In 2004, torture and beheadings were the norm in Iraq and America was still stunned by the bloated bodies floating through flooded New Orleans [bold mine-DL]. ~Michael Crowley

Now I know that some parts of New Orleans weren’t exactly a picnic before Katrina, but I’m pretty sure the flooding and the general disaster took place in the summer of ’05 following Mr. Bush’s re-election.  What’s strange about this is that Katrina wasn’t that long ago, but all of the failures of the Bush administration are here being shoved into the first term, as if to drive home the perversity of Bush’s re-election.  As much as I agree with much of Crowley’s article, this jumped out at me as not just obviously wrong, but bizarrely so.  After all, who could forget when Katrina hit New Orleans?   

It would make the argument that voters care more about character than issues (a generalisation I endorse, by the way) much stronger if you could show that the public ignored both the folly of Iraq and the disaster of the government’s post-Katrina response and put Bush back in office, except that the first time that Americans went to the polls for federal elections after Katrina was in 2006.  Don’t get me wrong–there was more than enough incompetence in the first term to prove the point that a majority will back a terrible incumbent on “character.”  The picture is complicated a bit by the fact that Bush won re-election by one of the smallest margins for a sitting President on record, but he did still win when he had no business doing so. 

In presidential elections, I do think character tends to trump issues, and this is something that I don’t like admitting, because it makes the worst parts of politics–the “atmospherics,” the trivia, the obsession with biography–into the most important parts, while the things most important to governing are given short shrift.  This is a reminder that most of the people complaining most loudly that the media is ignoring “the issues” and focusing on trivia are really just saying that they want to hear about “the issues” to the exclusion of everything else, which makes them unlike a large number of voters.  (This also makes clear that when journalists claim that this kind of trivia matters to the public, they aren’t just engaged in self-serving rhetoric.)  No one can explain why McCain and Huckabee were the most viable Republican candidates if we believe that “issues” are decisive and take precedence–one candidate had no “issues” except the “surge,” and the other one had the FairTax and that was about it.  The biggest failure among the major GOP candidates was the ueber-wonk who was thrilled at the prospect of laying out his policy proposals in PowerPoint format.  It’s true that there are “issues”-oriented voters, quite a few of them, but they are consistently outnumbered by the others.