Bush Wins First Battle in War on Drugs by Gaining Political Advantage

Before President Bush decided to put the war on drugs at the top of his domestic agenda, some aides tried to warn him off. “They said it was an uphill fight and he could get hurt politically,” recalled one White House staffer.

But the program Bush unveiled in his nationally televised speech won resounding public approval, opinion polls demonstrated, and enabled the President to put his Democratic opponents in just the political box that brought them to grief with voters in the past. “In the short term this certainly helps Bush,” conceded Democratic pollster Paul Maslin of Los Angeles.

Democrats fought back, mostly by demanding that Bush spend more, and last week they claimed to have won a victory of sorts when a tentative agreement was reached to increase drug war funding. But no matter what gains Democrats make in the funding battle, Bush seems to have a better chance of winning the political war in the hustings.

For on this issue, the President appears to have aligned himself with the majority of American voters by defining the drug problem the same way they do. Bush tailored his proposals, which emphasize stern law enforcement, to protect the middle class from the mindless violence of the drug scene.

Drug Use Changing

What gives this approach its political power is the changing nature of drug use. Because it appears to be lessening in the more affluent city neighborhoods and in suburbia while the scourge rages unabated in the inner cities, the drug problem threatens to polarize Americans along racial and economic lines. Indeed, the recent violent eruptions in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn and in Virginia Beach suggest that race tensions may already be on the rise.

Drug abuse is fast becoming what Yale University medical historian David F. Musto called “a two-tier problem,” with inner-city residents increasingly being stigmatized by middle-class Americans as drug users.

“The middle class will become more and more angry about drug use,” Musto predicted, and thus less likely to support proposals for helping to solve the drug problem by improving economic and social conditions in the inner city.

Ominous for Democrats

Politically, such polarization is especially ominous for Democrats. Their party has strong ties to the black community and counts on it as an indispensable base in its electoral arithmetic. At the same time, the Democrats need white votes if they are to regain the White House.

“The issue of drugs and crime is being manipulated cynically by the Republican Party to get into the racial aspects,” complained Democratic pollster Maslin.

Republicans reject such charges of implicit racism. They point out that in his introduction to the 154-page booklet setting forth Bush’s drug plan, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Director William J. Bennett made a point of rejecting a racial approach, declaring: “No inevitable link exists between urban life--however disadvantaged--and drug use. The majority of American city residents--rich or poor; male or female; black, white or Hispanic, well-or poorly educated--do not take drugs.”

Yet in the next breath Bennett acknowledged that the fight against drugs is “a two-front war”: one battle, which is being won, against casual use, mostly by the white middle class; and the other, which is being lost, against drug addiction among the urban poor.

When Bush went on national television and presented his solution to the drug problem with its stress on tight spending--about $8 billion--as well as tougher law enforcement, it proved popular with the President’s white, middle-class constituents.

Majority Favors Approach

A Washington Post-ABC News survey taken after his speech showed 75% of those interviewed approving of the way he is handling the drug problem, up from about 50% last month. A New York Times-CBS News survey gave the Bush plan a 70% favorable rating.

Many voters in the Post survey said they thought Bush should do more. But measures they favored, harsher penalties and tougher law enforcement, were consistent with Bush’s anti-crime approach.

On the other hand, blacks and other low-income citizens, who are most directly afflicted by the problem, wanted more federal funding--and especially more attention to treatment and prevention.

That tends to push Democrats into the position of urging higher spending on people many white voters regard as threatening, not objects of sympathy. Instead of regarding drug abuse as a social welfare need like health care and child care, which Democrats have a good reputation for handling, middle-class voters are expected increasingly to see drugs as a crime problem. And crime is an area in which voters generally consider Democrats to be weaker than Republicans, a point Bush reinforced during the 1988 campaign.

What makes such prospects particularly bitter for Democrats is that until Bush tackled the problem in full view of the television cameras, their party appeared to have an advantage on the drug issue. As they are quick to point out, Democratic congressional leaders last year pushed through the 1988 omnibus anti-drug abuse bill, which created the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy that Bennett now heads.

Bush Forced to Act

The new law also made it difficult for Bush not to confront the drug issue by requiring that he submit a national plan for a drug war.

Perhaps as a result of such efforts, Democrats can cite polling data before the speech that showed voters had more confidence in them than in Republicans to solve the drug problem. And other polls indicated voters recalled that Bush had been more or less in charge of fighting the drug problem as former President Ronald Reagan’s vice president and agreed he had failed to accomplish much.

Altered Perceptions

But by unveiling his own proposal and putting the prestige of his office behind it, Bush seems to have altered these perceptions.

Democrats contend that Bush will not be able to sustain his current high approval ratings unless he can make significant progress in the drug war--progress they say is unlikely, given what they regard as the inadequacies of his program.

“The question is whether it’s a program that really gets at the problem,” said Paul Tully, political director of the Democratic National Committee. “And the answer depends on the total level of Uzi shells you find on the street corner in your neighborhood.”

His reference was to the drug-related gun battles and other street crimes that take place almost exclusively in the inner cities, not the suburbs.

Symbolic Threat

It is true, as Democrats point out, that middle-class citizens feel threatened by inner-city crime. But this threat mainly is symbolic and indirect, based on impressions conveyed by the news media.

And Bush and his advisers, who showed themselves in the 1988 campaign to be masters of creating media impressions favorable to themselves, already have begun to make their mark on the drug war. The President has been on television regularly, demonstrating his concern over the drug problem to middle-class voters.

One day he managed to establish a link to schoolchildren, urging them “not to look the other way” if their friends start using drugs, and to reinforce his commitment to law and order by flashing the badge of a New York City policeman slain in a drug investigation.

Moreover, Bush expects to be able to back up the symbols with statistics, measuring decline of drug use in accordance with goals set by Bennett. As critics point out, the goals seem notably modest, aiming for declines in middle-class drug use at a slower rate than was recorded even before Bush launched his program.

In their frustration over the issue, Democrats were quick to complain that the President’s proposals did not go far enough, particularly in the areas of treatment and prevention. “The Democrats are taking some risk in going on the attack,” said A. James Reichley, Brookings Institution specialist in presidential-congressional relations. “The public has no great conviction that Bush’s plan will work. But they think it needs to be tried.”