Bush Benefiting From Divided Nation’s Unity on Security

Has Sept. 11 tipped the 50-50 nation toward the GOP?

Less cryptically, is a political environment centered on national security issues allowing the Republican Party to break the partisan deadlock that has characterized U.S. politics for the last decade?

That’s the ominous question facing Democrats as Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and President Bush prepare for a debate on foreign policy Thursday night that could represent Kerry’s best opportunity to regain the initiative in a presidential race defined primarily by war and terrorism.

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.

Since the Vietnam War era, the default position for most voters has been to view the Republicans as tougher than Democrats on national security. That means in any partisan argument over how to keep the country safe, most voters are probably more inclined to trust Republicans until given a good reason not to.

It’s similar to the advantage that Democrats enjoy on healthcare and Social Security: No matter how much Republicans protest, most voters still believe Democrats are more committed to those priorities.

The problem for Democrats is that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, security has eclipsed these domestic concerns. In the post-Sept. 11 world, strength trumps empathy.

A telling question in recent polls has asked voters whether it is more important that the next president be a strong leader or someone who cares about people like them. Voters, by a solid majority, have preferred a strong leader.

Bush is banking on it. He is running for reelection after a first term virtually certain to leave him as the only president since Herbert Hoover to suffer a net loss of jobs during his term. And since he took office, the federal deficit has hit record heights, the median family income has fallen, poverty is up and the number of Americans without health insurance has jumped by nearly 5.2 million.

In most times, a president running on that record probably wouldn’t be favored, and all of those issues could still hurt Bush. But he has regained the lead in this year’s race because he has reestablished crushing advantages over Kerry on questions relating to security.

Democrats, with considerable justification, complain that Republicans such as Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) are fanning unreasonable fears by arguing that terrorists would be more likely to strike again if Kerry won, or would even prefer his victory.

But those charges aren’t at the center of Kerry’s difficulties: His real problem is that Bush has convinced most voters he has a stronger backbone and a clearer vision of how to protect America.

To his credit, Kerry has worked hard at establishing credibility as commander in chief, devoting virtually his entire convention to that goal. But he has been torn between a desire to project strength (which encourages him to minimize differences with Bush on questions such as maintaining the U.S. troop commitment in Iraq) and the imperative of providing voters a clear contrast with the president.

Last week, he may have finally squared that circle when he argued that the war in Iraq had weakened U.S. security by diverting attention from Al Qaeda, alienating allies and deepening anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. To stay safe, Kerry argued, America needs both strength and judgment.

That case puts Kerry in a stronger position at Thursday’s debate to exploit lingering public unease about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq without appearing too dovish. But it also raises the stakes for Democrats in the election.

After some hesitation, Kerry is now making what most party experts consider the best argument against Bush on the campaign’s central issue. And Kerry is pressing that case as violence in Iraq daily dramatizes the war’s costs.

If Bush wins another term, many Democrats will likely point to Kerry’s flaws as a candidate. But a Bush victory would force Democrats to consider the possibility that in a country split evenly on other issues, security has become a thumb on the scales for the GOP.

If Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, can’t neutralize the Republican advantage on defense, what are the odds that, say, Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York could do so in 2008?

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ website at www.latimes.com/brownstein.