Katrina & Terri Schiavo
On Josh's question, let me agree with everyone below that there is no single cause to Bush's (and the Republicans') drop, that the Republican juggernaut was overestimated, and that the bankruptcy of the non-reality-based community was waiting to be exposed. But if we get to give our hunches for what finally yanked back the curtain, let me give mine: Katrina & Terri Schiavo.
My sense is that ordinary Americans--the ones too busy to pay much attention to the news--wanted to, and were willing to, trust and believe their president on Iraq. If their president said we were winning, by gosh, give him the benefit of the doubt. The media did the same, "typing" rather than reporting, as Colbert noted in his infamous and hilarious White House Correspondents talk. But watching the horror, incompetence, and flat-out refusal to acknowledge reality in New Orleans erased both citizens' and the news media's willing suspension of disbelief.
Remember, most people just don't get very much news. We're junkies, those of us writing and reading here at the Coffee House. But Katrina was impossible to miss. Those were Americans on television, abandoned in an American city. There were no special foreign circumstances, no mysterious Islamic radicals or "longstanding hatreds" involved. The administration was visibly incompetent or lying: we could see it on television.
And if Bush and his appointees were lying or incompetent about something Americans could see for ourselves, how could we any longer believe them about Iraq? The news media got (at least some of) their cojones back, and Americans lost their willingness to trust W.
My other hunch is that the fact that that came after the Terri Schiavo debacle mattered. Once again, this wasn't some special, hard-to-unravel foreign mystery. Every American has an opinion about whether she or he wants to get to live or die in such a condition. The idea of having Congress decide--based on a few religious radicals' beliefs--was horrifying. Ordinary folks were still discussing what they wanted in such a condition with their families six months later, after Katrina. My sense is that that debacle blasted away confidence in not just Frist, who was clearly and cravenly lying when he said he could diagnose Schiavo's condition, but in the Republican Congress in general. Most folks don't have time to worry about SEC reporting requirements & the like. But the Schiavo debate was like Clinton and Monica: sickness and sex are things every citizen thinks she understands.
Schiavo also helped significantly in peeling libertarians away from the Republican coalition. But that's a topic for another day...
I agree that Schiavo and Katrina were the two things that caught the attention of people who don't necessarily follow politics.
I have been against W since before 2000,and never thought him to be competent or truthful. But the level of incompetence in the response to Katrina really surprised me. I couldn't believe the posturing over the Schiavo matter and I found this intrusiveness a little scary.
Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox just reminded me of that affair. Republican defending of Allen's macaca moment and the Foley coverup were perhaps too much at last for people who were still looking for a way to believe.
And as for Iraq. Too many lies, too many deaths, a real betrayal of this country and the troops. W. also lost credibility when he implied that Democrats were for terrorism. People actually know and love people who happen to be Democrats. This was just too much bullshit.
I think that Colbert and Clinton paved the way for allowing actual criticism of the President to be shown on TV. The people were way ahead of the pundits of this.
December 28, 2006 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Confirmation of your point about Americans who don't get much news.
Shortly after Katrina happened, I was in my local cafe, glancing at a newspaper. The woman standing next to me volunteered a comment (this almost never happens to me) on how incredible the Bush administration's incompetence was in response to Katrina.
I responded, "Oh, really. Have you been paying attention to the news from Iraq?"
No, she said, she made a point of avoiding that.
Iraq was behind the blinders. Katrina was front and center.
December 28, 2006 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
The tipping point was the Schiavo grandstanding. After years of being frustrated by the failure of the general public to understand how dangerous the Bush regime was, I was amazed to see how quickly everyone GOT what the Republicans were doing with the Schiavo case. I guess it takes a personal issue like that to make people who generally ignore politics to sit up and take notice. Anyway, you could just feel the tide of public opinion turning after that. The first evidence was the reaction to Bush's Social Security publicity blitz. It didn't matter how much he toured the country; people knew now that the man was capable of selling bullshit, and no one was buying. Then the Katrina nightmare reinforced the lesson in a big way. Trust was gone by then, and it wasn't coming back.
December 28, 2006 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps the blatantly hypocritical message imparted by the combination of the two factors you cite was more than the American public could bear:
"Interfere in Schiavo -- a private life and family --but ignore your public responsibility to the victims of Katrina."
December 28, 2006 11:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Schiavo affair pointed out the potential for extremism in social issues, but I would not describe it as a tipping point. The Reagan revolution was only marginally about social issues, focussing on small goverment, the elevation of self-interest above the public interest and redistribution of wealth by market forces instead of government policy. Katrina forced the American public to face exactly what those policies might mean in an emergency. The tipping point was three days after the storm when thousands were waiting for help from a government that did not care...as a matter of policy.
