Bush Benefiting From Divided Nation's Unity on Security

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-outlook27sep27.story
WASHINGTON OUTLOOK
Bush Benefiting From Divided Nation's Unity on Security
Ronald Brownstein

September 27, 2004



<snip>For the last decade, the parties have been as evenly balanced as at any time since the late 19th century. In 2000, Bush won the second-narrowest electoral college victory ever. Voters in 2000 returned a Senate divided exactly in half. Probably not since 1880 had a national election, measured from all angles, finished so close to a tie.

Our recent partisan standoff was built on a political landscape shaped almost entirely by economic and cultural concerns. National security was probably less relevant to the elections of the 1990s than any since the 1930s.

In an environment where cultural and economic views drove most decisions, neither party had a clear or lasting advantage. The unusual Republican gains in the 2002 congressional elections, and Bush's lead now, raise the possibility that when security looms largest, the balance may tilt slightly toward the GOP. Or at least it does if Democrats can't convince voters they will do as good a job safeguarding the country.

Security was the Democrats' downfall in 2002, when Bush became only the second president since the Civil War to see his party win both House and Senate seats in the first midterm election of his White House tenure. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1934, was the other.) Republicans pilloried Democrats for resisting the creation of a Department of Homeland Security without greater protections for union workers.

The argument was more than a little hypocritical, because Bush initially resisted the idea of a new department when Congress, led by Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, proposed it. But it worked largely because it reinforced the electorate's preexisting assumptions about the parties.<snip>