Homeland Politics:Not as helpful to Republicans as they think

National Review Online ^ | 6/21/02 | Ramesh Ponnuru

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Many Republicans think that the president's proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security — and in the process to reorganize a large chunk of the federal government — is, in addition to whatever merits it may have as a policy matter, a smart political move. Congressional Democrats will be too tied up with the reorganization to talk about Social Security, the environment, prescription drugs, and other issues they would like to use in this fall's campaigns. Instead, they'll be talking about security, a Republican issue.

Tod Lindberg makes this argument in this week's Standard. It seems to be plausible to Dick Gephardt, who has said he wants to complete the reorganization by September 11, presumably because he wants to be able to move to Democratic issues during election season.

But there are two reasons to think that this analysis is wrong. First, while it's true that the public trusts Republicans more than Democrats on security issues, it's not clear what salience this fact will have in the midterm elections. A Republican candidate cannot expect to get a boost from merely belonging to the same party as a popular president conducting a war — unless, that is, there are security issues where his positions are superior to his Democratic opponent's.

Can homeland security be such an issue? Under certain circumstances, perhaps. Democratic congressman Steny Hoyer was quoted today saying that Bush is trying to use the war on terror "as a ruse" to undermine federal workers' civil-service protections. Those protections, among other things, make it hard to reassign Border Patrol agents to where they are most needed. So Republicans could justifiably charge that the Democrats are putting their constituents' job security ahead of national security. Will they? Probably not: Tom Ridge just assured Ted Kennedy in hearings that he has no intention of undermining collective-bargaining agreements.

If there's no fight to be had — or no fight that engages the passions of anyone outside Washington — then the reorganization merely gives the Democrats a piece of the security issue. Democrats can't order strikes on Baghdad, and they're not going to get to Bush's right on, say, indefinite detentions for suspected terrorists. But Paul Wellstone can talk about fiddling with the organizational charts just as comfortably as Trent Lott can. Instead of exploiting Republicans' strength on security issues, reorganization dissipates it.

Second, midterm elections are famously "base elections," in which the parties win or lose based on whether they mobilize their core supporters rather than appealing to fence-sitters. There are plenty of security issues in which the Republican base takes an interest: military action against Iraq, missile defense, arming pilots, racial profiling, border control, and even accountability for errant security officials. Whether the Coast Guard is fully or partly in a Department of Homeland Security is not one of these issues. If anything, conservative voters are likely to be unhappy about the expansion of government that is almost certain to occur with reorganization. At the same time, Dick Gephardt doesn't really need the floor of Congress to tell core Democrats that they have to vote to fend off Republican polluters, Klansmen, foes of the elderly, etc.

There's another point to be made about the Republicans' hope that homeland security will drown out the debate on domestic issues. So far, this is shaping up to be the fourth election in a row in which Republicans have wanted to avoid a debate on such issues. Since 1994, Republicans have tried to win on the basis of pork, incumbency, local issues — and serendipity. In 1998, Republicans hoped that disgust with President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and perjury about it would win them elections even as they did next to nothing to make the case that the scandal was a reason to vote for them. In 2000, they banked on "Clinton fatigue" again. This time, the war on terror is supposed to help Republicans in the absence of any attempt to demonstrate that electing Republican senators and congressmen will in fact improve national security. Maybe it will work. But in the last three elections, Republicans lost congressional seats.

The war should be a political issue, and maybe it could even be a realigning one. ("Realignment" — when's the last time you heard a Republican use that word?) But first Republicans would have to be willing to commit politics.

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"But first Republicans would have to be willing to commit politics."

They better.