When we move beyond these grandiose themes, the top two items on Democratic candidates' agendas are negative and backward-looking, as though politicians could undo past events. The Washington Post considered it news that President Bush "did not discuss two of the most common Democratic criticisms: the more than 500 soldiers killed in Iraq and the 2.3 million jobs that have been shed by the economy during his term"
Opposition to the Iraq war is about as useful as opposing the wars in Vietnam and Korea. The serious question, then and now, is how to make a graceful exit. U.S. troops never did leave Korea, and the strategy for a partial retreat was to leave thugs in North Korean for this generation to worry about. President Nixon was initially thought to have had a "secret strategy" for getting out of Vietnam, but this turned out to be a few more years of bombing followed by an ignoble retreat. If any Democratic candidate has a secret plan for getting out of Iraq, it might be helpful to share the secret.
The second most boring Democratic complaint is that the economy has not yet recovered all the jobs lost since the previous cyclical peak. This seems designed to deceive voters into imagining the recession was somehow caused by tax cuts in 2002 and 2003, even though the stock market began crashing in April 2000 and manufacturing output and employment started shrinking three months later.
Many countries are still struggling to recover from that world recession, but the United States is not one of them. According to the household survey, 138,479,000 people said they had a job in December, up from 137,300,000 in March -- an increase of nearly 1.2 million jobs in just nine months. A narrower survey of company payrolls increased by 278,000 jobs from August to December. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.3 percent in June to 5.7 percent in December.
The director of the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut, put together some figures for The New York Times showing conditions at the time that former presidents sought a second term. The unemployment rate during the final quarter of the year before the election was 5.9 percent for George W. Bush, 5.6 percent for Clinton, 7.1 percent for Bush senior, 8.5 percent for Reagan and 6 percent for Carter. As many studies have shown, no measure of unemployment ever had any predictable effect on presidential elections.
Besides, the current unemployment rate is the second lowest of the seven elections Kohut examined. The percentage of Americans who think the country "is on the right track" was recently at 45 percent -- far ahead of Clinton before his second term (23 percent) and ahead of any of the other would be second-termers except Reagan (51 percent). Democrats might want to reconsider their talk about "changing direction." Changing direction sounds like turning left, but voters in other two-term elections defined "right track" as turning right.
One other thing the president's rivals all share is an urge to raise taxes a lot. Clark, Dean and Lieberman are quite explicit about taxing the stuffing out of moderately high salaries. Edwards, Dean and Lieberman are equally explicit about greatly increasing tax rates on dividends and capital gains.
Their arguments for abusing the tax system to penalize success and savings are the exact opposite of those John F. Kennedy once used against the high-tax policies of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. In any electoral contest between Jack Kennedy proteges in the Republican Party and the Eisenhower-Nixon copycats who now dominate the Democratic Party, the latter will never stand a chance.