With President George W. Bush emphasizing the war on terror in his re-election campaign, his focus on wartime accomplishments may end up hurting him politically in the end.

Robert McClure, professor of political science at Syracuse University, spoke last night at the Christian Brothers Academy in DeWitt to about 100 members of the community about the history of war and the presidency and how it may affect the upcoming election.

‘The 2004 presidential election is mainly about the war in Iraq and President Bush’s conduct. Not much more, not much less,’ McClure said. ‘The election is a national referendum on Bush as commander-in-chief.’

McClure said that some people believe it is to the incumbent president’s advantage to be involved in a war in a time of re-election, but he disagreed.

Although four of the five presidents that have led the country to war have won re-election, three did not even attempt to run again and all ended up mired in political turmoil in their next term.

Presidents who led the country to war as generals and then ran for president, however, all fared extremely well. Also, almost all either won re-election, died or didn’t run again.

‘The evidence about how you fare as a president in wartime running for re-election is mixed,’ McClure said.

It seems as though both candidates, Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry, only speak about foreign policy. Although many people would like to hear them discuss domestic issues more, McClure said foreign policy is always more important to focus on because domestic issues are too difficult to control.

‘Presidential elections should be about foreign affairs,’ McClure said. ‘You don’t want to cast votes on the basis of something somebody can’t do.’

McClure added that people want to hear about what the candidates would like to do in the future, instead of only focusing on the past. But, McClure said that the future is too unpredictable.

‘Bush said he wasn’t interested in nation building and then the planes ran into the towers,’ McClure said. ‘We’d like to know about the future, but we can’t so we have to judge from the past.’

Historically, Bush’s power to lead the country into war stems from the U.S. Constitution, and the decisions made by the founding fathers.

When writing the Constitution, no other country offered a model that the founders could follow as far as designing a position for the executive power, McClure said. All the founders agreed that there should not be another king, but there were many arguments about how many people should be president and what kind of power he or she should have. McClure said that they changed their minds almost every day.

‘At some level, we got Article 2 (of the Constitution) the way it is because that was the last resolution they had before they left town,’ McClure said.

McClure also said that the political experts are not always correct in their judgments either. He said he was reading the Los Angeles Times, and the newspaper ran a correction about an article that was run in the Sunday edition. The article originally said that the race for the senate seat in Illinois was very close. The correction stated that Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama was ahead in the polls by 51 points.

‘Experts aren’t always right,’ McClure said.

While most in the audience enjoyed the lecture, some felt that McClure gave too much importance to war and its effects on an election.

‘People take other things into consideration, like domestic policies, when going to vote,’ said Elma Boyko, a resident of Manlius.

Some people in the audience also disagreed with McClure when he spoke positively about Bush, but Boyko did appreciate what McClure said about the second clause in the Constitution.

‘Some people don’t think it makes a lot of sense to us today, but it did back then,’ Boyko said. ‘People say we should change it but I don’t think we should without a lot of thought.’

McClure’s lecture was the first in a series of four lectures occurring every Tuesday night throughout October. The series is titled: ‘The 2004 Elections: Politics as Usual?’

‘The turnout tonight indicates how much interest there is in the election,’ said Sandra Barrett, the director of community programs at SU.

Published on October 5, 2004 at 12:00 pm