What About George?

As far as organizing principles of life go, I've never found anything that beat the theory that all life imitates high school. It's pretty much foolproof and covers almost all of the universe's difficult questions, such as why scientific studies show 82 percent of all males want to punch Tucker Carlson when he wears a bow tie and why some political candidates react the way they do to a president's popularity.

Visualize, if you will, the president of the United States as the ultimate high school quarterback. When the team is winning and he's on a hot streak, all flock to him in the great cafeteria of life. But when the team is losing, suddenly there are a lot of empty seats at his lunch table and downcast eyes as he's passed in the hall. If you're that quarterback, you find out pretty quickly who your real friends are.

Most Democrats and the vast majority of what passes for the intelligentsia in this country simply don't understand the appeal of President Bush, much the way Republicans never got that Clinton guy. So now that the president's public approval numbers have fallen from historic highs, there seems to be great salivating at the notion that the country is finally getting what has been so obvious to them for so long and that a national day of reckoning is nigh.

This view of Bush transformed from Leader of the Free World into Election Jeremiah is so wrong that it should be laughable. Except that a lot of Republicans seem to believe it's true. They're certainly behaving that way on the campaign trail, acting as though they're sure that a spy camera photo of a candidate caught with the president will be a death sentence in November. And that's a problem -- not for the president but for the candidates and the GOP.

One of the dirty little secrets of politics is that presidential endorsements rarely have any positive impact. In 1986, Republicans went into the off-year elections believing that their strongest card was the popularity of President Ronald Reagan, especially in those red states. It seemed axiomatic to end the campaign by giving the ball to the Big Guy, and race after race closed with endorsement spots of Reagan doing what he did best, looking straight at the camera and suggesting that if you wanted to help him, you'd vote for Candidate X. And then most of those candidates proceeded to lose. In one tight race after another -- such as those involving GOP Sens. Mack Mattingly of Georgia, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama and Paula Hawkins of Florida -- candidates saw their numbers flatten when the Reagan endorsement aired, then spike downward to defeat. These were all states in which Reagan's numbers were through-the-roof positive, but voters seemed to say, "Thanks very much, Mr. President, it's nice that you're supporting a fellow Republican, but what does that have to do with me?"

The flip side of the marginal positive effect of a presidential endorsement is the limited negative impact that comes from being associated with a president of your own party, regardless of his popularity. It's hardly a secret that if you're a Republican candidate you happen to be in the same party as Bush. If there's a Republican candidate out there who thinks he or she can slip that little factoid past the electorate, well, good luck, and good riddance.

Candidates need to worry less about Bush and more about their own agendas. The truth is that there is ample reason to believe that the president is well-liked among voters who might consider voting Republican. But the nation is fighting a tough and nasty war and there's little joy in the day-to-day slog of winning that war. Which makes it just like every other war the nation has waged.

My advice to Republican candidates is that they first must come to grips with the rationale for their own election: Why me? Why now? If in their hearts they disagree with the Iraq war, they should call it like they see it, but without trying to nuance a response seven ways from Sunday in hopes of pleasing all sides. That's French for ending up like John Kerry. Elections are littered with losers who have a need to be loved by everyone.

But I'd also caution any GOP candidate: Remember that Bush is the dominant political figure of the day and, well, he is president and head of the Republican Party and you're not. He has a distinct worldview that places the United States in the lead in a war against Islamic fascism. Whether you believe he is destined to be remembered as one of America's great presidents, as I do, or you think we have adopted a disastrous course, trying to ignore the president is likely to be as successful as a Democrat trying to ignore FDR in 1936. Running for the House or Senate and not having a clear and articulated position on Iraq is a recipe for disaster.

The War on Terror is clearly the new Cold War, the key in which our politics is to be played for a very long time. As a human, it's permissible to be conflicted. As a politician, conflicted equals confused -- and that's a particularly unappealing position when men and women are dying. The problem for Democrats is that they really believe this War on Terror is worth winning, they just wish somebody else would do it.

That's the same mix of hand-wringing and handshaking that the Europeans engaged in while the Serbs set up rape camps a four-hour drive from Harry's Bar in Venice. It has the dubious virtue of being both understandable in motive and reprehensible in result.

The simple truth is that Republican candidates should be running basically the same race regardless of the president's poll numbers. Which is to say running their race. There is a rumbling out there that this may be a terrible year for Republicans, one of those tsunami elections like those in 1974 or 1994. And, who knows, the rumbling may be right. But if so, that will have less to do with the president's personal approval rating than the general mood of the country and the election agenda. If this year turns out to be a referendum on the Iraq war and the numbers on Iraq are negative, those in both parties who support the war are likely to suffer.

The president understands this perfectly well. He is not trying to change the subject from Iraq and the fight against terrorism, which may very well be the best way to pump up his job-approval numbers. What he's doing is the hard stuff of continuing to make the case for why the Iraq war is essential and explaining its role in a global and historical sense. Like the war itself, it's a long, tough haul but he's out there doing it day after day.

In the 2000 campaign, we made a commercial that opened with then-Gov. Bush looking at the camera and asking, "Why don't the hard things get done? Because they're hard." So now he's doing the hard things. If Republican candidates run from this rare display of leadership just because there are a lot of rough days, they most likely will lose.

GOP candidates should take their lead from the president -- take a stand and fight. As I often heard the late Lee Atwater say, "It's time to dig the ditch we're going to die in."

Stuart Stevens is an author and a partner in the Stevens and Schriefer Group, a Republican media firm that advised George W. Bush's presidential campaigns.