DAN K. THOMASSON Election comes down to 2 issues

WASHINGTON -- All of the hours, days and months and millions upon millions of dollars spent on campaigning by the two candidates for president could be as irrelevant as at any time in recent history. When all is said and done this election will turn on the job performance of George Bush, specifically his handling of two issues, Iraq and the economy. Everything else from education to Social Security is secondary.
Clearly that is the explanation for the president's precipitous drop in approval ratings to below 50 percent without a corresponding increase in the polls for his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, whose static ratings indicate that voters at this stage are not focusing on him, but rather are occupied with deciding whether Bush deserves another term. Once they make up their minds, the current thinking goes, they will take a serious look at the alternative or stick with the incumbent.
Can the president survive the negative history accompanying such a decline in job approval at this stage of an election year? His father couldn't, and neither could Jimmy Carter, both of whom had similar poll numbers about the same juncture in their re-election campaigns. But the White House believes that the warning has come early enough and the situation is fluid enough that he will be the exception despite the horrendous publicity generated by the prisoner abuse scandal and the administration's seeming inability to solve the Iraqi problem generally.
Powell's view
Secretary of State Colin Powell recently pledged that the United States would quit the country if so requested by a new Iraqi interim government slated to take over June 30. Some of the president's allies on Capitol Hill took the opportunity to privately confide that such a development might not be bad. It isn't likely, of course, and it would result in such chaos as to further destabilize the entire region, most likely producing a civil war between religious factions. But Powell's statement shows the depths of concern by a White House increasingly frazzled and frustrated by its inability to get its arms around pacification.
The economy also continues to be troubling for the president although growth is at a respectable 4 percent level and the employment picture has improved dramatically over the past two months with jobs, always the slowest to return in a downturn, finally rebounding somewhat. But there is just enough uncertainty, particularly in the industrial battleground states like Ohio and Michigan, to keep the issue very much alive. All things considered, most elections turn on the state of the economy with prosperity generally benefiting the incumbent no matter what else is going on.
The rosy economic forecasts, however, have been muted by worries over steadily rising oil prices that have cut heavily into the budgets of most Americans. Although at this stage the soaring cost of gasoline to new levels daily has not seemed to dampen growth, the long-range prognosis is that it ultimately could.
How it often works
When the economy is good, Americans tend to overlook a president's obvious or perceived mistakes in other areas, preferring in wartime not to switch commanders in chief. Vietnam was an exception, of course, with Lyndon Johnson realizing that he had no chance of winning re-election in 1968 and announcing early that he would not be a candidate. The danger for Bush is that the depth of opposition caused by the lack of success in bringing order to Iraq is inviting more and more comparisons to Vietnam and will end up for him the way it did for Johnson.
Kerry has problems of his own, and this may be Bush's best hope. So far the senator has failed to cause much excitement. In the Midwest, for instance, he is regarded as another privileged Massachusetts liberal who is on all sides of every issue. He has a seeming aloofness that hinders his connection with voters. Most of all his campaign has lacked direction or a theme. His approach has been to talk about whatever may appear to have gone wrong at the moment and blame Bush.
On the other hand, his standing with the voters could improve quickly without concrete improvement in Iraq and strong moves by Bush to deal with the concerns of middle class workers over job security. Ultimately, Kerry may not be able to impact the election at all, but will merely have to wait to see what voters decide about the incumbent, hoping not to make a major mistake himself. It's not unlike the position young Bill Clinton was in during the 1992 election against Bush's father.
Scripps Howard News Service