Run on National Security
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Election Day 2004 was one of the best for Republicans in years. Election Day 2005 – consisting of two governor’s races, one mayoral race, and a slew of referenda in California – was one of the worst.
You will see much hue and cry about these results, and what they mean for the 2006 elections, when all seats in the House of Representatives, about a third of the Senate, and a slew of gubernatorial races are on the ballot. This week Democrats are heartened; Republicans feel as if they’ve hard their teeth kicked in.
What changed? In 2002, the dominant issue for Republican Senate and House candidates was fighting Al Qaeda, establishing a Department of Homeland Security, and the potential war with Iraq. One year after September 11, Democratic Party leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt made the strategic decision to essentially ignore these life-and-death issues and instead talk about one of their perennial safe topics, prescription drugs. They got their butts handed to them, tied in a nice little bow, losing control of the Senate and making no progress in the House.
In 2004, the second consecutive cycle that was good for the GOP, with Republicans running alongside President Bush on a simple message: “We are the hawkish party; we’re better at fighting terrorists; the other guys can’t keep you and your family safe.” Mr. Bush was reelected, and the GOP gained seats in the House and Senate.
This year, the issue of national security was absent from the races – except perhaps the New York City mayor’s race, where there was some grumbling about whether Mayor Bloomberg was overreacting to terror warnings about the subways. New Yorkers overwhelmingly decided they were happy with his leadership, and that he was the right man to run the city that remains the preeminent target of Al Qaeda.
Well, these are governor’s races, right? Republican candidates had no opportunity to run on the issue of fighting terror, right?
Wrong. Last year, the governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey, didn’t resign because he was gay – he resigned because he put his lover in charge of the state’s homeland security.
Republican candidate Doug Forrester did periodically mention that Democratic lawmakers had awarded millions of state homeland security funds based on politics and ignoring applications for funds for towns with nuclear reactors, airports, and water treatment centers; but he failed to make that the centerpiece of his campaign. Instead, his last move was the over-the-top attack ad featuring Jon Corzine’s ex-wife. He failed to exploit this ready-made message: “The state’s Democrats are going to get you killed because they can’t resist playing politics and their usual habits of cronyism.” It’s one thing to appoint friends to, say, the board of the Museum of Science and Trucking. It’s another when the issue is protecting citizens from terrorism.
One could argue that in Virginia, Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore tried to evoke the traditional “daddy party” advantage of toughness, spending much of the final weeks of the campaign attacking his opponent’s opposition to the death penalty. But the death penalty in and of itself is not a pressing issue – unless your opponent, like retired General Wesley Clark, says he prefers that Osama bin Laden be imprisoned in the Hague than be executed. (DNC Chairman Howard Dean said during last year’s campaign he had no opinion on whether Osama ought to be executed.)
But as Democrat Tim Kaine campaigned on basic quality-of-life issues like traffic and infrastructure, the Republican again missed an opportunity to take these “mommy issues” and turn them into “daddy issues” – in an emergency, the state needs to be able to evacuate areas quickly, get rescue crews in, and have quick, efficient methods for getting its citizens around. Virginians know this and remember this; when the Pentagon was hit on September 11, it was Virginia firefighters who were among the first to respond while routes out of the District of Columbia were snarled with evacuated federal employees. A Republican candidate could have pledged to put the state’s surplus into disaster readiness and infrastructure improvements, and neutralized Kaine’s advantages on this issue. A security-comes-first campaign would resonate among the state’s thousands upon thousands of Pentagon employees and military personnel.
In California, the only lesson to Republicans may be that not even the Terminator can survive an onslaught of more than $100 million in union campaign spending. Nonetheless, as Governor Schwarzenegger continues to attempt to reform his state’s government, he too, can make the case that his state needs lean, efficient, agencies and programs that can adapt and handle a terrorist attack – not bloated bureaucracies that get paralyzed in a crisis. (You know, like France’s.) In the post-September 11 world, the basic nuts and bolts of functioning government are too important to be left to business-as-usual political machines and special interests that prefer the status quo.
The lesson of post-September 11 elections has been clear: When the dominant issue in voters’ minds is protecting their families from attacks and pursuing the terrorists, Republicans win. When it’s a “mommy party” issue like education, health care, or traffic, Democrats win.
Mr. Geraghty, a contributing editor to National Review, is writing a book on how the September 11 attacks affected American voters, to be released next year by Simon and Schuster.