The Democrats, who always fear that the machiavellian Republicans have an October surprise up their sleeves to grab a quick jump in the polls for the November election, can hardly believe their luck. All three of this year's October surprises went their way. The first was Bob Woodward's new book State of Denial that depicted the Bush team as feuding incompetents who have botched Iraq. The second was the intervention by veteran Republican senator John Warner, chairman of the armed services committee, who came back from an Iraq trip to say things were getting worse and talking of "a change of course"—a direct challenge to Bush's "stay the course." And the third and most dramatic was the resignation of Florida congressman Mark Foley after the exposure of his salacious emails and instant messages to underage congressional pages. As always, it was the cover-up that was most damaging, as the discreet mafia of gay Republican staffers leaked the fact that the party leadership had known of Foley's little weakness, possibly for years. It may be premature, but the Democrats are now convinced that on election day, at least one and maybe both houses of congress will come their way, along with the committee chairmanships and the right to subpoena all the president's men (and Condi) for gruelling public interrogations into the Iraq mess. The Dems also anticipate the sweet sound of cash pouring into their campaign coffers from all those chastened lobbyists who ignored them in the bitter decade in opposition.
The end of the Dowd thesis
Apparently the traditional rule of democratic politics—that all elections are won in the middle ground of undecided voters—no longer holds true. Call it the Dowd thesis, after the former Democratic party activist Matt Dowd, who became a Republican through his friendship with Karl Rove, and then became President Bush's chief pollster in the elections of 2000 and 2004. Remember that in the 2000 campaign, Bush ran as a moderate "compassionate conservative" who was, in the traditional way, looking for undecided voters in the middle ground and seeking support among ethnic groups like blacks and Hispanics, not usually noted for Republican sympathies. But as he analysed the results of that razor-edge election, Dowd found something very strange in the small print of the statistics: "[The data] showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years had gone from 22 per cent of the electorate to 7 per cent in 2000," explains Dowd. "And so 93 per cent of the electorate… was going to be already decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among the 6 or 7 per cent, but you could lose [them] and win the election, which was revolutionary."
Rove was convinced and the political consequence was that the Republicans decided to devote half their available resources to getting out the vote, rather than 80 per cent of their resources to persuading the undecided voters. This transformed American politics, not only because of this massive shift in campaign resources, but also because it changed the entire thrust of the campaign. Rather than running to the centre, the Bush campaigns in 2002 and 2004 ran to the patriot right and pushed hot-button topics and wedge issues like gay marriage and stem cell research to energise their core supporters. They sought to polarise the electorate, rather than spouting the usual rhetoric about uniting them. But if in November the Republican base proves to be too few in numbers to win and the Dowd thesis collapses, expect the hunt for the centre ground to resume.
Here comes Bloomberg
Neither party is happy with its front-runners for the presidency in 2008. A lot of Democrats fear Hillary cannot win, while Republican conservatives dislike John McCain. This anxiety seems to lie behind the sudden flurry of interest in New York mayor and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, whose chief aide Kevin Sheekey is urging a White House run. Although nominally a Republican with a decent record running the big apple, the centrist and socially liberal Bloomberg would have trouble getting his party's nomination. So the buzz in New York is that having seen how well his chum Joe Lieberman is doing running as an independent in Connecticut, Bloomberg is thinking about a third-party bid. As a running mate, Bloomberg appears to be courting Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Hispanic Democrat who seems all too ready to be seduced. Bloomberg made a point of attending Villaraigosa's inauguration and in September he was back in LA, attending fundraisers for Arnold Schwarzenegger and hailing Villaraigosa as a visionary mayor. Villaraigosa returned the compliment. According to Tumbler's sources in the New York labour unions, who like Bloomberg a lot, they have been given a peek at polls by Bloomberg's staff that show an independent Bloomberg campaign doing "one helluva lot better than Ross Perot," who got nearly 20 per cent of the national vote in 1992. Another Bloomberg backer is legendary LA police chief Bill Bratton, who made his name by slashing crime as New York police commissioner from 1994-96. Bratton said Bloomberg had "run the most complicated city successfully for five years now—he would be adequately prepared to assume the responsibility of president." And funding will be no problem. The Forbes list of the mega-rich puts Bloomberg's personal wealth at $5bn.
