Why have so many people who might reasonably have been expected to support President Bush in the next election suddenly wavered, and even turned against him altogether?
Partially, this is because the Democrats have rejected their rejectionists and selected John Kerry as Bush’s opponent. Kerry, whatever his faults, gives the appearance of being a candidate you can take seriously on national security and foreign policy issues (Bush’s big strong points), which is more than you could say for Howard Dean. (Whether or not Kerry actually can be taken seriously may well be a whole ‘nother story, but still.) Another factor is the relentless “where are the WMDs?” questioning, which of course ignores the forest for the trees, but still (rightly) puts a big chink in the President’s foreign-policy armor.
But the real culprit, I think, was the disastrous State of the Union address. The amazing thing about the upcoming election is that I think it would have been relatively easy for Bush to actually secure the vote of myself and others like me, and he blew it in a big way. The SOTU was a tipping point for liberal hawks–the point at which we realized that for all our hawkishness, we’re still liberals, and the President is not. Ditto for libertarian hawks. Ditto for fiscally conservative hawks. The SOTU essentially caused a lot of Bush’s ersatz supporters to pit one aspect of their political personality against the other, which was the LAST thing he should have wanted to do with it. Because the fact is, we’ve all spent a lifetime being the first half of our respective “_____ hawk” equations, and for the most part have only been the second half since Sept. 11, 2001. The first half has a big advantage in that regard.
But does the second half outweigh everything else? That’s the question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now.