December 28, 2006 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Schiavo and Katrina were definitely highly visible tipping points. I think while Katrina was the tipping point for Bush the Schiavo affair was the tipping point for the whole conservative movement. Each and every conservative from Bush to each GOP Congressman betrayed the conservative bedrock principle of "federalism". Bush still muddled on after his role in the Schiavo debacle mainly because of being incorrectly perceived by many as a "war president" but Katrina and his "heckuva job Brownie" moment did him in, in the eyes of the American people.
I do look back at another probably forgotten moment even if not nearly as important nor visible as Schiavo and Katrina. Back before the 2004 election Sen Hagel openly criticized Bush for his handling of the Iraq War. Kerry didn't seize the opportunity in the '04 elections but it was the first time that a republican had openly questioned the POTUS. Every democrat up to that point had been demonized as defeatist, unpatriotic or disloyal when they tried to say what Hagel did...and after that dissent became permissible again.
December 28, 2006 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think Social Security, Schiavo and Katrina all fed into each other, though Schiavo was March, 2005, Social Security Late Winter through early Summer 2005, and Katrina late August. All these matters involve matters that randomly impact every American or their families -- everyone deals with old age, most people have had to engage with the serious illness and death of a family member or close friend, And Katrina was disaster on biblical proportions rolled out on TV for all to see.
The first one, Schiavo among other things involved the threat that even if someone had jumped through all the hoops to legally remove the feeding tube, Big Brother Government in the persons of Frist, The Senate, President Bush and the Superme Court could come and yank back rights, and make your family tragedy into a big time political issue. Disapproval of the Bush intervention was as high as 82%, and a very substantial part of that was Bush Voters.
Social Security was long and drawn out, but I think Bush's real problem with it was that he never allowed himself to be questioned by someone who either would ask for specifics, or generally did not approve of the proposed general changes. His support on it started fairly close to his vote in November 04, and as it rolled out as a fake election style campaign with no specifics, he lost trust. He was trying to sell a pig in a poke, and people wanted to see the pig.
Katrina was a series of video pieces. Each had a different little message. At one point I was counting people by race as the cars left NOLA, observing that the majority were white, and NOLA was a Majority Black City. I remember my first thought was that shelters were segregated somehow. Anyhow, then there was the lines to get into the Superdome -- video of a long parade of wheel chairs from nursing homes being pushed in (I wondered why they couldn't do better)? Then all the forcasts, the graphics as to the storm movement -- the immediate aftermath with the roof partially off the superdome -- and then a long period where no one really seemed to know what had happened. Then the slow reports about flooding, mostly on Public Radio that gradually created a partial picture of it all -- TV did not yet have pictures, but with a NOLA map one could find locations reporting in and get a sense of it all. When few if any relief organizations or personnel showed up the next day, one knew plans either did not exist or had failed. When they showed Bush out in California in full campaign mode -- you knew he was pretending he didn't know what had happened. After that, it was watching Bush slide down hill. Some of the more quick and dirty polls had Bush going down at a rate of a point a day. Then the pictures of the dead, the beginnings of a running death toll -- and the Bush Slide continued. It still astounds me that Bush didn't "get it" and act so as to stop his slide.
December 29, 2006 3:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are right that the Schiavo and Katrina fiascos were major tipping points in the public's trust of Bush, though for different reasons. The right wing's exploitation of the Schiavo situation hit home on an issue that many people understand intuitively, much as they did the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. No matter how much Cokie Roberts and the other self-appointed DC pundits told the national audience how they should interpret and be outraged by Bill's blow job, everyone trusted themselves to make up their own minds, and they realized it just wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things. As a result, the impeachment charade didn't play out the way that Brower and Cokie thought it should.
The same dynamic occurred with Schiavo, because it impinged on turf that many ordinary citizens felt they were more competent to judge than those self-appointed pundits interpreting for them.
Katrina was a bit different, though it was equally important in shaking the average citizen's trust in the Republican leadership. In this case, the media actually exposed the incompetence that had been staring them in the face for five years. This was not a moment of courage, rediscovered journalistic responsibility, or civic duty -- it was just good TV! Standing in front of destitute Americans being screwed over by their clueless government in an easily filmed environment was a good story. Defending the incompetence of Bush, FEMA, and Brownie was not. Thus, our reporters discovered their calling! The truth about any real journalistic responsibility is all too apparent in the complete disinterest in looking seriously at the aftermath.
Social Security deserves a note, as well, both because it was another dent in the media worship of the Republican leadership, and because of the mode of failure. It got minimal press attention, unlike either the Schiavo affair or Katrina. The reporting was completely shoddy, and the Democratic opposition was not much better. It was, instead, a story where Bush pulled out all the stops, but was completely unable to convince the public, some of whom knew a thing or two about Social Security. The press was late to notice the story, but eventually it became interested in the complete failure of the Bush machine to sell its program and in the preposterous staging before canned audiences. Thus, it became a story about politics and marketing.
December 31, 2006 12:36 AM | Reply | Permalink