Sunday, August 10, 2003

By Ann McFeatters

WASHINGTON - Anger management is the Democrats' latest political strategy. At the moment, it's not working. If you listen (as a few strangely eager souls have been doing for weeks) to Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bob Graham, Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton, Dick Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich, Americans are angry and getting angrier and soon will be the angriest they've been in some time.

	Ann McFeatters is National Bureau chief for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (amcfeatters@nationalpress.com).

People are angry, say the candidates on the stump, at the lack of jobs, at corporate greed, at being deceived about the cost of, length of and rationale for war in Iraq, at mounting that evidence America is not getting the next generation ready for the challenges ahead and at the tax cuts that are giving us a monumental deficit.

Mostly, say the candidates, Americans are getting angry at President George W. Bush.

That, according to the polls, is wishful thinking.

Largely because of the economy, Bush is vulnerable in his re-election bid next year, but he is still leader of the pack.

The administration's lack of interest in spending more on homeland security may indicate that its top priority is not the war on terror -- the money is not where the administration's mouth is on this one. Americans still feel vulnerable, especially with new warnings of more terror attacks on U.S. soil. But there is little if any personal anger toward Bush; Americans want a strong leader who at least talks a good game on battling the terrorists, and Bush is doing that.

The wisdom of some of Bush's rash of spending cuts in important programs is debatable in the wake of those large tax cuts. So is the economic rationale for the child tax credit checks recently mailed. But cash is cash, and most people are grateful for having more of it. And those same checks will go out next year. (Not surprisingly, they will stop in 2005, not a national election year.)

There is huge debate in Washington over the posturing in the administration over the war in Iraq, the use of questionable data and shunting aside of CIA misgivings about so-called evidence of Saddam Hussein's weaponry and the question of whether Bush might have been too eager for victory in Iraq (Osama bin Laden still being on the lam) and unprepared for the aftermath of war and unsure about how to handle the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran -- the other two members of the "axis of evil."

But the polls show the American people overall not really very interested in the debate. While many Democrats are angry about the administration's fudging, the opinion of the majority of Americans is that Bush was right to go to war against Iraq for whatever reasons he wanted to cite.

There might well be broad-based dismay if, as everybody in Washington believes, Secretary of the State Colin Powell will leave his job in a second Bush term. But a sunburned Bush with Powell at his side in steamy Crawford, Texas, eliminated this as an immediate concern when he said scornfully that this is just "August speculation" inside the Beltway. Of course, August speculation often turns out to be correct. But for the time being, Bush batted aside a possible thorn.

There has been increasing concern about the true status of Bush's vaunted "compassionate conservatism." He doesn't get on well with a lot of black leaders partly because he is against affirmative action. His stance against gay marriage may be popular with a majority of Americans but there are questions about whether his appeal for personal tolerance is only rhetorical. And what about Attorney General John Aschroft's assault on civil liberties? Many are anxious, but Bush is cagily using a string of political events to try to reassure moderate Americans that there will be no wholesale efforts in a second Bush administration to rein in civil rights or gay rights.

So, yes, there is growing uneasiness about many of Bush's policies among Democrats and among many independent voters, who will determine the election next year. Republicans, for the most part, love the man. And even among most Democrats there is -- as yet -- no real anger about Bush personally. He is seen as amiable, as working hard, as smarter than he used to be, as dedicated to making America strong. He says what many want to hear and isn't strident. He grins a lot and cracks jokes.

The gamble by the Democrats' posse of nine that anger will turn Bush out of office seems slightly desperate at this point. Of course, if all nine repeatedly tell all the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire how angry they should be, maybe those voters will get angry. It will depend entirely on whether they have jobs and their out-of-school children have jobs and how secure they feel financially. Right now, nobody can predict that.

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