'Partisan gap' grows: a good sign for Bush?

"You have a political civil war going on that will only intensify as we get closer to the election," says a senior Republican Senate aide. "You can see, on the Demo-cratic side, a lot of this is driven by the success of the Dean campaign, which broke through when he expressed raw emotional anger.... Candidates who don't show that anger haven't done as well."

Ever since Bush took office under the cloud of a disputed election, he has faced the venom of the Democrats' most partisan members, who believe his presidency is illegitimate. That, plus his conservative agenda, helps explain why the first three months of his presidency showed the greatest partisan gap in job approval of any president in modern history, says Jacobson, the professor at UCSD.

Clinton also took office under a bit of a cloud, as he won with substantially less than a majority of the vote. The "draft dodger" and "womanizer" labels made his election controversial. "He was elected, but Republicans didn't think him legitimate," says Jacobson. "They immediately organized to get him."

John White, a political scientist at Catholic University in Washington, sees a cultural dimension to the passionate dislike some Democrats feel toward Bush.

"Bush's persona really angers Democrats, who see him as high-handed and arrogant, especially on the Iraq war," says Professor White. "He's like the 1950s retro dad - he knows best, don't ask, don't worry, don't tell. This really angers the Democratic base. They don't have much in common with him, culturally."

If there was one moment from the 2002 campaign that will galvanize Democrats this time around, it was the reelection race of Sen. Max Cleland (D) of Georgia, a Vietnam vet who lost three limbs in the war. He seemed a shoo-in to keep his seat, until his opponent impugned his patriotism over establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and ran an ad connecting him to Osama bin Laden.

"Inevitably when Democrats talk about the election, they talk about Georgia and Cleland," says the Republican Senate aide.

Some political analysts suggest the 2004 race will be a "battle of the bases" - that each party will work to get its core supporters to the polls and won't reach for the middle at all. But with each party now seeming equally energized, and the electorate still split down the middle, the race for the center may be joined. Thus, the yearning of some Democrats for newly announced candidate Gen. Wesley Clark to catch fire with his centrist platform.

As for Bush, political analysts expect him, too, to reach out to the center. Watch for that, they say, during the Republican convention in September 2004, when the election is less than two months away.

Page: 1 | 2