Costs of War: Return of the ‘Security Gap’?
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
The conventional wisdom that Brown’s victory represented a repudiation of the Democrat’s proposed healthcare reform law - effortlessly echoed by a succession of pundits on Washington’s Sunday TV talk shows - is, as so often the case, almost certainly wrong.
Indeed, among the 56 percent of Massachusetts voters who listed the healthcare issue as their top concern, Scott’s Democratic opponent, the hapless Martha Coakley, actually led by a 7 percent margin, external pageaccording to a Rasmussen Reports poll.
Instead, the evidence, and the more intelligent analysis, seems to suggest that Democrats in the state found themselves on the wrong end of the self-same frustration with politics-as-usual and concern about the looming US fiscal crisis that swept Barack Obama into power a little over a year ago.
For instance, the Rasmussen polling data shows that Brown led Coakley by more than six-to-one among those who picked taxes as their top issue, and four-to-one among those who named deficit reduction.
And Brown also led by more than two-to-one among the small group of voters who picked national security as their key issue.
Soft or smart on terrorism?
In a external pagehagiographic interview conducted this week by Fox News, Brown's top campaign strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, said the candidate had been “from the first day of his campaign back in September […] talking about national security concerns, about how we have to treat terrorists as enemy combatants and not as ordinary criminals.”
Fehrnstrom also identified the Christmas Day bombing attempt as one of two key events, along with the passage of the Senate health care reform law, which “helped crystallize the issues for Scott in a way that added fuel to his campaign.”
It has been axiomatic among American political scientists for half a century that the Republicans are seen as ‘tougher’- and therefore better - on foreign policy and national security issues than Democrats. But many saw the disastrous Bush adventure in Iraq, and Obama’s determination to fight a ‘smart power’ war against al-Qaida and its extremist allies as having turned that around.
There has been a relentless drumbeat from Republicans charging that Obama’s administration is somehow ‘soft’ on terrorism - slamming the decision to charge alleged Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in criminal court, rather than as an enemy combatant, for instance.
There is no doubt these criticisms have a popular resonance among American voters. external pageAnother Rasmussen poll found 58 percent favored the use of “water-boarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques […] to gain information from” Abdulmutallab. Only 31 percent were opposed. That is in line with external pageearlier polling data suggesting broad support for the use of such techniques.
The good news for President Obama is that these attacks do not appear to be getting any traction on him. external pageFrank Rich in the New York Times noted at the weekend that “Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues - despite the relentless hammering from the [former vice president Dick] Cheney right.”
Indeed, external pagedata from a Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken earlier this month before the Massachusetts special election last week, found that the president’s approval ratings were higher on terrorism and Afghanistan than on any other issue - and his ratings on handling terrorism had risen slightly since Christmas.
Rising pessimism
But even the good news may not be that good. Looked at in detail, and in historical context, the data shows Americans more pessimistic than ever about their conflict with al-Qaida.
Only a bare majority, 51 percent, believe that the US campaign against terrorism is going very well or fairly well. That is the lowest figure ever since pollsters started asking the question in January 2002. It is a statistically insignificant one point below where it was in 2006, at the height of the violent and bloody insurgency in Iraq.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the poll also found historically low levels of confidence in US intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. Indeed, the data suggests Americans believe - by a 53 to 44 percent margin - that the reforms which created the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence have not made them safer.
And the really bad news for the president is the bigger picture. The fact that only a third of Americans continue to oppose torture suggests that Obama has not succeeded in changing the optic on national security. Americans appear simply not to get that, external pageas he eloquently put it, “our nation is stronger and more secure when we deploy the full measure of both our power and the power of our values - including the rule of law."