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Monday, Oct 11, 2004

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Kerry must learn from Reagan

By Tristram Hunt

Mr. Kerry's challenge is to link the $200 billion expenditure on Iraq to faltering economic confidence at home.

IN HIS fading years, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright embarked on a final grand project. Invited in 1957 by King Faisal of Iraq to design a new opera house, Wright expanded the brief into a plan for Baghdad complete with museums, parks, university and authentic bazaar.

The 1958 revolution meant that none of it was built. But the ever-resourceful Wright simply offered the design to a new client. And today, the Baghdad opera house is the Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University: an example of Wright's versatility and the forum for next week's presidential debate. Under the arches of a lost Iraqi skyline, George W. Bush and John Kerry will meet in debate for the final time.

With just three weeks left to the election and Bush still fractionally leading, a decisive blow is what is needed for the final head-to-head. In Arizona, Mr. Kerry's strategy to focus so determinedly on foreign policy could play either way.

Despite the losses, it would take a substantial shift for this electorate to dismiss their commander-in-chief mid-war. Arizona is, after all, a State which grew rich on the back of the military-industrial complex.

Its clear skies proved ideal for pilot training, drawing in high-tech firms in their wake. Today, it retains that martial spirit, with an array of military bases and culture of service — not least in the form of its popular senator, Vietnam veteran John McCain (whom many now regard as the leading Republican candidate for 2008).

Moreover, since the 1950s Arizona has been seen as the birthplace of modern Conservatism. It was from this rugged landscape that Barry Goldwater emerged. His anti-government credo — `Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice' — set the modern Republican party on its course. Under Goldwater's guidance, power drifted from the Rockefeller moderates to the free market individualists of southern and western America.

Although Goldwater lost catastrophically to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, his anti-Communist, laissez-faire ideals would triumph in Ronald Reagan. And now, in Bush, many Arizonans see a south-western compatriot ready to defend gun-ownership, gas-guzzling SUVs, and `traditional values'.

But while Mr. Bush continues to lead Mr. Kerry in Arizona by 10 points, hope is in the air for Democrats. Recent polls have shown a marked increase in undecided voters, as well as another 500,000 people registering to vote. And, in a State that only went Bush by 6 per cent in 2000, that could be enough to make the difference.

The final debate is in theory focussed on domestic policy, but will inevitably slide back towards Iraq. So far, one of the more effective tactics of the Kerry campaign has been to emphasise how America is bearing 90 per cent of the war's costs. This week, Mr. Kerry's challenge is to link that $200 billion expenditure to faltering economic confidence at home.

The middle-class boom of the Clinton years is a thing of the past. House prices, college fees, health costs, even petrol prices are creating what Mr. Kerry exaggerates as `a crisis of the middle class'. Those concerns, together with worries over the fiscal deficit and mounting unemployment, need to be connected in the popular imagination with the Iraqi war mismanagement.

To do so, Mr. Kerry might follow the lead set by Goldwater's apprentice, Ronald Reagan. In his 1980 debate with President Carter, held amid another U.S. foreign policy debacle in the Middle East and rising costs of living, Reagan suggested to his audience: "It might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores? Is America as respected as it was?"

Then, as now, the answer was `no' and a one-term incumbent was ousted from office. This Wednesday, another act of regime change might be enacted under the arches and palm trees of a Baghdad skyline. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

( NOTE: Tristram Hunt is a visiting professor at Arizona State University.)

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