Yesterday’s DLC commentary on the president’s big Iraq speech suggested that yet again George W. Bush is demonstrating he’s the ultimate one-trick pony as a leader in time of war. He’s capable of communicating “resolve,” and not much of anything else.So I was more than a little interested in today’s Washington Post front-pager by Peter Baker and Dan Balz reporting that Bush is pursuing this we-make-no-mistakes tone of “confidence” on the advice of a political scientist who recently joined the National Security Council staff.The staffer in question, former Duke poli sci professor Peter Feaver (who also worked at the NSC early in the Clinton administration), is best known for a study he did with Duke colleague Christopher Gelpi on war leadership and U.S. public opinion. According to Baker and Balz, their big conclusion, based especially on Vietnam, is that the key factor in public support for a war is the perception that we’re winning, with presidential assurances on this front being particularly important.It’s not completely clear to me whether this characterization of Feaver and Gelpi’s views is accurate; some of it seems to be coming from unnamed “Bush aides.” And the piece also quotes Gelpi as saying that Bush’s latest speech was insufficiently specific in laying out a strategy for success in Iraq.But still, it’s more than passing strange that the White House would hire a political scientist to tell Bush exactly what he wants to hear in terms of his communication strategy on Iraq. It sounds sort of like scouring the earth for a dietician willing to tell a fat man that his habit of eating five pounds of ice cream a day is a good weight management technique.More importantly, it’s troublesome to learn that the White House thinks presidential spin on Iraq is more important to public support than the actual facts on the ground. All the “resolve” in the world won’t help Bush if the insurgency cannot be quelled, and if the Iraqis cannot achieve a political settlement that will make it possible for a stable government to function.The initial reaction to Bush’s speech doesn’t seem to indicate it had much of a positive effect on public opinion, and in part that’s because his expressions of “resolve” were insufficiently linked to the kind of specifics that could make them credible. Maybe it’s time for someone on the White House staff to break through the atmosphere of willful self-deception and suggest a communications strategy that’s based more on facts and less on spin. In other words, maybe Bush should be told to lay off the ice cream.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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June 20: Democrats Hate Their Leadership, But Still Like Their Leaders
Sometimes you have to look a little deeper than the headlines to understand polls, and I did so at New York this week:
A new Reuters-Ipsos poll provides the unsurprising news that rank-and-file Democrats are displeased with their party’s leadership. The numbers are pretty stark:
“Some 62% of self-identified Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that ‘the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.’ Only 24% disagreed and the rest said they weren’t sure or didn’t answer.”
Some of the more specific complaints the poll identified are a little strange. “Just 17% of Democrats said allowing transgender people to compete in women and girls’ sports should be a priority, but 28% of Democrats think party leaders see it as such.” This is largely hallucinatory. With the arguable exception of those in Maine, who earlier this year fought with the Trump administration over the power to regulate their own school sports programs, most Democrats in the public eye have given this sub-issue (inflated into gigantic proportions by demagogic ads from the Trump campaign last year) a very wide berth. It’s not a great sign that Democrats are viewing their own party through the malevolent eyes of the opposition.
But beyond that problem, there’s a questionable tendency to assume that changing “the leadership” will address concerns that are really just the product of the party having lost all its power in Washington last November. And to some extent, the alleged “disconnect” between party and leadership is exaggerated by the lurid headlines about the poll. For example, “86% of Democrats said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority, more than the 72% of those surveyed think party leaders make it a top concern.” That’s not a particularly large gap, and, in fact, there are virtually no Democrats in Congress who are not grinding away like cicadas on the message that Republicans are trying to cut taxes on “wealthy Americans and large corporations.”
The more fundamental question may be this: Who, exactly, are the “Democratic leaders” the rank and file wants to replace? It’s not an easy question to answer. I am reasonably confident that a vanishingly small percentage of Democrats could name the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, despite some media stories about turmoil at the DNC since his election.
According to a recent Economist-YouGov survey, 36 percent of self-identified Democrats had no opinion of the “Democratic leader” closest to actual power in Washington, Hakeem Jeffries, who is very likely to become Speaker of the House in 2027. Of those who did have an opinion, 51 percent were favorable toward him and 13 percent were unfavorable, which doesn’t sound much like a mandate for “replacing” him. In the same poll, Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, had a 48 percent favorable and 28 percent unfavorable rating among Democrats, which is surprisingly positive given the massive negative publicity he earned for botching a confrontation with Republicans over a stopgap spending bill in March. Indeed, the favorability ratios for every named Democrat in that poll are a lot better than you’d expect if the rank and file were really in a “throw the bums out” kind of mood: Bernie Sanders is at 82 percent favorable to 8 percent unfavorable; Pete Buttigieg is at 62 percent favorable to 9 percent unfavorable; Elizabeth Warren is at 67 percent favorable to 12 percent unfavorable; Cory Booker is at 56 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable; Gavin Newsom is at 56 percent favorable to 17 percent unfavorable; and Gretchen Whitmer is at 49 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable.
Democrats obviously don’t have a president to offer unquestioned leadership, but back in the day, losing presidential nominees were often called the “titular leader” of the party until the next nominee was named. Under that definition, the top “Democratic leader” right now is Kamala Harris. Democrats aren’t mad at her, either: Her favorability ratio per Economist-YouGov is a Bernie-esque 84 percent favorable to 10 percent unfavorable. Her 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, comes in at 65 percent favorable and 13 percent unfavorable.
These findings that aren’t consistent with any narrative of a party rank and file in revolt. The source of Democratic unhappiness, it’s reasonably clear, is less about party leaders and more about the party’s dramatic loss of power, even as Donald Trump has asserted the most massive expansion of totally partisan presidential power in U.S. history. No new set of leaders is going to fix that.
Barring a really nasty and divisive nomination contest, the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will become the unquestioned leader of the party, at least until Election Day. Jeffries, as noted, could enormously raise his profile if Democrats flip the House in 2026, and midterm elections could create new stars. Other Democrats could have big moments like Cory Booker’s after his 26-hour speech deploring Trump’s agenda or Gavin Newsom’s during his toe-to-toe messaging fight with the administration over its assault on his state. But in the end, Democrats on the ground and in the trenches won’t be satisfied until their words can be backed up with real power.