*EPF414 12/11/2003
Text: Scholar Says Foreign Policy Will Play Critical Role 2004 Election
(Stephen J. Wayne briefs at Department of State) (3270)

Foreign policy issues will play a critical role in the 2004 U.S. general election campaign, says Stephen J. Wayne, an expert on the American presidency and a professor of government at Georgetown University.

Wayne discussed the major issues of the 2004 U.S. presidential election in a digital videoconference program with journalists in Malta at the Department of State in Washington on December 4.

According to Wayne, Iraq, perceptions of America overseas, and the Bush administration's use of military force will be decisive issues in the campaign and the election results, Wayne said. He described the electorate as polarized and cited a recent Gallup poll showing 87 percent of Republicans surveyed approving of the job President Bush is doing, compared to 20 percent of Democrats, and 46 percent of independents."

Wayne remarked that both parties are attempting to increase voter turnout by courting the independent vote and young voters. He elaborated, "In the last presidential election," he said, "33 percent of those people between the ages of 18 and 24 turned out to vote. In this election, with various campaigns going on, they're trying to get that figure up into the 40s. That would be a large number of new voters."

Wayne described another potential large voting group in the 2004 election as people over 65, "who came of age during World War II and after World War II, and many of them have maintained their Democratic allegiances." Wayne suggested that the recent Medicare bill was passed in order to appeal to these voters, many of whom require prescription drugs.

Wayne said that the outcome of the 2004 presidential election will depend less on the Democratic Party choice of candidate than on voter attitudes towards President Bush. "In every election in which an incumbent runs for reelection," he said, "the election is decided by an up-or-down vote on the incumbent. In other words, do we approve or disapprove of his presidency? So I think this election will be Bush's to lose rather than a Democrat to win."

Following is a transcript of Wayne's remarks:

(begin text)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE BRIEFING WITH STEPHEN J. WAYNE, PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

TOPIC: MAJOR ISSUES OF THE 2004 U.S. PRESIDENCY

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
DECEMBER 4, 2003

MODERATOR: We have some guests from the Malta media here as well as Ambassador Gioia. Politics in Malta is a pretty vigorous activity, and so I'm sure that that will generate a number of questions afterwards in what we hope will be a lively discussion. So with that, I wanted to say thank you very much for joining us, and I'll hand it over to you.

MR. WAYNE: Well, thank you very much. What I wanted to do first is talk about the fact that we really have three elections for the presidency coming up. We have the Democratic primaries for the Democratic nominee, who will probably be selected at the latest, mid-March, but probably by March 3rd. So very early, we will know who the Democratic nominee will be.

The political conventions are not until the summer -- the Democrats in mid-July and the Republicans, the latest the political convention has ever been, at the end of August in New York, backed up obviously to 9/11.

So there's this long period from the beginning of March until the summer when the candidates are going to have to run before the official campaign begins. Part of the reason for some Democrats rejecting the campaign funds and for the president deciding to rely on private contributions is to have money to campaign during this period.

Following the Republican convention, the beginning of the actual campaign will begin. We know something now about what's going to happen in terms of the environment that we're in, both issue-wise and partisanship.

At the beginning of the Democratic process, there were a lot of candidates but no obvious front-runner. Although Howard Dean has now moved into the lead, there are two things to note about this. The first thing is in recent polls -- and by recent, I mean the middle of last month -- only about two-thirds of the people even recognized Howard Dean's name.

The second thing to note about the Democratic primary process is that it's heavily front-loaded. By front-loaded, we mean the contests have gotten earlier and earlier. The Iowa caucus is going to be on the 19th of January, the New Hampshire primary on the 27th, and then we move very quickly in February so that by the end of February, by February 24th, more than one-quarter of the Democratic delegates who will vote at the convention will be selected. Another 50 percent are selected the following week on March 3rd. So we will know very early who the Democratic nominee will be.

The third thing I'd like to note is that the Democratic candidates, led by Governor Dean, have raised more money cumulatively than has George W. Bush, but not a whole lot more than George W. Bush. We know every quarter of the year, you have to file with the Federal Election Commission. Howard Dean filed at the end of September, having raised $25 million, and John Kerry of Massachusetts raised about $20 million, and then the others go down from there.

Both Kerry and Dean have decided they will not accept federal funds. The reason they're not going to accept federal funds is that if you accept federal funds during the primary period, you are restricted in the amount of money you can spend in a state and the overall amount of money. For example, in New Hampshire, which is the first primary, you can only spend $729,000.

Well, the importance of this primary will mean that candidates will want to spend more than that just on their advertising alone. So Dean and Kerry have both opted out of it. The others would opt out of it, if they had a chance. But the fact of the matter is, they don't have enough money, and they don't have enough visibility now, and they need the federal funds.

