Attacks Produced a Seismic Shift in the Political Agenda

Scouring their speeches from the 2000 election, President Bush and Al Gore, his Democratic rival, can both find moments when they urged increased vigilance against terrorists.

But terrorism wasn’t a central, or even a secondary, issue in their fiercely fought campaign. Neither candidate suggested that defending against terrorism would soon become perhaps the preeminent challenge facing the United States. Taxes, education, health care, Social Security, even the moral climate in the capital, all attracted far more attention from the candidates, and from the voters.

That’s a measure of how abruptly the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have compelled America to reorder its priorities. Just as the jumbo jets slamming into the World Trade Center ignited fires hot enough to melt steel, the threat exposed on that searing morning has wrenchingly reshaped the agenda in Washington and the terms of political debate.

Across the country, dozens of federal agencies are shifting their focus: stockpiling vaccines, reconstructing the security system at the nation’s airports, struggling to build systems to monitor foreign students and visitors, dispatching more inspectors to examine cargo containers in foreign ports and searching for new ways to monitor and disrupt extremist groups at home and abroad. In all, this might be the most comprehensive government mobilization since the frantic months after Pearl Harbor.

“It’s historic, and it’s stunning in terms of how much we are trying to do at once,” said Donald Kettl, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who studies federal administration.

Tom Ridge, director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, said that as many as 100 agencies and departments are involved in the effort to stiffen the nation’s defenses. “If you took a look at all these agencies, you will find that ... as of 9/11, if they didn’t have a particular individual or team assigned to [terrorism], they do now,” he said.

Initially, this massive mobilization in a climate of wartime urgency appeared poised to mute political debate for the indefinite future. That hasn’t happened. After a few months of truce, the two major parties again are banging heads in Washington over the full range of domestic issues, and candidates still are scorching each other with attack ads.

But the new threat has changed the playing field on which the parties are contesting their differences. It has compelled Congress to appropriate billions of dollars for the military and homeland defense--spending that over time is likely to squeeze domestic priorities favored by Democrats and drive the parties toward sharpened conflict concerning taxes and the federal budget.

It has increased the relevance of national defense, which faded after the Cold War, as a campaign issue in 2002, and almost certainly will make credibility as commander in chief more important to voters assessing presidential candidates in 2004 and beyond.

And it has greatly strengthened Bush, whose performance in the days after the tragedy appears to have resolved doubts many Americans held about whether he was up to the job of president. Just before the attacks, 40% to 45% of Americans were telling pollsters they doubted Bush had the experience and intellect for the job; today, three-fourths of Americans say they consider him a strong and decisive leader who can manage the government effectively.

“It has given him a credibility and a legitimacy that was questionable before the attacks,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling group. “He became every bit a legitimate president, and questions about the 2000 election and his gravitas just disappeared.”

As one dividend for the White House, the heightened sense of vulnerability and increased trust in Bush’s foreign policy judgment has created a backdrop that likely will make it tougher for domestic critics to block an invasion of Iraq, if Bush chooses to launch one.

At a more fundamental level, the powerful emotions that bound together the country after the tragedy suggested Americans still have a greater sense of connection than many social critics on the left and right believed--especially after the bitter presidential election that showed the country divided almost exactly in half between political coalitions defined mostly by their cultural differences.

That hasn’t erased political conflict about issues such as gun control, abortion or gay rights. But the surge of national unity after Sept. 11 may put these disputes in a different perspective by showing how much common ground Americans still share around those fault lines.

“It’s clear to me that America’s self-perception has changed,” one senior White House official said. “There is a feeling that if you scratch an American, there’s an elemental decency beneath. That’s a source of national unity, and I think it’s going to be pretty durable.”

With so much in flux at once, the hard part for policymakers, analysts and ordinary Americans alike is divining which changes are durable and which are transitory. The shift in mission toward combating terrorism looks like a lasting change for federal agencies from the FBI to the Coast Guard. But the surge in public trust in the federal government evident in polls immediately after the attacks already has faded.

Likewise, while Bush appears to have crossed a fundamental threshold in public confidence, that doesn’t guarantee that concern about the economy or disagreements over his policies won’t erode his support before 2004.

Already clear, though, is that the struggle against terrorism will consume much more of the federal government’s attention and money than seemed possible a year ago.

