What It's About

It's not even summer, but it is becoming abundantly clear what will be the subject of the 2006 election: it's all about George W. Bush.

The Republicans, of course, will not see it that way. They will make it about anything else but about the president and his administration. They cannot have the electorate going to the polls in November with the reminders of the administration's incompetence and mendacities -- Iraq, Katrina, $3 gasoline, a stagnating economy, Duke Cunningham -- on their mind. So they have to make the election about any demon they can find to distract the voter. We've already seen the opening acts: the anti-gay Constitutional amendment, the anti-alien immigration reform, meaningless patriotic idolatry and pandering with the flag-burning amendment, and the oldie-but-goodie threat of terrorism. (Is it just a coincidence that we're just now finding out about a three-year-old plan to gas the New York subway? You make the call.)

The fact that all these issues have a highly emotional appeal with very little to show in the way of substantial remedy for our current problems tells you that the Republicans have no plans other than to change the subject, find a scapegoat, blame their problems on it, and make people afraid. That's not leadership, but that is the only way that works for them. As Paul Krugman notes, the party "whose economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus the public's attention elsewhere. And there's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless."

All mid-term elections are a referendum on the current occupant of the White House, and it's been that way for the last century. Quite often it's been a sobering lesson to a president and party in power that they lose seats in the House and the Senate at the mid-terms, but it's also been seen as a way to balance the power in Washington and remind them that all glory is fleeting. Tip O'Neil's famous axiom that "all politics is local" seems to have been repeated by leaders of both parties when they see the tide turning against them.

So as much as the GOP would like to focus on the local elections and as much as the Democrats are in their typical mode of not having much more than a lame slogan ("Together, America Can Do Better"), the reality is that the Democrats, who have been effectively frozen out of any meaningful role in governing since 2003, don't really need to have to do anything more than ask the same question the Republicans asked in 1948 (and Newt Gingrich found and dusted off) when Harry Truman was polling at 29%: "Had Enough?"