Bush rides high as 2004 begins

Democrats, however, have a problem in this election year. As presidential scholar David Gergen points out, there have been only three presidential elections since World War II in which foreign affairs played a secondary role. They include the two Clinton elections and the election of George W. Bush three years ago. How the world has changed from those benign days when it looked as if it really didn't matter if a president lacked the stuff to be commander in chief!

Bush entered the White House deeply inexperienced, but it has to be said that he has grasped the elusive cloak of leadership. Like his policies or not, he strikes the nation as a man capable of taking the ship of state into stormy seas. "Bush defined himself in Afghanistan and in his response to 9/11," Gergen says. "That was the moment."

Bush's would-be opponents suffer from the hoary old cliche that Americans trust Democrats with the mummy issues -- health, education, social welfare -- but look to the Republicans for the daddy issue of national defense. And the question of who best can defend us in the age of terror is what Gergen calls "the threshold test."

The Democrats who could best pass that test, John Kerry and Wesley Clark, have not yet captured the public imagination. As Gergen says, today Bush is holding "all the high cards, including the Ace of Spades."

Of course a year is a lifetime in politics, and many things could go wrong to upset the Bush locomotive. A big economic downturn, an inability to get a grip on the Iraqi insurgency, even another 9/11, are political unknowns. But the trouble with running as an antiwar candidate, for which frontrunner Howard Dean has amassed a following, is that not even he is saying we should pull out and bring the boys home. The Democrats are saying we have to stay, but we can do it better. That may be true, and responsible, but it doesn't give an antiwar candidate the same purchase as Dwight Eisenhower's "I will go to Korea" and end the war.

If Bush is reelected, his second administration will undoubtedly not be graced with the presence of Colin Powell. The old soldier's year-end explanations and justifications seemed simply to underline how he has been outmaneuvered and undercut by the Pentagon and his president.

One can only hope that Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, will be asked to fall on their swords for the terrible advice and incompetence they showed in Iraq. Almost every bet they made has proved wrong, and although Bush would never admit it publicly, he must be wondering how his Pentagon could have so ill-served him. If Bush is reelected one can only hope that the sobering experience of Iraq will still some of the loose talk of empire that so enchants the neocons.

President Bush is a better politician than his father was, but instinctively further to the right. He is also more outspokenly religious. Howard Dean has begun to put Jesus into some of his speeches, but he will have a long way to go before he can out-Jesus George. And that is another advantage that the Republicans hold in God-fearing America. Likewise, Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, knows a pro-Likud posture toward Israel will please the Christian right and help pry some Jewish money out of Democratic counting houses.

With their think-tanks and their greater intellectual energy, the Republicans dream not only of maintaining their dominance over both the Congress and the executive branch but increasing it -- perhaps for a generation to come. If the Democrats are to derail these ambitions they are going to have to come up with a better alternative than they are projecting today as this election year begins.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.