“The truth is, if we are serious about homeland security, we are going to have to spend more money,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

Projecting forward from the amounts already approved, the Democratic staff on the House Budget Committee recently estimated the bill for increased homeland security and national defense after Sept. 11 (as well as cleanup of the attack sites and aid for the airline industry) likely will reach about $600 billion over the next decade.

That’s almost certainly too low. In the national strategy it recently released, Ridge’s office said the $40 billion Bush requested this year for homeland security should be viewed only “as down payments to cover the most immediate security vulnerabilities.”

In dollar terms, the struggle against terrorism still isn’t likely to cost U.S. society nearly as much as our most demanding conflict, World War II. When the country entered that war, federal spending as a share of the economy soared from 12% in 1941 to almost 44% in 1944, the year of D-day.

By contrast, the Office of Management and Budget projects that, even with today’s additional costs, total federal spending in the next few years will peak at about 20% of the gross national product, before settling back into the 18% range where it is today.

But as a management and organizational challenge, the war against terrorism is probably the federal government’s biggest undertaking since World War II. Experts note that other massive government projects--such as the lunar landing, the 1960s War on Poverty, or the reorganization of the national security bureaucracy in the 1940s for the Cold War--didn’t simultaneously ask so many agencies to shoulder new responsibilities or revamp operations.

The sheer magnitude of the challenge now is, as Ridge put it, “monstrously complex.”

A few examples show the scale.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is stockpiling 270 million doses of smallpox vaccine and enough antibiotics to treat 20 million people exposed to anthrax, while positioning about 600 tons of emergency supplies at secret locations around the country and accelerating research at the National Institutes of Health on the next generation of vaccines.

To meet a congressional deadline requiring that all luggage checked onto airplanes be screened for explosives, the Transportation Security Administration is trying to deploy, by January, three times the baggage screening equipment currently in use everywhere in the world, the National Journal magazine recently reported. At the same time, the agency needs to hire as many as 7,600 people a month to meet its deadline to assume control of screening airplane passengers.

On top of all this, Bush has proposed a massive restructuring of the federal government: a new Department of Homeland Security that would combine all or parts of 22 federal agencies and have 170,000 employees. Measured by staff, it would instantly become the third-largest federal department.

So much activity is underway on so many fronts that few, if any, in Washington think they can keep it all in view. But long-term implications of this focus are emerging.

In political terms, the increased reliance on federal efforts to protect Americans from terrorist threats could make it tougher for conservatives to pursue the anti-government arguments common in the 1980s and 1990s.

Though polls show that overall trust in government has receded almost to its levels before the attacks, “You are not going to have a return to the discontent with government we had in the early 1990s, because we need Washington,” Kohut said. “That’s not to say people aren’t going to have their complaints or worry about big government, but it’s a real climate shift.”

Conversely, the rising tab for defense and domestic security could lastingly crimp Democratic hopes of offensives on issues such as education, health care and prescription drugs. The competition for resources may eventually force now-hesitant Democrats to challenge some defense outlays or seek to retrench Bush’s 10-year, $1.35-trillion tax cut of last year, or both.

Eventually, debate may also develop about the strategy the government has used to meet the terrorist threat--especially if the U.S. suffers another major attack.

Experts such as Kettl note that, for the most part, Washington has responded to this challenge the way it did in World War II and the Cold War: by centralizing power in the capital, either bulking up existing agencies or creating new ones. Bush’s proposal to create the mammoth Homeland Security Department is a precise modern analogue to Harry S. Truman’s 1949 decision to unify the armed services in a centralized Department of Defense.

But against such a diffuse threat as terrorism, Kettl and others argue, in time it may make more sense to follow the model of many companies in the Information Age and decentralize authority and initiative to officials closer to the front line of the problem. That approach, for instance, would provide more freedom to field-level FBI agents to pursue leads, rather than depending on analysts in Washington to make connections.

“We have responded to a 21st century problem with a 20th century approach,” Kettl lamented.

It may take years, many false starts and perhaps some painful reversals before Americans genuinely feel safer. And even then they may have to live with more uncertainty about security than at any point since the chilliest early years of the Cold War.

“If you believe in what we stand for in this country and accept that we are ... a freedom-loving people ... very trusting [and] a nation of immigrants,” Ridge said, “endemic within that [is] that we will never get to a failsafe, I-guarantee-you-you’re-safe system.”