There is a spectre haunting George W. Bush, the spectre of Jeanette Rankin. You may not have seen the lady’s name in the newspapers recently but in December 1941 this legislator from Montana made it to the national headlines as she was booed by her own colleagues. The United States had been drawn into World War II thanks to the stunning sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, yet Rankin refused to vote for war — the only member of the US Senate or the House of Representatives to do so.It was political suicide, but Jeanette Rankin was actually carrying on in the tradition of the founding fathers of the American republic. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is,” George Washington said in his farewell address, “to have with them as little political connection as possible.” America, John Quincy Adams warned, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” In 1916, even as World War I embroiled Europe and Asia, Woodrow Wilson won re-election on the slogan ‘He kept us out of the war’. In 1940, President Roosevelt promised, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” And in 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s most potent advertisement would contrast images of a girl counting daisy petals with a mushroom cloud to suggest that Republican Barry Goldwater was the ‘war candidate’.The point is that, unlike Victorian Britain — which actually coined the term ‘jingoism’ — the United States has historically been deeply ambivalent on the necessity for war. And any political party which took the country into a war suffered in the electoral battleground. It did not matter if the war was successful, as in World War I or the 1991 Gulf War, or ended in a stalemate, as happened in Korea and Vietnam; the American voter simply resents being dragged off from his or her peacetime pursuits.George W. Bush forgot the lessons of history when he was quick to declare a “war on terror” in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Winning re-election has now become a matter of drawing a distinction between “war” and “terror”. It is a simple equation: Bush wins if the American intervention in Iraq can be passed off as action against “terrorism”, Kerry moves into the White House if Americans see it as “war”.Two years ago, as the American military machine began to set its sights on Iraq, the catchphrase dinned into the world’s ears was “weapons of mass destruction”. The rationale for action against Iraq was the fear that Saddam Hussein was building up a cache of biological, chemical and nuclear arms. The Bush White House changed its tune when it became apparent that the feared weapons of mass destruction were simply not there. (Or have not been found anyway.) It then became a race to convince the American electorate —the rest of the world really does not matter — that the Saddam Hussein regime had backed terrorist attacks on the United States. This effort has been so successful that one poll suggests that 42 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. (Something that the Bush administration never mentioned at the time.)Iraq has dominated the American foreign policy debate to the extent that the actual masterminds behind the onslaught on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been forgotten. Leave alone Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, even their principal lieutenants in the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have thus far escaped the talons of the American eagle. This has left President Bush open to the dual charge that he has not only mismanaged the (unnecessary) war in Iraq but also forgotten the hunt for the actual perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.There is, however, a second historical tradition in American politics: the reluctance to unseat a sitting president in the midst of a war. As Abraham Lincoln reputedly said, “You don’t change horses in the middle of the stream!” Lincoln himself, of course, was the beneficiary of this fact when he was re-elected in the middle of the Civil War, just as Roosevelt would be in the 1944 election. While the Democrats lost the contests of 1920, of 1952, and of 1968, it was not Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Lyndon Baines Johnson who failed but their successors — James Cox, Adlai Stevenson, and Hubert Humphrey. On the other hand, the Bush White House is trying to play down the fact that the United States is at war thus levelling the playing field once again.“I knew that we were asked to vote for a commercial war, that none of the idealistic hopes would be carried out, and I was aware of the falseness of much of the propaganda.” That could be the Kerry platform today but it was actually Rankin voting against Wilson’s war resolution in 1917. She would stand by her beliefs once again 24 years later, when as a venerable 88-year-old woman, she lead a march against the Vietnam War in 1968.Few remember the senators and representatives who reviled Jeanette Rankin on that December day in 1941. But the fact that her native state of Montana placed her bust in the US Capitol after her death indicates that her influence outlasts those of her detractors.However history takes time to be written, and John Kerry awaits not the verdict of scholars but the decision of the voters a mere fortnight hence.
