To the despair of cliche lovers everywhere, the phrase “war-weary” has started to fall out of favor. People grow tired of being so weary, or weary of some other things.
Weary, for instance, of being ignored by other world powers, of being played for a fool by Vladimir Putin, of having red lines crossed with disdain by murdering tyrants, of finding out that al Qaeda, described as dead just a few news cycles earlier, has grown a new and more dangerous head.
Or perhaps war weariness hadn’t been for a while as deep or as wide as was thought. People were weary of war in 2006, the worst year in Iraq until recently, and made their views known in the 2006 midterms. It was a well-deserved rout for a president and his party, who lost control of both houses of Congress two years after a realignment of sorts in their favor seemed imminent.
The election of 2006 was indeed a war-weary election, but two years later a great deal had changed. George W. Bush had sacked his old team and old policy, pushed through the surge, and by the end of 2007 Sunni and Shia were fighting alongside Americans to push al Qaeda out of their country. Gen. David Petraeus was a national hero, and super-hawk John McCain was toe-to-toe with Barack Obama coming out of the party conventions, and starting to open a lead.
Momentum was with him Sept. 15, when he fell off a cliff and lost the 5 points or so that he never recovered. Pew Research Center reported on Sept. 18, looking back on the few days before, “McCain increased his lead on national security and foreign policy issues. His current advantages over Obama on terrorism and foreign policy — 25 points on terrorism and 11 points on foreign policy — are on a par with President Bush’s leads over John Kerry on these issues at this stage in the 2004 campaign.” It was the financial crash, not foreign policy — the main thing about him the voters liked best — that did McCain in.
Bear in mind that there were only three times in the 20th century when one party extended its reign beyond two terms in office: the Democrats’ run of five straight elections between 1932 and 1948, owing to World War II and its aftermath; 1908, when William Howard Taft followed the very popular Theodore Roosevelt; and 1988, when the very popular Ronald Reagan was succeeded by his vice president, the elder George Bush.
In 2008, the younger George Bush was not very popular, which makes it remarkable that McCain stayed so close to Obama throughout the year and, absent the meltdown, might well have won. Had he won, it would have been a third term for Bush’s foreign policy, which did not seem to bother swing voters unduly, at least until the stock market crashed.
Obama took the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton because of her vote for the war, but he did not win the general election on the strength of this argument. He won it when the stock market crashed, which automatically discredits the party in power, and which, like a tsunami, sweeps all else aside.
A president who wins has the right to claim a mandate for all his positions, and all presidents do. But not all of Obama’s positions have equal salience, and not all reflect a prevalent consensus or mood. Obama’s excuse that he “ended” the war in Iraq because his election proved that the public demanded it may make him feel better. But it’s simply not true.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
