How the GOP Could Win
There are two ways to predict the winner of the 2008 presidential race: Check the polls or read some history. The polls tell you that with George Bush’s approval ratings terribly low, with the war in Iraq becoming more and more unpopular, with the GOP lacking a dominant candidate, and with the party divided over immigration, social issues and even religion (Mitt Romney’s Mormonism), the next president is bound to be a Democrat. History begs to differ.
The Year is1972, which ended with 56,844 Americans killed in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the winner in that year’s presidential election was Richard M. Nixon. He won 49 of 50 states — and the war raged on.
Now we come to the current race. The war in Iraq is not — or not yet — an issue for Republicans. With the exception of Ron Paul, they all more or less support the president. It is among the Democrats that the war is a divisive issue — John Edwards sniping at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Obama sniping at both. Everyone now opposes the war, but the issue is not so much their positions as much as the intensity of their feelings. Anti-war Democrats in key primary and caucus states, particularly New Hampshire and Iowa, will not vote for a lukewarm anti-war candidate. This accounts for why Clinton recently reversed herself and voted to end funding for the war. The one presidential candidate from the Senate who did not was Joseph Biden. He said he opposed the war but saw no choice but to fund the troops. By Richard Cohen
This is where history looks to be repetitive. The GOP is adept at painting Democrats as soft on national security. And while most Americans would like the war to end, they do not favor a precipitous withdrawal and neither have they forgotten Sept. 11, 2001 — the entirety of Giuliani’s case for the presidency, after all.
Will History trump the polls? It will, if as in the past, the Democratic Party so wounds itself fighting the war against the war, it nominates a candidate beloved by a minority but mistrusted by a majority. It has happened before.
Originally By Richard Cohen