The final point I want to make about the nomination process is about the Dean campaign. Howard Dean is at the front of the pack for two reasons. Number one, he is the only Democrat who has generated enthusiasm among the liberal base. He has tapped into liberal resentment with the Bush Administration, which could not be voiced because of 9/11.

You don't win a presidential election on a liberal vote. Liberals constitute 19 percent of the American electorate compared to about 41 percent for the conservatives. Being a liberal is an advantage for the Democratic nomination and a disadvantage for the general election.

The final thing is that the Howard Dean campaign is really the campaign to date, which has made the most use of the Internet. He has generated a body of believers whom he keeps in touch with on the Internet. He's had over 500,000 people sign up on his Web site. He collects money from them. The average campaign contribution to the Dean campaign has been $80. Compare that to George W. Bush. Seventy-six percent of the contributors to George W. Bush's campaign have contributed the maximum amount, which is $2,000. So Bush has what we used to call the fat cats, and Dean's cats are young and lean and not quite as wealthy, at least not yet.

QUESTION: Do you expect that Howard Dean is going to win the nomination, based on what you know today?

MR. WAYNE: If Dean wins Iowa and/or New Hampshire, he'll be in pretty good shape. Then what we're going to see is Democrats drop out, and everybody wants to be the anyone-but-Dean candidate. It's more of an elimination contest.

QUESTION: Could I ask how you assess General Clark's campaign team? Is it getting stronger? How would you assess his early traction to date?

MR. WAYNE: Well, I'm glad you asked is it getting stronger, because it couldn't get worse. General Clark announced his candidacy and then fired his campaign manager, or his campaign manager quit. He didn't have a headquarters. He didn't have an issues team.

He started off rather badly, and I would say naively. He had name recognition. He had the title "general," which is a good title to have. Now he is tapping into some of the people who were active in President Clinton's two political campaigns, particularly the second one. Eli Segal is the overall director, and he has a number of people in the field there. I wouldn't say his campaign team is anywhere near as good as Dean's team is, but he has improved somewhat.

He hasn't gained a Democratic constituency yet. There's no one group who he particularly appeals to. His hope is that he will appeal to more centrist Democrats in the South. But he's decided not to run in Iowa. I don't expect he will do very well in New Hampshire.

So Clark has a ways to go. He still may end up on a Dean ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

QUESTION: Will the election controversy of four years ago be a factor in this coming election?

MR. WAYNE: No, I don't think that will be a factor in this election. For one thing, they've got new voting machines in Florida. For another, you know, how often do you have a vote in an election that becomes in essence a statistical tie? That's all we had in Florida. We had a statistical tie.

In the last Gallup poll that was fielded right before Thanksgiving, so this is very recent data, 87 percent of the Republicans who were surveyed approved of the job President Bush is doing, compared to 20 percent of the Democrats, and 46 percent of the independents.

So what we've reestablished in the United States is the polarized electorate that we had in 2000. In other words, Democrats have now come out into the open as disliking Bush, and the Republicans embrace him, and the election is going to be twofold: One for the independent vote, about 27 percent of the people declare themselves as independents.

The second race is going to be turning out people who normally don't vote. In the last presidential election, 33 percent of those people between the ages of 18 and 24 turned out to vote. In this election, with various campaigns going on, they're trying to get that figure up into the 40s, to the mid-40s. That would be a large number of new voters.

Now it's also interesting to note while simply on the subject of voters, that the age cohort that is most antagonistic to Bush and the Republicans are the people over 65. These are the people who came of age during World War II and after World War II, and many of them have maintained their Democratic allegiances.

These are also the people who take the most pills, prescription drugs, and that was one of the reasons that President Bush pushed so hard to get that Medicare bill with the drug benefit bill through, even though the bill breaks his budget.

QUESTION: If Howard Dean is the nominee, do you think the Democrats will still have a chance of beating President Bush?

MR. WAYNE: To the extent that Howard Dean is able to bring out people who otherwise don't come out and vote. To the extent that he's able to generate enthusiasm among the Democrats, he has a chance. Let me back off this by stating something which I think is even more important than who the Democrats nominate.

In every election in which an incumbent runs for reelection, the election is decided by an up-or-down vote on the incumbent. In other words, do we approve or disapprove of his presidency? So I think this election will be Bush's to lose rather than a Democrat to win.

QUESTION: Do you see George W. Bush moving towards the center?

MR. WAYNE: Yes. I see him, number one, backing off the unilateral foreign policy, which I believe personally, has characterized this Administration's foreign policy, so it's a much more multilateral, UN-oriented, World Bank-oriented approach.

Secondly, I do see more concern for some of the domestic matters, Social Security. Privatization of Social Security would be pushed in the second term in large part because the Social Security system might run out of money, and in large part because the market is now up. If the stock market is up, pushing privatization of Social Security is a much easier sell.

