President Obama helps the public to stop seeing his party as soft on national security.
National Journal Saturday, May 30, 2009 by James A. Barnes
Have Democrats finally recovered from the weak-on-defense image that has lingered since the days of the Vietnam War? Two of the party's leading pollsters argue that they have.
Stanley Greenberg and Jeremy Rosner base their conclusion on the results of a national survey they conducted recently for Democracy Corps, a survey research operation that Greenberg help found to advise the party on strategy and positioning
The poll's central finding is that in the wake of President Obama's election, the traditional Republican advantage on national security issues has evaporated. Asked May 10-12 which party is better at handling "national security," 43 percent of respondents said Republican and 41 percent said Democratic -- a statistical tie.
That contrasts with the 14-point advantage (49 percent to 35 percent) that Republicans held last August in a Greenberg-Rosner poll, and the 29-point edge (54 percent to 25 percent) that they held six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Moreover, the latest survey indicates that Democrats now hold sizable leads over Republicans on several components of national security, such as diplomacy. Asked which party is superior at "improving global respect for America," respondents gave Democrats a whopping 36-point edge. On "working with our allies around the world," Democrats ended up with a 27-point margin.
The new Democracy Corps poll also found that Democrats hold advantages -- albeit slimmer ones -- on the questions of which party would do a better job with "the situation in Afghanistan" (12 percentage points) and "the situation in Iraq" (10 points).
Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who co-founded Resurgent Republic, a GOP research consortium intended as a counterweight to Democracy Corps, says that independents are more likely to side with his party on such key issues as torture, interrogation investigations, and the use of force in Afghanistan. He plays down some of the Democracy Corps findings, noting, "Any time you attach the words 'Republican' and 'Democrat' to anything these days, the Republican position is going to be disadvantaged because of the damaged Republican brand."
In the Democracy Corps survey, Republicans and Democrats tied on the question of which party would do a better job conducting "the war on terrorism" (41 percent each). And the GOP still held a commanding, 18-point lead (53 percent to 35 percent) on "ensuring a strong military."
"Obama's very strong handling of national security [issues] has effectively erased the [partisan] gap on national security," said Rosner, who was a senior director for legislative affairs on the staff of President Clinton's National Security Council.
Perhaps most impressive is the substantial bipartisan support that Obama garnered in the Democracy Corps poll for his handling of Iraq and Afghanistan. A decisive 73 percent of those surveyed said they approved of his plan to withdraw combat troops from Iraq by August 2010 but leave as many as 50,000 service members in the country in supporting roles until 2011. (Even a majority of Republicans, 59 percent, approved.)
An identical 73 percent gave a thumbs-up to the president's Afghanistan strategy, which includes increasing the number of U.S. combat troops. On that, 67 percent of Republicans approved.
At the same time, the poll revealed potential stumbling blocks for Obama and his party on national security topics where public opinion is divided.
For example, 48 percent of likely voters in the survey agreed with the statement "I do not believe we have a clear military mission in Afghanistan," while 46 percent thought "our military mission in Afghanistan seems pretty clear to me."
Likewise, 50 percent of likely voters thought that torture of suspected terrorists was justified, while 45 percent agreed with Obama that it wasn't. A solid 55 percent said that it was "not useful to launch a bipartisan inquiry into the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding." Only 32 percent said that it was "important" to launch such a probe, which Obama doesn't want but which many congressional Democrats have endorsed.
Democrats could also be hurt, Ayres believes, by the recent flap between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the Central Intelligence Agency over the CIA's briefings on interrogation techniques. "The more the Nancy Pelosis of the world are in the spotlight," he said, "the more independents will be persuaded that Republicans share their values more than Democrats. Winning back independents is the key to Republicans' rebuilding their majority."
But Rosner dismisses the idea that the Pelosi-CIA dustup hurts Democrats' standing on national security. "I would be stunned if stories about the speaker changed that in any way," he said.
Wendy Sherman, who was a counselor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and held the rank of ambassador as Albright's chief troubleshooter on hot spots that included North Korea, said she was not surprised by the poll's good tidings for Democrats. She said that the presidential election was at least in part a referendum on Obama's contention that the Bush administration had led the country in the wrong direction on national security.
But Sherman, a veteran Democratic political operative who has seen the party's candidates struggle with national security issues, says that Democrats still have "a lot" of work to do to maintain their newfound strength. "One has to institutionalize that sentiment," she said. "Events sometimes conspire to challenge what people hope for and believe. And President Obama has set a high bar."
She praised the deliberative way the Obama team has handled national security issues but cautioned, "It's early for any administration."
Meanwhile, Carroll Doherty, associate editorial director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, noted that independents are generally siding more with Democrats on national security in polls these days, but they can be unpredictable. "In the event of a new crisis, it's hard to know how they'll track," he said.
One element of Obama's approach to national security that appeals to many independents is his pursuit of bipartisanship. Although he cultivated the anti-war wing of his party during the Democratic primaries and caucuses last year, Obama balanced that by touting his ability to work with Republicans. Early in his general election campaign, he ran a TV spot that emphasized his close working relationship with the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana. After winning the White House, Obama quickly chose then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his more hawkish rival in the Democratic presidential nominating contest, to be secretary of State. He also asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who oversaw the troop surge in Iraq that Obama once criticized, to stay on. And Obama recently tapped Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to be ambassador to China.
But at times Obama's balancing acts not only send mixed signals to the public, they also elicit mixed signals from the public. Last month, the president delivered a speech in Prague that embraced the idea of eliminating all nuclear arms. The Democracy Corps poll found that likely voters approved of the job the president was doing on "America's policies on nuclear weapons" by more than 2-to-1; but by nearly the same ratio, those respondents also thought that eliminating all nuclear weapons "is not realistic or good for America's security."
To buttress his initiatives, Obama continues to court the GOP foreign-policy establishment. At a May 19 photo op in the White House, Obama sat next to former Secretary of State George Shultz, who served under President Reagan and endorsed Sen. John McCain of Arizona in last year's presidential contest. Shultz was at the White House for a meeting of foreign-policy heavy hitters that included former Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, D-Ga.; and former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry. They discussed upcoming strategic arms talks with Russia.
Afterward, Obama pointedly told reporters, "I don't think anybody would accuse these four gentlemen of being dreamers." He also touted the bipartisan nature of the group. Shultz, who dealt with the politics of the nuclear freeze during the Reagan years, said that the issue was "really nonpartisan." The former university professor added, as if instructing the new president, "This is a subject that ought to somehow get above trying to get a partisan advantage."
It's hard to tell whether Shultz was just quibbling over language or whether he sensed that Obama was subtly trying to use the aura of bipartisanship for political leverage. But whatever Obama's motives, there are always partisan consequences to the way that voters perceive the performance of the commander-in-chief.