President Bush has had his share of political troubles lately. Critics have been pummeling him for the slow pace of job creation, for soaring gasoline prices at the pump and for all but ignoring the terrorism threat posed by al-Qaida before 9/11. Even his friends were no help politically. Corporate America was not creating enough new jobs on the home front, and his old friends in Saudi Arabia were leading the charge within OPEC to cut oil production and send gas prices even higher. Some friends he has.
He finally got a break last week, although it may be only a temporary respite from the bad news of recent weeks. The Labor Department reported on Friday that employers added 308,000 news jobs in March, the biggest increase in four years. It also revised the number of new jobs created in January and February to 205,000, up from the 118,000 reported last month.
If the president is lucky this election year, gasoline prices will take a dive this summer and the economy will continue to gain strength through the November election, blunting Democratic attacks on the Bush economy's jobless recovery. And maybe Bush will really get lucky and find those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and even capture Osama bin Laden. That would make it easier for him to fend off John Kerry, Bush's Democratic challenger, on the two overriding issues of the campaign - the economy and national security.
Those political sugarplums may be dancing in Karl Rove's head as he plots the president's re-election strategy. Rove may be a political genius (although you have to wonder the way the campaign has been going lately), but the one thing the Bush campaign cannot control is the political impact of unexpected events.
The economic recovery could stall this fall and gas prices could go off the charts. A major setback on the economic front might be enough to tip the election to Kerry. Most indicators suggest that the economy will continue to gather strength and create jobs. But as the Bush White House knows better than anyone, it's easier to predict economic trends than it is to predict what terrorists are up to.
So what if this year's October Surprise is another horrific terrorist attack inside our borders - the bombing of a commuter train, a major shopping mall or some other public arena that kills several hundred people? It's hard to know how such an attack would affect the election. Would it unite Americans behind their commander in chief, as 9/11 did? Or would it crack the bedrock of Bush's popularity and re-election campaign - his leadership in the war against global terrorism?
Bush may yet come to regret having made Iraq the central battleground of the war on terrorism. That conflict has the potential to become a disaster for Iraqis - and for Bush. How long will Americans support the president on the war in Iraq, especially if they see more grisly images like those that came out last week from the Iraqi town of Fallujah, where four American security workers were murdered and their charred, mutilated remains were dragged through the streets by jubilant mobs who left two of the corpses hanging from a bridge? How many more scenes like that can Americans stomach before deciding that Iraq is a quagmire and that Bush should be held accountable?
Bush's image as a wartime leader has come under heavy fire in recent days from former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, whose new book and testimony before the bipartisan commission investigating 9/11 ignited a political firestorm. Clark says the Bush administration was so preoccupied with going after Saddam Hussein before 9/11 that it ignored his warnings about the growing threat of a terrorist strike in the United States.
Clarke took direct aim at Bush's greatest political strength - his handling of terrorism. That explains why the White House launched a ferocious counterattack that raised questions about Clarke's motives and may have limited the political damage to the president.
Recent polls suggest that Clarke's testimony has done little damage to Bush's approval ratings on national security issues. A majority of voters still believe Bush is better equipped to deal with terrorism than John Kerry, who is seen by many voters as being indecisive. But Bush's approval rating for his handling of terrorism has been slipping in recent months, and that has to worry him.
According to a recent Newsweek magazine poll, Bush's approval rating for the way he has handled terrorism dropped from 70 percent in January to 57 percent in March. And most of the erosion was among Democrats and independent voters. He lost 23 percentage points among Democrats and 13 points among independents, according to the Newsweek poll.
I doubt that there's much John Kerry can do to seize the political advantage on national security issues. But the election is still seven months away, plenty of time for unexpected events - good and bad - to determine the outcome.