The Administration is still pushing for an energy policy with the Congress this term. So, I see a more centrist Bush in the campaign in 2004.

MODERATOR: Do you see any of the Democrats breaking from the party and the candidate for the presidency?

MR. WAYNE: I don't see the 2004 election as a runaway election for the Republicans even if Bush does well. One of the things one has to remember -- political scientists like myself tell it to our classes all the time -- is that there is no longer any discernible connection between presidential races and congressional races. In other words, presidents don't have coattails anymore that bring other people in. The last president to have that was Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The Republicans are going to gain seats in Congress regardless of what happens in the presidential election. The only way Bush helps the Republicans is if the Bush campaign can bring out a very large targeted Republican vote and then everybody benefits.

AMBASSADOR GIOIA: How do you see the campaign finance reform bill impacting either candidate, or either party?

MR. WAYNE: First of all, our campaign finance system broke down in the year 2000 because of an amendment that was made to the law in 1979 which permitted national parties to raise unlimited, and initially even unreported amounts of money, in voluntary efforts to get people out to vote and to build the party base at the grassroots level. This was known as the soft money loophole.

Bill Clinton exploited this loophole when he was in the White House. Then both Democrats and Republicans exploited it in 2000. So in 2002, after Enron and WorldCom and some of the others, Congress passed what has become known as the McCain-Feingold bill. The McCain-Feingold bill outlawed soft money for the national parties, and also put a restriction on campaign ads, what we called issue advocacy ads, by interest groups or by parties, which mention the name of the candidate in the last 60 days before an election.

Most importantly for this election, they doubled the size of the contributions that you could give a candidate from $1,000 to $2,000 and substantially increased the amount of money you could give a political party.

Now all three of those provisions greatly benefited the people who voted against the law, and that is the Republicans. Democrats have more dependence on soft money than Republicans, because they don't have as good a hard money base.

Number two, Democrats are more dependent on outside groups to build support, so if the groups couldn't mention the Democratic candidate's name, that would be hurt. Number three, as I cited the statistics earlier, Republican candidates tend to get maximum contributions, whereas Democratic candidates get much smaller contributions because their base isn't as broad.

The new law will really benefit the Republicans in the short run. Now the Democrats have already found ways to get around it. As you probably know, George Soros has contributed $12 million to different groups, policy groups and grassroots groups, all devoted to getting George W. Bush out of the White House. Of course, the Republicans have raised substantial amounts of hard money. Anytime the President goes out, he raises between one and three million dollars of hard money for the Republican Party to either be used in his campaign or in their campaign.

So one of the reasons that I think Bush would be the favorite in 2004 is that he will have more money at his disposal, the Republicans will, than the Democrats will. Does that answer your question?

QUESTION: The United States is the sole superpower in the world now. When does the rest of the world get a say in the United States election?

MR. WAYNE: Americans are concerned with how they and their government are viewed abroad. The anti-Americanism that's evident in many parts of the world that we see on our television is of concern to people.

We always thought in the United States that we were the bastion of liberty, the beacon of hope, and the place where people would come when they were discriminated against economically, politically or socially. We still like to think that. So, it does upset people when they see a lot of people who are very critical of U.S. policy. I think that will play in the election.

QUESTION: I was wondering if you could just address how you see the role of third parties in the election next year.

MR. WAYNE: Zero. No role for third parties. We are divided as a nation between Republicans and Democrats. There is no third party movement.

Question: In the last presidential election, America was very evenly divided between Al Gore and George Bush, and it seems to be there was an ideological divide between two Americans, the more rural of America who was conservative and against abortion, for example, against gun control, and you have the urban America, which is more liberal, in favor of abortion, for gun control and other social issues. Has the principal scenario changed since then?

MR. WAYNE: I can answer that question quickly. No. It has not changed at all. You'll see the same division in 2004. The parties are still at parity. The parties are still ideologically polarized. However, it is important to note that the election occurs in the electoral college so that in those states that are close, we're going to have like we had in 2000, a very targeted election.

Most of the election campaign will be fought in the following states: Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maine and Florida. In other words, the coasts, with the possible exception of Oregon, remain Democratic. The Rocky Mountain and much of the South remains Republican at the presidential level, and the election will be fought in the Midwest where the parties are more evenly competitive.

We see an economic divide. We also see a social divide between conservatives who are very traditional in terms of their values and want those values imposed on the rest of the society, and people who are more liberal.

MODERATOR: Thank you very much. This helped our Maltese friends understand a little bit more about the dynamics of U.S. election systems, particularly the presidential election, because it's much more complicated than most people realize. I think it's the most exciting and vibrant race going.

MR. WAYNE: Thank you.

(End of tape.)

(end text)

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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