Changing the game

By E.G. | AUSTIN

MY COMMENT from Monday that Barack Obama "is probably getting re-elected" was controversial, so I'll unpack the thinking here. The death of Osama bin Laden obviously hasn't created a national consensus around re-electing Mr Obama, and it hasn't eradicated every objection to the first term of his presidency—including, as several commenters pointed out, the entirely fair complaint that Mr Obama has broken his promise to overhaul the Bush-era security state. Nor can Mr Obama claim all the credit for Mr bin Laden's death—the successful mission was the culmination of a decade-long effort by members of both parties and America's national-security apparatus. Finally, the 2012 election isn't going to be a referendum on the war on terror; economic concerns will probably be more important than national-security issues. Hardly anyone sees terrorism as the most important issue facing America.

For these reasons and others Mr Obama obviously could be defeated next year. I'm predicting that it's now less likely for two reasons. The first is that the strike against Mr bin Laden changes fundamental aspects of the political narrative—about Democrats in general, and about Mr Obama himself. The second is that the likely Republican candidates, and the vocal Republican base, have been focused on criticising Mr Obama personally, and some of their complaints have now been rebutted.

With regard to the Democrats, the issue is that for decades they have been tagged as a party of weaklings: soft on crime, squeamish on terrorism, and content to leave America's security to the mercy of liberal fanaticism about the emerging world order. You may think this criticism unfair, or that the Republican approach to law and order is thuggish, but it's clearly been an electoral albatross. Spare a thought for John Kerry or Michael Dukakis. It didn't keep Mr Obama from being elected the first time, but it would have been revived as a theme in any opponent's 2012 campaign. Just Sunday, for example, the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds was musing that Mr Obama is so weak on foreign policy he "could only wish for such success" as Mr Carter. In killing Mr bin Laden the current Democratic administration has acquired a national-security credential.

For Mr Obama himself, the strike provides a tacit rejoinder to the explicit and implicit arguments that he's somehow too weird or foreign to be president. I actually think Mr Obama has more responsibility for the position he's been in than we usually acknowledge; he was the guy who made his own biography the central selling point of his first presidential campaign, and he pushed his personal experiences as a political credential more aggressively than most candidates. But although he stoked the interest in his background, it's been twisted into paranoid and bigoted forms, as evidenced by the obsession over his birth certificate. Ordering the strike that killed the al-Qaeda leader can be taken as evidence that despite his time in the madrassa, Mr Obama is not in fact a terrorist sympathiser.

The strike also challenges the notion that Mr Obama hasn't been assertive enough as president. One recurring complaint about the president is that he is not a strong advocate for his own ideas, placing too much responsibility in the hands of congressional Democrats and giving away too many concessions to Republicans. Killing Mr bin Laden was an unforced event. People weren't clamouring for it, and most of them, including perhaps George W Bush, were resigned to the idea that it wouldn't happen. This does not mean Mr Obama gets a free pass from now on. But we can expect some boost in his supplies of voter confidence, in addition to a jump in the more mutable area of approval ratings.

Let's put this in different terms using the Rasmussen tracking poll as an indicator of how people feel about the president. Before the news about Mr bin Laden, 26% of voters strongly approved of Mr Obama, and 36% strongly disapproved. The total split was 49% approving and 50% disapproving, meaning that 23% of voters somewhat approve, and 24% somewhat disapprove. There's an emotive component to the strong feelings, and that does reflect policy considerations, most notably health-care reform, but it also includes the personal animus discussed above. That means Republicans have had an incentive to play to their base, because that's where their greater relative advantage lies—in the ferocity of the opposition, rather than its size. And although moderates determine the outcomes of elections, the base influences the issues that are foregrounded in the primary process and the tone of proceedings. The news about Mr bin Laden changes things. We would expect it to diminish the strength of the disapproval, if not its size. That could push Republicans to a different strategic approach, one more focused on moderates, as they enter the primaries.

With those considerations in mind, I would argue that when we're trying to predict whether an event will influence an election, the important thing isn't strictly what happened. It's what happened given the expectations and assumptions about the players in question. If the expectations and assumptions change, so does the game. That's what happened this weekend. (And that's why this is different than, for example, George H.W. Bush's quick success in the Gulf War.) If the Republicans are going to win they have to update their strategy. Not a theoretically impossible shift. My colleague argues below that they will do it; certainly, as I said yesterday, there are some candidates who would be better at it than others. Either way, the clock is ticking.

(Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)