Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Welch, Roger Simon, Tacitus, Stephen Green, Jonah Goldberg, and yours truly (Jim Henley too, but, well, duh): It’s been a bad couple of days for President Bush on the blogosphere. Wha’ happen?
Simply put, a one-two punch:
1) The strong showing of John Kerry and John Edwards and the drubbing of Howard Dean in the Iowa caucuses, coupled with the rapidly diminishing returns of Wes Clark, make it look like the Democratic party will field a responsible, electable, non-berserk candidate for president after all. I don’t know enough about Edwards’s record or positions to comment, and Kerry’s opportunistic backpeddling on the wars in Iraq/on terror is transparent and infuriating, but I don’t get the feeling that either of them has a dangerous temperament, or that they like to put sneer quotes around the War on Terror. In other words, I don’t feel that they’ll sell out our ambitions to foment democracy abroad, nor will I feel dramatically less safe while buying comics in Times Square or across from the Empire State Building if they’re in the White House. Thus the main obstacle to foreign-policy hawks voting Democratic is removed (in the process reminding many of us that, domestically and socially, we were always a lot closer to the Democrats than we were to Bush’s Republicans).
2) The President’s State of the Union address started strong and rapidly swerved into the nightmarish. Mandatory drug testing for schoolchildren, enshrining anti-gay bias in the goddamn Constitution, “unleashing” the churches and temples, taking time in the most prominent political speech of the year to basically take potshots at Barry Bonds, an adamant refusal to reexamine the excesses of the PATRIOT Act, advocating what is essentially a faith-based approach to teen sexuality: If you sat around and tried, you couldn’t have come up with a better laundry list of things tailor-made to make me not want to vote for you. What’s more, Bush wants to throw a ton of our money at all these things, and more besides, continuing a spending spree that’d put my wife at a 3-hour sale at Loehmann’s to shame. And even if you’re not a fiscal conservative and do think the government should be spending a good deal of money on important programs, these sure as hell aren’t the programs you had in mind.
There’s a large and growing class of voters who are socially liberal, fiscally moderate, and hawkish. Neither party is a comfortable home for them, and so they must prioritize and vote accordingly. With the Dems making it easier for hawks to hold their noses (beaks?) and vote donkey, and the President making the social libs and fiscal mods run screaming from their television sets, I think we’re beginning see a realignment of the post-9/11 realignment. And I don’t see this boding well for the President.