President Bush staged his simple message Thursday night–declare (not quite) victory, move on–in a symbolic setting aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln after one of the more extravagant joy rides in the history of Oval Office travel.
His words were predictable, indeed their essence had been leaked the day before, but the moment nonetheless marked a dramatic pivot by the administration, a hoped-for transition from war to peace, and, at least as important politically, toward postwar prosperity.
With a beautiful sun behind him, a shimmering Pacific Ocean beneath him, and hundreds of cheering sailors in front of him, Bush aired, in effect, the first commercial of his re-election campaign. Though he sounded notes of caution about unfinished business in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism, he made plain that voters could trust him on the issue that matters most: their personal security. He offered proper grace notes to those assembled in uniform.
There was nothing new in what he said, yet it carried a collective weight. In his father’s time, he might have simply said, “Stay the course.” Wisely, he chose different language. Democrats were put on notice that Bush would readily drape himself in patriotism and his successes as commander in chief.
Bush announced the start of the war from the White House. He effectively declared the end of it from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Somewhere, Michael Deaver, the image impresario for President Ronald Reagan, must have been smiling.
The prologue started hours earlier, with Bush arriving as the co-pilot of an S-3B Viking jet, wearing a flight suit and looking the part of a well-aged fighter jock, complete with a postflight swagger.
When a president really doesn’t have much new to say, better to say it with pictures.
There is risk in that strategy–as some Democrats were quick to note–but also potential reward. The scenes from the flight deck served up potent images in the montage that will become the wallpaper of Bush’s re-election campaign, images that suggest leadership, strength and success.
Bush didn’t talk much about the so-far-inconclusive hunt for weapons of mass destruction or the lack of proven links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and terrorists bent on destroying the United States. Nor did he dwell on Hussein’s fate, another of the unpleasant uncertainties of the otherwise military triumph in Iraq. He merely suggested that time would allow for vindication.
The cable news channels fawned over Bush in prespeech coverage. How would the plane land? Would Bush, who flew fighter planes during his Vietnam-era hitch in the Texas Air National Guard, actually take the controls? Which of the four lines of cable would catch the plane’s tailhook?
And in the context of military triumph, the pictures worked for Bush in ways that they have not for others who have tried to drape themselves in the uniform. This was clearly not Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis ludicrously riding around in a tank.
Bush didn’t actually declare outright victory because to do so would have triggered obligations, returning prisoners of war and not hunting down enemy commanders among them, that the administration is not ready to meet.
But his statement–that “major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and its allies have prevailed”–had the same effect. No one ever expected to see the victor and the vanquished sitting across a table negotiating peace in this war.
To say that major military operations are complete is to grasp the obvious firmly. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld conveyed essentially the same message in a tour of Afghanistan. Neither he nor the president spoke much about the long-term.
For the president, there is another clear objective: to steer the nation to a postwar mindset.
If his early trips following the cessation of large military operations are a guide, expect Bush to try to keep at least five toes on a war footing and the rest in a position so he can think and talk about the economy.
The mix of the message is intentional. Play up the success in war and try to parlay it into building confidence in the electorate that the president can work the same magic with the economy. In another sign of postwar thinking, the Republican-controlled House passed a $15 billion AIDS package, a measure the president embraced in the name of compassionate conservatism.
He received some help this week from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Though Greenspan spoke with his typical density, it was fair to conclude that the chairman was saying that there was reason for hope that the economy is likely to do better in the months to come. Had Bush’s father had such assistance in the 1992 campaign, it is at least plausible to say that he would have won his bid for re-election.
Having learned from his father’s haunting lesson of not appearing to care about the economy–at least in the minds of a plurality of voters–the son sends signals at every opportunity that he is focused on the economy.
The USS Lincoln, deployed for nearly 10 months in the Persian Gulf, is among the first ships to return to home port from the war in Iraq. Bush’s choice of that the carrier as the venue for his speech was thus emblematic of the pulling away from Iraq and the shift in focus to domestic concerns.
It is clear that Democrats have their sights trained on the economy, its weaknesses, and Bush’s accountability for the state of things. One presidential aspirant, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) criticized the president for “going out to the aircraft carrier, far off at sea,” while countless Americans are suffering under a languishing economy.
“What people want to see is the president clearly facing the economic needs of the country, whether it’s unemployment or health care,” Kerry said. “There are a host of backdrops that would lend themselves to that.”
But the backdrop Thursday evening in the Pacific Ocean was to thematically close out the focus on war. And it might not be as easy as a canny address from an aircraft carrier. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Bush’s speech represented merely “an important milestone in a very long story.”
Lugar warned that while troop numbers are drawn down in Iraq and family reunions with soldiers are beginning, “it is important to remind Americans that this is just the beginning of freedom for the people of Iraq. … We must help Iraq become a successful state, and not another failed state. We will need to have staying power.”
Bush seemed to address that concern, at least rhetorically, when he said, “Our coalition will stay until our work is done.”
But the speech also marked the point where the workload for the White House will shift from overseeing a war in Iraq to waging another campaign at home.