Dan Rather"IT'S THE economy, stupid." So went the watchwords for Bill Clinton's successful 1992 campaign against George Bush senior. People vote on the status of their pocketbooks, not on foreign policy, the thinking goes, and with rare exceptions this political conventional wisdom has been borne out.
Indeed, it can be argued that the last time foreign policy decided an election was 1968, when the Vietnam quagmire led President Lyndon Johnson to not seek re-election, paving the way for division in the Democratic Party and, ultimately, the victory of Richard Nixon. Some might also point to 1980, when the American hostages in Iran doomed Jimmy Carter's presidency, but it can be argued that the hostage crisis only served to increase the margin of victory for Ronald Reagan.
No matter which year you choose, though, it's been a long time since foreign policy has turned a presidential election. And as we look toward the stretch run from Iowa to Election Day 2004, it might be worth considering that it has also been a long time since United States foreign policy so dominated the headlines and White House priorities as it has during President Bush's administration.
Scarcely a day goes by without some mention of Iraq on the front pages of America's biggest newspapers, or in the top segments of the network newscasts. Sometimes the news is good, as with the recent capture of Saddam Hussein. But more often than not the news is bad -- another Black Hawk down, another soldier killed by a roadside explosive device or rocket-propelled grenade.
So far, these negative developments have been cast by the administration and by many others as incremental, rather than strategic. Any soldier's death is tragic, this thinking goes, but we are winning the war in Iraq, and America is safer for having fought it. And so far that has been the prevailing view, at least as reflected in opinion polls, of the American public. As long as it remains so, and barring any dramatic developments in Iraq or elsewhere in the world, voters might be expected to turn their attention back toward domestic concerns, such as health care and, yes, the economy.
But what if something came along to change that view of Iraq? Would the steady beat of bad news from Iraq then start to sound like the tune of a different drummer?
These questions may have turned from academic to practical last week with the release of a scathing evaluation of the Iraq War and its overall place in the global war on terrorism, one that called the Iraq campaign "unnecessary" and a "distraction" from a war on terror that has become "a hopeless search for absolute security."
More stunning than the criticisms themselves was their source -- they didn't come from the stump speech of a Democratic presidential candidate but from a report issued by the Army War College. And though the report is the product of an independent professor, it is rare for the college to lend its imprimatur to such critiques of wars in progress.
In and of themselves, academic papers have about as much power to alter an election as you or I have to change the weather. But if "it's the economy" ever does give way this year to "it's the foreign policy" - and regardless of the outcome such a shift might produce - we may well end up looking back on the Army War College report as a key factor in the change. Not because of whatever facts it may contain, but because of the source, and because of the alternate lens it might provide for viewing the news we see every day.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor. Copyright 2004 DJR Inc.
