The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president’s undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush’s Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn’t matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what’s Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naïve. C'mon, they’d say, you don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?
To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea–after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation–but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.
As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed–thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry’s case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.
This bit from the same essay is probably more generally edifying.
This guy paints it as a bad thing, but for the most part I think the attitude here is completely reasonable. “This is a really hard problem, and I don’t believe that
$your_favorite_politicianis actually able to fix it,” turns out to be true the vast majority of the time. With regards to Bush in particular, the decision to invade Iraq was atrocious and inexcusable, but the stuff that happened afterwards was basically what I think any president would have done, and I don’t believe that Kerry would have been much better.
“This is a really hard problem, and I don’t believe that
$your_favorite_politicianis actually able to fix it,” turns out to be true the vast majority of the time.
Wholly accurate but misses the point.
With regards to Bush in particular, the decision to invade Iraq was atrocious and inexcusable…
This is the point.
If elections are going to work at all, you need to have some system whereby the voters are motivated not to elect people with a track record of making atrocious decisions, and whereby politicians have some incentive not to make atrocious decisions in the first place. (You also need some system for figuring out which decisions count as “atrocious,” but…one step at a time.)
“Bill Dumpty can’t fix the atrocities that have already been perpetrated, so I might as well vote for Bob Humpty the Atrocious, since at least he panders to my cultural subsector with his rhetoric” – this leads nowhere good.