December 15, 2003	Monday	Shawwal 20, 1424

WASHINGTON: George Bush must have thought it would be plain sailing to win another four-year term in 2004 when he jetted triumphantly onto the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare major combat over in Iraq.

Seven months after that dramatic May 1 speech on the aircraft carrier returning from duty in the conflict, Iraq still haunts the US commander-in-chief and the American economy is not completely out of the woods.

But with a 110 million dollar election war chest and other political weapons primed for deployment, Bush is still well placed to secure the re-election that eluded his father.

Without hitting the popularity heights that followed the Sept 11, 2001 attacks two years ago, Bush’s opinion poll ratings are recovering again after an autumn depression.

An early December Gallup survey for USA Today and CNN gave Bush a 55 per cent approval rating, against 50 per cent in mid-November. Forty-eight per cent of those asked said they would vote for him, against 46 per cent in October.

The president and his loyal strategists, led by “boy genius” Karl Rove, are also skillful at public relations coups, such as Bush’s surprise visit to Baghdad in late November to spend Thanksgiving Day with US troops.

Bush’s campaign fund is already at a record high but he aims to have 200 million dollars ready to unleash an advertizing assault by the time he is designated the Republican Party’s official candidate at their New York convention in September.

The convention has been timed to coincide with memorials for the terrorist attacks on the twin towers two years ago.

While the elder George Bush had to face Ross Perot for the Republican nomination in 1992 and then went on to be defeated by Democrat Bill Clinton, the younger Bush is almost certain to be unchallenged within his party.

That gives him a major advantage over the opposition Democrats for whom Howard Dean is only just pulling decisively away from eight other contenders as they go into January’s primary elections.

However, analysts have warned that as the 2000 election showed, Bush can never be certain until the final vote is counted.

“It is a strange position that any incumbent is in,” said Stephen Hess, a professor of presidential history and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“They know very well that they will be elected or defeated based on their record, on what they have done up to that point, not what they have promised to do.”

Much of Bush’s record rests on his handling of Iraq, which is seen as the biggest handicap facing the US’ 43rd president.

The 130,000 US troops in Iraq remain the targets of daily attacks. Far more American soldiers have died since Bush declared major combat had finished — some 200 as of this past week — than in the war that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The elusive weapons of mass destruction that were used as a pretext for the war, have still not been found and Democrats are stepping up accusations that the Bush administration lied to the American public about the real reasons for the March 20 invasion.

The financial cost has also been high at a time when the United States faces a prolonged record budget deficit to pay for the controversial tax cuts the president ordered to get the US economy moving again.

The deficit is particularly hard for right-wingers in the Republican movement who traditionally consider themselves the defenders of the monetary faith against high spending Democrats.

While the stock market has taken off again, the tax cuts have not created the jobs that the president knows the country desperately needs.

Right wing commentator William Kristol said in a Washington Post editorial that Bush is “likely to be the first president since Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) under whom there will have been no net job creation, and for the first time since Lyndon Johnson whose core justification for sending US soldiers to war could be widely (if unfairly) judged to have been misleading.”

It could be a long and tense 2004 for the 57-year-old incumbent of the White House.—AFP