As Voters Increasingly Focus on Economic Concerns, War Becomes a Proxy for Other Issues
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 3, 2008
CORPUS CHRISTI, Tex. -- Five years into a deeply unpopular war in Iraq, one of the surest applause lines for a Democratic candidate has been a promise to bring home the troops. But as Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign in Texas and Ohio ahead of Tuesday's critical primaries, they are encountering an electorate that has largely moved on.
With the economy and health care now registering as voters' top concerns, the candidates have discovered that it is not enough simply to oppose a war that has cost the nation the lives of 3,963 soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 9 percent of likely Democratic voters in Ohio ranked the war as the most pressing issue.
Instead, the candidates use the ongoing conflict to underscore a host of other issues, from national security and domestic spending to what it says about their own judgment. That point is driven home in the fierce exchange of recent television advertisements and campaign trail assertions in Texas and Ohio, states with strong connections to the military.
Obama (Ill.) points to his early opposition to the war as proof of his wisdom on foreign policy. Clinton cites her understanding of complex issues related to Iraq as a reason she would be best prepared to lead "on Day One."
They use the war as a proxy to discuss national security, describing Iraq as an example of misguided foreign policy and failed counterterrorism strategy.
Obama and Clinton (N.Y.) also ask audiences to imagine what $120 billion -- the approximate annual cost of the conflict -- would buy. They contend that bringing the troops home would liberate cash for economic investment, infrastructure improvements and, Clinton argues, improved care for hundreds of thousands of war veterans and their families.
A combination of somewhat better news from the war zone and worsening economic prospects at home is pushing the candidates beyond the templates that guided their strategy when the campaign began.
"Obviously, it has changed in a year," senior Obama strategist David Axelrod said. "The reality is that Iraq is extraordinarily important, but I think economic issues have come to the fore in the last few months."
Steve Stivers sees it every day as he campaigns for a congressional seat in Ohio.
"Usually, I bring it up unsolicited because nobody's talking about it now," said Stivers, a Republican state senator and an officer in the Ohio National Guard. Making the rounds ahead of Tuesday's primary for an open House seat, he hears more about jobs, gas prices and health insurance.
"It's weird," Stivers said. "The economy is just overshadowing everything. When people are worried about jobs and their pocketbook, they don't want to think about things across the world."
One factor is that fewer U.S. warriors are dying.
In the six months before the November 2006 elections, 416 American troops were killed in Iraq. In the six months ending Feb. 24, the death toll was 244.
"It's not as front-burner, because the violence has been down," said Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), who made the war central to his message as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 and is now campaigning for Obama. "It doesn't mean that people believe we should be there forever, but it doesn't have that urgent, chaotic definition to it."
A year ago, as the Democrats began to campaign, the war was front and center in the heartland. Funeral by funeral, voters of all kinds were losing faith in President Bush and the war effort.
As the Democratic candidates labored to distinguish themselves from one another, they often defined themselves by their view of the invasion before it happened. Clinton and former senator John Edwards (N.C.) voted in 2002 to authorize the war. Clinton defended her vote; Edwards apologized for his.
Obama was in the Illinois state senate. He pointed then, as he does now, to an October 2002 speech in which he opposed the invasion, calling it "a dumb war, a rash war." The war was central to mailings in Iowa and early canvassing there. His campaign thinks his position caused many voters, especially young people, to take a close look at his candidacy.
"I think it's a fair analysis that the war has helped Obama more than it has helped Clinton in the Democratic primary," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "He is purer on that question."
But on the campaign trail, the distinctions about what the candidates would do next in Iraq have become blurred.
"They quibble over which one didn't show up to which vote, but their policies are the same," said Jody Young, an Army reservist and federal prosecutor in Brownsville, Tex., who listened as Kerry backed Obama. "I would like to think we can win honorably or at least remove ourselves honorably, the Vietnam mantra."
The candidates, mirroring the mood, increasingly talk about the war in terms that stretch beyond the fighting itself, making its conduct a bridge to domestic issues.
In domestic terms, the candidates point to the war's cost, suggesting that taxpayer money directed to Iraq could make a difference at home if it were invested in the nation's battered roads and bridges or spent on schools and social services.
The argument makes sense to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who has heard about the war's budgetary impact while listening to constituents at 85 roundtables since early 2007. He said he hears from business owners and government officials that federal support for such things as police and utility improvements is drying up.
"They are starting to understand this economically," said Brown, who defeated Republican incumbent Mike DeWine in 2006 with a message that touched on the war, the economy and corruption. "They are seeing that, because of tax cuts and because of the immense cost of the war, they aren't getting what they need locally."
Public fixation on the war may be waning, but two of the candidates' chief surrogates think it could revive.
Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, campaigning for Clinton in Texas, thinks the war and its many permutations are already returning to prominence, thanks to the emergence of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as the prospective Republican nominee. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and is a strong supporter of the president's recent Iraq tactics, and Clark said he can be expected to play on voters' fears in the general election.
"All we have to have," Clark said in a telephone interview from Galveston, "is a freshly elevated threat level or an incident somewhere -- or a message from Osama bin Laden, as we did in 2004 -- to reawaken fear in the minds of many voters."
Kerry, too, sees a strong possibility for Iraq to return to center stage.
Iraq is "held together by chewing gum and Band-Aids," he said in an interview between campaign events along the Texas border. "They say we're drawing down. We'll see."
Polling director Jon Cohen and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
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