There’s a spectre haunting the McCain Campaign, the specture of an incredibly unpopular President:
Hurricane Gustav has spared Republicans one potential problem — President Bush and Vice President Cheney are skipping tonight’s first session of the Republican National Convention to remain on hurricane watch in Washington. Tying Bush, Cheney and their dreadful approval ratings around the neck of this year’s Republican ticket has been the Democrats’ dream all year.
But the president’s decision to stay away from St. Paul this week won’t solve John McCain’s Bush problem. During their convention in Denver, the Democrats made perfectly clear their intention to run against “McSame” and “George W. Bush’s third term.” Republicans in St. Paul can’t hide the fact that they are picking the person they hope will be Bush’s successor.
Wait — isn’t McCain different from Bush? Tim Russert, the late moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” asked McCain precisely that question three years ago. “No,” McCain replied firmly, “no.”
He elaborated: “The fact is that I have agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I’ve been totally in agreement and support of President Bush. . . . My support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people. And I’m particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline, a number of other issues. So I strongly disagree with any assertion that I’ve been more at odds with the president of the United States than I have been in agreement with him.”
In politics, timing is often telling. When McCain gave this account of his political intimacy with the president in June 2005, nearly half the electorate approved of the Bush presidency, and only a quarter disapproved. Perhaps more relevant to McCain at the time, 84 percent of Republicans in a Washington Post-ABC News poll still held a favorable view of Bush. McCain was thinking hard about running for president. In the months that followed, he decided to run and decided initially at least to run as the heir to Bush, hoping to win the support of the Republican establishment still loyal to the president.
Of course, that has changed significantly over the past three years and, today, nearly 2/3 of the public disapproves of the job that President Bush has done. That’s why the Democrats are continuing to tie McCain, the man who ran against Bush in 2000 and nearly ran as John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, to Bush.
To some extent, it appears to be working:
The latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll taken in mid-August asked voters if they thought a President McCain would “mainly lead the country in a new direction, or mainly continue in George W. Bush’s direction?” Fifty-seven percent said they expect McCain to follow the Bush line, including 57 percent of independents. Within that group, more than 70 percent said they planned to vote for Obama.
And history argues that McCain’s chances aren’t good:
Since 1960, candidates running on the ticket of the party that is completing two terms in the White House, hoping to win a third, usually lose. Richard M. Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976 and Al Gore in 2000 are the cases in point. Only George H.W. Bush defied this rule in 1988, in the midst of an economic boom, “but nobody has ever been elected to a third term for the same party in bad economic times,” Beckel noted. “No one’s ever been elected to a third term when you have an unpopular war. And most importantly, no one has been elected to a third term with an unpopular incumbent president. . . . Yet McCain has all three of those problems.”
Political scientists who try to reduce election prognostication to mathematical formulas agree that thanks largely to Bush, McCain’s situation is grim. One is Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, who uses a complex mathematical formula based on the sitting president’s approval rating on July 1 of the election year, the economic growth rate in the second quarter of that year and a “time for a change” factor based on the number of terms the incumbent party has held the White House. This year, Abramowitz’s formula — which has predicted the winner of the popular vote correctly in every election since 1988 — says Obama will win easily in November.
And yet, the polls remain close and if there’s one thing that’s been true about the 2008 Presidential Election to date, it’s been the fact that conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold true — if it did, then we’d be talking today about a Presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
