President Bush has spent the past week doing his best to get through one anniversary before nudging the attention of voters towards another.
The first was that of Hurricane Katrina, which smashed its way over the Gulf Coast last year and blighted the Administration with a reputation for uncaring incompetence. The second anniversary is that of 9/11 when, for a time at least, Mr Bush symbolised America’s unity and defiance in the face of a terrible new enemy.
The President spent Monday and Tuesday trawling through still-devastated areas of Mississippi and New Orleans, taking full responsibility for failures at “all levels” of government while insisting that billions of dollars were being spent to rebuild the region. Doubtless he also hoped that this determinedly ground-level tour might help to dissipate vivid and bitter memories of his Air Force One flyover last year, when he was filmed peering down like a medieval monarch on his suffering subjects below.
But in the second half of the week he put post-Katrina penance behind him. Instead, he set about rekindling a very different image of his presidency when, five years ago, he had stood in the rubble of the World Trade Centre — megaphone in one hand, burly fireman in the other — and warned that those responsible would soon be hearing from America.
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On Thursday he told veterans at the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, that as “the horror of that morning grows more distant there is a tendency to believe that the threat is receding and this war is coming to a close”. Such a feeling was natural and comforting — and wrong, said Mr Bush, who will take every opportunity to ram home the point in the coming weeks.
The President will mark the fifth anniversary of September 11 by visiting all three sites where terrorists crashed hijacked planes: the Pentagon, rural Pennsylvania and New York City. Thursday’s speech was the first of a series on the War on Terror and will continue next week, culminating on September 19, when Mr Bush addresses the United Nations General Assembly.
Although the White House does not like to admit it, all this activity has much to do with a third red-letter date looming on the calendar: the mid-term elections on November 7, when the Democrats hope to wrest control of Congress from the Republicans.
The war in Iraq will inevitably be the backdrop for this campaign, but Katrina and 9/11 will be the hub for each party. The Democrats believe that a connection has been made in voters’ minds between last year’s hurricane and Iraq, which they claim have been similarly characterised by chaos, the waste of billions of dollars and preventable deaths. They talk of the Administration’s “Katrina foreign policy” and say that Mr Bush jumped into Iraq too early but arrived on the Gulf Coast too late.
The Republicans are seeking to restore the increasingly brittle links between 9/11 and the decision to remove Saddam Hussein. A recent opinion poll indicated that a narrow majority of Americans now believe the War on Terror to be separate from the conflict in Iraq. Still more are dissatisfied with Mr Bush’s handling of Iraq and pessimistic about the prospects of America prevailing against the insurgents.
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The President, however, is still credited as being strong on national security, and about two thirds of voters do not support an immediate withdrawal by US troops. Such contradictory impulses, together with the inability of the Democrats to agree on what exactly they would do about Iraq (their leaders have proferred a vague plan for a phased redeployment of troops) are regarded as an opportunity by the Republicans.
This week they set out their revised political strategy against what they call the “Defeatocrats”. No longer do they seek to claim that everything is going well in Iraq. Instead they emphasise what is at stake, giving warning that handing victory to the terrorists in Iraq would open a new front on the homeland itself.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, led the charge by citing the lessons of Nazi Germany. He said that those calling for withdrawal of troops “believe somehow that vicious extremists can be appeased”.
Mr Bush, in his speech to the American Legion on Thursday, adopted a slightly softer tone by emphasising that he was not questioning the patriotism of his opponents. But he went on to describe the War on Terror as the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”. He said: “As veterans you have seen this kind of enemy before. They’re successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century.”
The Democrats and the liberal press have cried foul. “There’s a reason why high-school debaters are warned away from Nazi analogies because,” sniffed a leader in the Los Angeles Times, “they’re almost always disproportionate.”
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But it might yet help the Republicans to defy the polls and retain control over at least the Senate this autumn. Although critics say that this Administration is incompetent at handling hurricanes and fighting wars, no one disputes that it is pretty good at elections.