Yawn, what a shock: Trumpist Republicans are trying to leverage war with Iran for political advantage here at home. Anyone who didn’t see that coming hasn’t been paying attention to the Trump playbook – or to the GOP playbook of 2002, during the prelude to war with Iraq.
On Saturday, I tweeted that Donald Trump’s minions will say it’s un-American to impeach and remove a war-on-terror president. On Sunday, like clockwork, top House Republican Kevin McCarthy tweeted: “Think of the contrast. While Democrats are trying to remove President Trump from office, the President is focused on removing terrorists from the face of the earth.”
And rest assured that after Senate Republicans exonerate Trump for his impeachable acts (or if there’s no trial at all, and he stays in office by default), the 2020 election spin will kick in: “It’s unpatriotic to change the commander-in-chief in time of war.” Or variations thereof.
Democrats old enough to remember 2002 are probably a tad unnerved right now. President George W. Bush, with strategic tips from Karl Rove, wrapped himself in the flag and declared that either you loved America (by swallowing their false claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and thus deserved to be ousted), or you rejected their message and thus hated America. Most congressional Democrats knuckled under, and voted to authorize a Bush war against Saddam, but they were nonetheless routed in the ’02 midterm elections. The GOP had so thoroughly captured the flag and co-opted patriotism that even Democratic senator Max Cleland – who’d lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam; and who’d voted Yes for a Bush war – was still successfully smeared as “soft” on terrorism.
This explains why most Democratic presidential candidates (with the exception of Bernie Sanders) were initially somewhat cautious in their responses to Trump’s extremist assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The basic message from Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttegieg, and Amy Klobuchar was “yes, but” – that, yes, Soleimani was a very bad guy who’d killed many Americans, but that Trump had acted impulsively without gauging the likely long-term fallout in the volatile Middle East. (Warren, after taking heat from the progressive left, revised her initial statement – eliminating all bad-guy references to Soleimani, and echoing Sanders’ message that Trump had recklessly heightened the odds of another major conflict.)
But Democrats shouldn’t quake in their boots about Trump’s predictable decision to campaign for re-election by waving the flag and stoking war fever. There are four big reasons why 2020 is not like 2002:
1. In 2002, Bush had the political winds at his back. Americans were haunted by what had happened just one year earlier, on 9/11. Roughly 3,000 civilians had died, and there was a general thirst for revenge. Most people were willing to believe the Bush team’s bogus claim (most infamously amplified by Dick Cheney) that Saddam was the likeliest culprit and that he was crafting “imminent” threats to the homeland. By contrast (and thank goodness), Trump doesn’t have a 9/11 emergency that he can exploit, nothing remotely similar that he can use to shape public opinion.
2. Bush’s job approval rating in 2002 never fell below 61 percent; in January of that year, it was 84 percent. By contrast, Trump is typically mired in the low 40s. Thanks to his well-earned reputation as a serial liar, he lacks the standing to lead America into a new Middle East war, not without suffering serious blowback on the home front. A damaged guy who can’t even tell the truth about toilet water has no chance of convincing people (outside his cult) that he warrants trust on matters of war and peace.
3. There’s no public appetite for a war with Iran anyway. Last summer, Gallup asked Americans whether they favored military or diplomatic action to goad Iran into giving up its nuclear program. A landslide majority – 78 percent – favored diplomatic action. (Oh well, that ship has sailed. Trump’s assassination act has prompted Iran to resume its nuclear program.) More generally, a University of Maryland foreign policy poll, conducted last September, asked Americans whether “the U.S. should be prepared to go to war” in order to achieve its policy objectives with Iran – or whether “the U.S. should rely on other means short of war.” The latter stance won in a landslide, 76 percent to 21 percent. So it was no surprise, this past weekend, when Joe Biden said, “No president has a right to take our country to war without the informed consent of Americans. And right now we have no idea what this guy has in mind. He’s isolated us from our partners. He’s isolated us from our NATO allies.”
4. And since we don’t have a military draft anymore, it’s possible that war fever will merely simmer and that domestic issues closer to home will dominate the 2020 campaign. Three issues in particular: health care (Trump’s promises, to replace Obamacare with something “phenomenal,” have been worthless); gun violence (Trump’s promises, to come up with a “very meaningful” solution, have been worthless); and income stagnation (Trump’s ’17 tax cut law has disproportionately benefited the rich – and the biggest companies, thanks to the backstage maneuvers of corporate lobbyists in the un-drained swamp). The ’20 Democratic presidential nominee can potentially leverage those issues, just as Democratic congressional candidates did during the midterm blue wave of 2018.
So keep calm, Democrats, and carry on. And here’s one last blast of historical perspective:
In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The senior President Bush, George H.W., responded by preparing for war the right way. He methodically built a western allied coalition. He secured an endorsement from the U.N. Security Council. He enlisted the aid of NATO. The brief American-led war, in early 1991, was resoundingly triumphant. It pushed Hussein out of Kuwait and sent Bush’s job approval rating into the stratospheric 90s. The conventional wisdom decreed that he was a cinch to be re-elected in 1992.
In 1992, he got 37 percent.
See my point? If a successful wartime commander-in-chief can drop from the 90s to the 30s – if indeed history means anything – how is it possible that the bone-spurs bumbler could win a second term?
Don’t answer that.