by HMKGrey » Thu Jun 01, 2006 8:54 pm
<br>Comment<br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>It will be a verdict on Bush and it looks bad. Very bad.<br><br>Armageddon is forecast for the Grand Old Party this November. But political eruptions are inherently unpredictable</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Martin Kettle<br>Wednesday May 31, 2006<br>The Guardian<br><br>In the history of editorial boo-boos, few can out-goof the Chicago Daily Tribune's "Dewey Defeats Truman" front page in November 1948. That classic humiliation is imprinted on the collective journalistic psyche, not just because a major paper miscalled a presidential election on the night - which might even have been forgotten in time - but because in St Louis the next day it was gleefully held aloft by the victorious Harry Truman for the photographers, and thus for history.<br><br>Article continues<br>Still, this cautionary tale seems a prudent preliminary to reporting what I discovered in Washington last week. In America's capital, the political class is gearing up for a stunning reverse for George Bush's Republicans in the midterm elections this November. Yes, these experts may all be wrong - it has happened before - but at the moment the facts supporting their view are overwhelming. As the political analyst Charlie Cook puts it: "It's bad. It's very bad. All the diagnostic indicators suggest that 2006 will be Armageddon for the Republicans. The only good news for the party is that it is five months away."<br><br>It is important to be clear that what Cook calls the diagnostic indicators of Republican decline extend far beyond the president's own lamentable approval ratings, currently in the low 30s. This is normally the only polling yardstick to attract any notice in Europe. But American politics are more subtle, various and, above all, local than that. Yet here the rot goes much further.<br><br>In four polls over the last month, for example, Americans have been asked whether they think the country is, overall, heading in the right or the wrong direction. Normally this is a good general guide to the political health of the incumbent president's party. Yet in each case less than a third of Americans have answered "the right direction", while more than two-thirds have said "wrong track". A volcanologist would say that this is eruption territory.<br><br>When American voters are asked whether they approve or disapprove of the job that the Congress (currently Republican-controlled but not the president's puppet) is doing, the result backs this up. Congress approval rates ranged between 23% and 33% in seven recent national polls; disapproval ranged from 52% to 70%. American election lore has it that when Congress's approval rating hits 40%, the ruling party can expect to lose about five seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives. Well, the latest poll has Congressional approval at 27%. "We've got a category four or five hurricane shaping up for November," predicts Thomas Mann at the Brookings Institution. "The question is whether the levees will hold."<br><br>Mann reckons that 50 to 60 Republican seats could be in play this time as things stand. Given the extent to which American electoral districting is gerrymandered to favour incumbents, that would amount to a cultural revolution. Clearly the Democrats would be big winners, overturning the current Republican majority of 27. Yet it might be more sensible to see any landslide more as a rejection of the Republicans. It would mark the end of a dozen years of Republican dominance in the House that began with Newt Gingrich's rightwing revolution in 1994. Ironically, though, many of the losses would be among the few remaining Republican moderates.<br><br>No one I spoke to thinks that the Republicans are as liable to lose the 100-seat Senate as the House. For that to happen, the Democrats would have to hold all their Senate seats - not an inevitability - and then capture six new ones from the Republicans, including one in increasingly hard-to-win Tennessee (where the Democratic candidate is the charismatic African-American Harold Ford), while relying on the likely independent socialist winner from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, to take them to 51. In the Senate races, as in the presidential election of 2004, the hardest pounding will be in the big swing states such as Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania.<br><br>It can be dangerous to treat midterm elections as a verdict on the president. Yet few are in doubt that Bush is the central figure in this campaign and Iraq the central issue. At the start of 2005 he told the Washington Post that he had had his "accountability moment" on Iraq and had been re-elected. But that was wishful thinking. He now faces the potent combination of continuing Democratic anger over the war and mounting Republican disillusion. His approval ratings are much worse than the lows of all late-20th-century second-term presidents except Richard Nixon - and he had to resign with two and a half years to run. Bush and Karl Rove will try to cast November 2006 as a contest between two visions of America, but these elections are shaping up to be a classic referendum. Even Gingrich recently let slip the view that the Democrats should campaign on the slogan: "Had enough?"<br><br>If that is right, and Americans really have had enough, then two things are likely to follow after November. The first will be the increasing isolation of a politically weakened president, while the second will be that 2008 will mark a new chapter. The anger that is carrying the Democrats to victory in 2006 will not do the same business in two years' time.<br><br>But don't forget Truman. In a desk drawer I have a copy of a heartfelt but prudently unpublished Guardian editorial I penned in the early evening of November 2 2004 under the simple but, as it seemed at the time, eloquently restrained headline "President Kerry". I reread it sometimes, as a reminder that election day is still a long way off.<br><br>martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk<br><br>======================<br><br>Hmmmm... let's see Rove dig his dark master out of this one. <br><br>Rememebr those post-election night 04 stories of how the Bush clan, assembled at the WH, were completely and horribly sombre and strange watching the results come in and then Rove turned up saying he had 'his own' <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>new numbers</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> and that were more reliable than the opinion polls and it was all smiles thereafter? <br><br>Of course, the MSM played along with this ridiculousness.<br><br>I guess we should prepare ourselves for lots of CNN stories about a) how opinion polls are crap and b) how research and statistics are nonsense too over the coming months as they prepare the way for another 'stunner' in November. <br><br>Wanna bet? <p></p><i></i>
