http://www.reason.com/hod/jh012104.shtml(snip)
Many Republican politicians believe that President Bush, who in some polls has the highest approval rating of any president beginning his re-election campaign since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, is headed for an inevitable victory in November. With Saddam Hussein in custody, a resurgent economy, and a muddled and perhaps longer-than-expected Democratic primary, these partisans see little on the horizon to threaten the president's political prospects. They wonder only how big his margins will be, and whether they will translate into coattails in key GOP races for Senate, House, governor, and state legislatures.
This is a premature conclusion, to put it gingerly. While the sputtering, gesticulating implosion of Howard Dean and the available survey data may suggest that the Iraq campaign has subsided as a potential campaign issue, it wouldn't take much for a series of adverse events—a major terrorist incident overseas, another round of deadly attacks by insurgents in Iraq, or disclosures about intelligence failures—to change the political dynamic. Besides, given that about two-thirds of the electorate favored the war and a similar number prefer the Republican Party on issues of national defense, the Bush team probably wanted the 2004 election to present a clear divide between the president and a starkly anti-war candidate such as Dean. Now that the Iowa results have shuffled the Democratic deck, it may turn out that Bush will face a general-election foe such as John Kerry or John Edwards who voted for the war resolution but disagreed about how the policy was then carried out—a message that would muddy the very waters Karl Rove and company would prefer to keep crystal clear.
The Democratic nominee may well choose to challenge Bush on domestic issues while seeking only to neutralize the GOP advantage on foreign policy. It's worked before. That's precisely what then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton did in 1992 to President Bush's father, who if anything enjoyed greater public confidence in his national-security and foreign-policy credentials but found he couldn't rely on this advantage alone to win. Even in this post-9/11 environment, domestic issues are still more important to most voters, hard as it may be for both confident hawks and embittered doves to believe. In a recent TechnoMetrica poll for Investor's Business Daily, respondents rated health care far more important an issue (with an index rating of 44.1) than was the war in Iraq (26.5). This was true both for war supporters and for war opponents.
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