The WaPo’s E. J. Dionne Jr. noted the other day that the White House is telegraphing its punches for the 2006 cycle. Dionne said that the midterm message, in a nutshell, is, “If you don’t want to get blown up, vote Republican.”
We talked about how best to respond to the attacks, but The New Republic’s Peter Beinart raises an important question: running on terrorism worked in ’02 and ’04, but will it work in ’06? Beinart makes a compelling case that it may not.
The White House strategy is hardly surprising. National security has worked for them before, and, after Social Security, Katrina, and assorted scandals, they aren’t exactly swamped with good alternatives. But there’s a problem: Every two years, September 11 recedes further into the distance. […]
[A]fter a while, times change, and old attacks lose their zing. You could almost detect a note of desperation in Dick Cheney’s recent lament that, “as we get farther away from September 11, some in Washington are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our country and to back away from the business at hand. This is perhaps a natural impulse, as time passes and alarms don’t sound.”
And the impulse extends far beyond Washington. A recent poll found that only 5 percent of Americans consider terrorism the most important issue facing the country — down from 19 percent on Election Day 2004. And, as the public focus on terrorism recedes, the balance between national security and civil liberties shifts. In the summer of 2002, according to a CNN survey, only 11 percent of Americans thought President Bush’s war on terrorism had restricted civil liberties too much. Now, 38 percent say so — double the number that say he should restrict them more. In December 2001, 64 percent of Americans thought a wartime president should “have the authority to make changes in the rights usually guaranteed by the Constitution.” This month, it was only 36 percent. Cheney, Rove, and the gang can defend their electronic-surveillance programs all they want. They can demand the full reauthorization of the Patriot Act until they’re blue in the face. But it won’t work unless Americans are more worried about terrorism than they are now.
As much as I agree with Beinart’s point about diminishing returns, this is not to say that Dems should take any comfort in the possibility, or assume that tapering interest in terrorism as a top political issue is a sign that the GOP’s biggest advantage will be irrelevant in November. Dems still need to be aggressive on the issue — and not cede national security ground to the GOP.
That said, constant fear of terrorism has subsided, prompting Beinart to suggest that a fresh wave of terrorism alert may very well be on the way.
Beinart notes that these alerts dominated 2004, when Bush needed the focus for his campaign, but practically disappeared in 2005. Even when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that terrorists might be plotting an attack on New York’s subways last October, administration officials dismissed the talk and minimized the significance of the threat.
Ironically, it is precisely the administration’s failure to sound alarms in 2005 that contributed to the public’s growing inattention to the terrorist threat. If the administration starts sounding them again — holding high-profile press conferences to announce vague new threats — the press will face a serious test. Will it aggressively investigate the possibility that the claims are more about politics than national security, even though such investigations will produce a vicious response from administration spokesmen? How courageously the press does its job could help determine whether the White House strategy succeeds yet again.
Wait, you mean we’re dependent on even-handed press coverage to counteract the White House’s election-year fear mongering? Why am I not encouraged?