“The key question in this election is whether we want a wartime or a peacetime president. In this respect, the contest most closely resembles the Winston Churchill-Clement Atlee battle of 1945. With World War II just recently won in Europe but still raging in the Pacific, British voters opted to back a candidate they trusted on healthcare, jobs and social services rather than on Churchill whose wartime leadership they valued highly.
Events, more than anything else, will determine which issue has priority in our minds. The ironies abound.
If Bush succeeds too well in quelling international terrorism, he could do himself out of a job, encouraging voters to assign higher value to domestic and economic issues and hence to the Kerry candidacy.” – Dick Morris, today.
“Wartime leaders have always faced the worst fear: defeat in battle. But in democracies at least, war-leaders also confront another danger: success. The qualities that make for great statesmanship in wartime – determination, a single focus on victory, a black-and-white conviction of who is friend and foe – can often seem crude or overbearing when peace comes around. The most dramatic example of this in Western history is, of course, Winston Churchill. It is no exaggeration to say that, without him, Britain may well have been destroyed by Hitler. He was the difference between victory and defeat. But almost the minute that victory was declared, the voters turned on their hero. He lost the post-war election. Even more striking, he lost it in one of the biggest electoral landslides in Britain’s parliamentary history. He wasn’t just defeated. He was buried…” – yours truly, Time, March 1, 2004.
The Dish 