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A worsening deficit and a soft economy forced Ronald Reagan to reverse some of his tax cuts in the early 1980s. But confronted by the same setbacks on his watch, Bush pushed through two more. Faced with opposition and criticism, Bush just raises the ante. His $87 billion Iraq-Afghanistan package brought a gulp from even his staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill. And when polls showed Americans were increasingly disturbed about some of the provisions in the Patriot Act, which they viewed as a dangerous subversion of civil liberties, he sent John Ashcroft on the road to defend it and push for expanding it.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR 2004
Karl Rove carries in his briefcase a laminated card to help remind him of the central dynamic of the 2004 election. It shows five neat bar graphs for each presidential election since 1988 and last year's midterm election. Republicans are in red, Democrats are in blue, and between them a shrinking wedge of green shows the independent voter, a segment that has diminished with each contest.
The re-election campaign is in a higher gear than you might think a year before voters go to the polls. The Bush campaign is on track to raise $200 million, which, perhaps more than anything else, is a testament to the devotion of his supporters. And at Bush's suburban Virginia campaign headquarters, manager Ken Mehlman has taken to asking staff members who knock off early, "Does Howard Dean's staff go home at 6?"
The new wisdom about this election is that the side that wins will be the one that does a better job of ginning up its base. And while more voters are calling themselves independent, they are voting like partisans. In 2000 and 2002--the election that put Bush in the White House and the one that tested what voters think of his presidency--ticket splitting reached its lowest level in 30 years, according to a study by David Kimball of the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Some suggest this will only get more pronounced. Laura Stoker, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that as more young voters who grew up during the culture wars that raged from the '60s through the '80s start going to the polls, they will be even more strongly polarized than their parents.
Against this landscape, both sides are focusing on their core supporters. Republicans are signing up those who share their values but haven't registered, in particular chasing young, mobile Evangelicals with a message aimed straight at their hearts. "It's the heavy, heavy red-meat stuff," says a top Republican activist. On the Democratic side, Dean's rise to the top of the heap is not so much the raising up of an obscure ex-Governor from a tiny state as it is evidence that a candidate can ride the tidal wave of Democratic indignation. The Democratic base still burns with resentment at what they saw as Bush's theft of the 2000 election. With his barely concealed anger and his transparent disdain for Bush, Dean is, in fact, the Hate Him candidate, the one Democrat who has been able to channel the rancor many hard-core Democrats feel toward the President.