If the public is willfully ignorant, yes
Follow the Leader
By JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL
WASHINGTON
In this year's presidential campaign, no wisdom is more conventional than the assumption that George W. Bush's re-election effort will succeed or fail along with the American mission in Iraq. If Iraq collapses, the reasoning goes, the Bush presidency will soon follow. And yet here was the president gaining ground, in several polls released this week, in the face of what were certainly the worst three weeks in Iraq since the United States deposed Saddam Hussein a year ago.
The actual shift in the numbers was small — only a matter of a few percentage points, just about the margin of error in the polls. And it might be explained by $50 million worth of President Bush's TV ads or Mr. Kerry's relative absence from the nightly news. But the new numbers do suggest a paradoxical question: could escalating national security crises be bolstering the president's support — even if they are crises of his own making?
