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Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full? The Tight Presidential Race is a Product of Ambiguous Events
By Andrew E. Busch

Andrew Busch is an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Date Issued: 10/26/2004

Heading into the homestretch of the campaign, polls continue to show a close race that could go either way on Election Day. Most analysts have pointed to the ongoing division of Americans into "blue state" and "red state" voters, ideologically and culturally polarized as in 2000, but even moreso. This interpretation cannot be discounted. The gulf between Bozeman and Berkeley has rarely been wider, and it is no coincidence that one of the most important fault lines of voter support separates those who regularly attend religious services and those who don't.

However, the focus on cultural polarization may be obscuring another factor that is much simpler but at least as important.

To a much greater extent than usual, this particular presidential election is being held at a moment when events are open to a broad range of interpretations. When things are going well (like 1984 and 1996), voters return the incumbent; when things are going badly (1980), they vote decisively to remove him. The problem in 2004 is that the nation cannot seem to decide whether things are going well or not. Furthermore, this ambivalence is a logical outgrowth of the actual state of affairs.

Take Iraq, for example. Pacification and reconstruction has been much more difficult than most predicted. Over 1,000 Americans have lost their lives. But the defeat of Saddam and conquest of Iraq in three weeks was a notable military victory against a long-time enemy of the United States. Fallujah is a mess, but 80 percent of the country is not. Even the Duelfer report on weapons of mass destruction rendered an unclear verdict. On the one hand, Saddam had given up his WMD stockpiles after the first Gulf War. On the other hand, he intended to reconstitute them as soon as sanctions were dead, and sanctions were nearly dead by March 2003, thanks to France, Russia, and the U.N. hierarchy.

What about al Qaeda? Osama bin Laden is still on the loose (if he is not dead), but Afghanistan is free and his base of operations is dismantled. The war in Iraq may (or may not) have stimulated al Qaeda recruitment, but it has also served as a magnet drawing jihadists to hurl themselves against the Marines rather than occupy themselves in other nefarious ways. The terrorist Zarqawi may (or may not) have gained followers. He is cutting off heads in Iraq but he is also being slowly strangled, as he himself said in a letter captured last spring. The United States may (or may not) be more hated in the Middle East, but as of this writing, America has gone more than three years since 9-11 without another attack on American soil. Would anyone on September 12, 2001 have predicted that?

Or look at the economy. Over half a million net jobs have been lost during the Bush administration, but if you look at the last year, 1.9 million were created. And the job losses are true only if you use the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of businesses rather than the survey of households, which shows gains during the Bush administration. The unemployment rate is 5.4 percent, about the same as when Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996. And there were some mitigating circumstances: a severe stock market decline starting in 2000, a recession starting just as Bush took office, September 11, and corporate scandals that had their origin in the late 1990s. Tax cuts have added to family income, but high gas prices and health costs have taken away.

Is the glass half-empty or half-full?

The two phenomena—events that are difficult to interpret and the close cultural divide—surely reinforce each other. It is human nature to put the best construction on those one supports and the worst construction on those one opposes. Unlike many years, when events have not been nearly as ambiguous, each side in 2004 has plenty of ammunition to reinforce their existing predilictions.

On election day, the winner will be the one who convinces the voters in the middle that their interpretation of the state of affairs is closer to the truth.