bush lost five or more percentage points–Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, and so on. Bush won’t rely solely on TV ads as Reagan and Clinton did in their successful reelection campaigns.
The Bush campaign is similar to Clinton’s in one regard. Clinton aired a massive wave of TV ads outside major media markets in 1995. They were barely noticed by the media, letting Clinton appear as president but not as a candidate. Bush was a bit deceptive in 2003. His campaign did put forward surrogates to defend the president in the local media. But there was no national effort except for Gillespie’s activity, permitting Bush to appear above the fray.
I suspect Bush’s political team is also slightly disingenuous in forecasting the president will win by no more than 52-48 percent, hardly a landslide. At the same time, they argue that Bush has the advantage in each of the three most important issue clusters–the economy, national security, and the culture. If the Bush organizational drive–the ground game–is as aggressive as advertised and the issues are on Bush’s side, he’s likely to exceed 52 percent. No doubt the lowballing by Bush’s operatives is a reaction to 2000, when they insisted throughout the campaign that Bush held a lead over Al Gore.
There’s a sneak preview of the Bush campaign in Iowa on caucus day and in New Hampshire for the January 27 primary. The idea is for Republican bigwigs (Bill Frist, Tom DeLay, George Pataki, and friends) to show the Bush flag and step on the Democratic story. For the caucuses in 1984, Reagan himself went to Iowa, and Clinton did the same in 1996. David Yepsen, political writer for the Des Moines Register, thinks it’s a mistake for Bush not to come. But for the moment, that’s not the Bush style.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
