Against Panic

Here's an understatement: President Bush provokes strong emotions. On the left: hatred. On the right: anxiety.

Before he won the presidency, Bush caused conservatives anxiety because they did not yet know him and were not sure of what he would do. Would he take risks for conservative principles? Or would he sell out? Unlike Ronald Reagan, Bush had not spent a quarter-century eating chicken with conservative activists before ascending to the presidency; conservatives liked him, but they did not yet trust him.

Over the past three years, though, Bush has given conservatives very different reasons for anxiety. Yes, it turned out that he was more than willing to take risks for conservative principles. He repeatedly took huge risks: the tax cuts, the restrictions on stem-cell research, the innovative tactics of the Afghan campaign, the decision to keep fighting the war on terror even after the Afghan success. By now, Bush has won enthusiastic and near-unanimous support from the conservative base. And that's just his problem: As his standing has risen with the country's conservatives, it has slumped with everybody else. In late September, his poll numbers for the first time slipped below 50 percent.

Conservatives who used to worry about George W. Bush now have to worry for him.

Item: The U.S. economy has lost some 2.7 million jobs since January 2001. It picked up 57,000 non-farm jobs in September, which is nice -- but for the employment numbers to recover to where they were when George W. Bush took office, the economy will have to add an average of more than 200,000 jobs in every one of the 13 months until Election Day. That's not impossible -- the U.S. economy created jobs at an even faster rate during the 1990s -- but at the moment, it sure is looking unlikely.

Item: Poor employment numbers in swing states translate into poor re-elect numbers. Bush can probably shrug off his 44 percent approval rating in New York. But it's worrying that he is down to 55 percent in Ohio -- and was at 54 percent in Florida at the beginning of August.

Item: The administration has been buffeted by negative news from the war on terror. The recent report by David Kay confirmed that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had built an infrastructure to produce weapons of mass destruction -- and was still concealing that infrastructure from the United Nations inspectors until the very end. At the same time, though, Kay did not find weapons that were ready to use. Meanwhile, the costs of Iraqi reconstruction have risen unexpectedly high -- and Washington was convulsed in late September by a media frenzy in which the Bush administration stood accused of exposing a CIA agent to score a political point.

So is the jig up?

Hardly. Having derided liberals for misunderestimating the president, it would be all too painfully ironic if conservatives became discouraged by the same error.

Here are three countervailing facts to remember:

1) ÊGeorge W. Bush remains far and away the most trusted political figure in America on issues of national security. Sixty percent regard him as a strong leader; 60 percent also credit him with making the country safer from terrorist attack. Nor do things look auspicious for the Democrats' continued attempt to besmirch Bush's character -- more than 50 percent of Americans regard Bush as more honest than most people in public life.

2) ÊThe situation in Iraq gets better every day.

Perhaps you missed this dispatch by Pamela Hess of UPI, filed September 27:

"The surprise to me upon arriving [in Iraq] in July was that it wasn't nearly as dangerous as I thought it was going to be. People are on the streets evening and morning, eating at restaurants and doing their shopping. They swim in the Tigris to keep cool. They play soccer.

"And at least as far as operations in the south are concerned, I can attest to a nearly constant stream of heartwarming developments -- the engraved bells donated to each new school the U.S. Marines rebuild and open; the young reserve Army sergeant now enthusiastically leading the clean-up of a Najaf slaughterhouse; the happy children running out to greet Marines when they walk through downtown Hillah without body armor or rifles because they have worked long and hard to win the trust of the townspeople, and they have succeeded."

Hess goes on to acknowledge that there is bad news too. But as she notes, if the press emphasizes the bad over the good, that reflects less the facts on the ground than the poor treatment Iraq-based journalists are receiving from the "undermanned and unenthusiastic" press office of the U.S. occupation authorities. It's never smart to maltreat the press. But it can be just as unwise to believe what you hear from journalists who feel maltreated.

3) ÊThe Democratic base may thrill to the isolationist old McGovernite slogan, "Come Home, America." But most Americans know that the terrorists would be only too delighted to follow through the door. So the voters will want to know: What's the alternative? You don't like the Patriot Act? Iraq? Fine -- what would you do instead? None of the Democratic candidates has a serious or coherent message on terror -- and none seems to have any interest in developing one.

Wesley Clark, the momentary front-runner, has appeared on all sides of the Iraq issue. Howard Dean knows only that he wants to declare the war over and then quit. But 2004 is not the year to go to the nation without a coherent and convincing plan for national defense -- and yet the Democrats seem intent on doing so all the same.

Back in the 1980s, Jack Kemp chided Republicans for their complacency. "We can't," he said, "count on our opponents to go on digging their own graves election after election." He was right. We can't count on it. But all the same: They're now doing it.