Well, there’s a few reasons, depending on what your nonpartisan voter believes.
In Iraq, a single invasion with historically minimal U.S. casaulties has, at least in the short term, tipped the balance of power in the Middle East away from the terrorists and fascists who were running the show in Iraq and Syria. Already, we’ve seen increased cooperation from Iran on nuclear inspections, significant concessions by an already-improving Libya, a recent move by Syria to reopen talks with Israel and other events which indicate that the invasion may have been the best thing to happen to that region in about 600 years. Your voter might think that’s a good thing.
As regards Bin Laden, it’s frustrating that he hasn’t been found. But it’s not like there are no troops looking for him. Some people think that he’s in the mountains on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border and that the Pakistanis are preventing us from getting him. Your voter might think an invasion of Pakistan is justified if that’s the case, but I’m guessing if he thinks that he was probably not also against the invasion of Iraq. He has to ask himself what a Democratic candidate might to different or better? 100,000 more troops in Afghanistan? An invasion of a nuclear-capable country? They keep saying do “more” but I don’t think any of them is really saying precisely what. Your voter will want to know what.
Economies turn. And ours turned down following the collapse of the bubble (which wasn’t just about internet and telecom, but about too-cheap capital generally leading to capacity expansion). As it happens, though, the turn was relatively short and shallow – the peak unemployment rate wasn’t much above what used to be thought of as the minimum unemployment rate our economy could sustain over a long period without overheating. Some people don’t believe a President has much influence over the economy at all, in which case neither the contraction nor its shallowness would enter into his thoughts when selecting a candidate. Others might think that the tax cuts and the additional domestic spending under Bush helped things and would look favorably on that record. Alternatively, he might look at the future plans of the small businesses which have been the job creators in the U.S. for the past couple of decades, see that the net percentage of them who intend to hire this year went up by almost 50% in the past couple months, and say that there’s hope for the future whether it’s Bush’s doing or not.
As above, domestic spending, which had been under control during the Clinton years, has exploded (well, relatively). And it’s going to get worse. Among other things, Bush has created and partially (only partially) funded a massive program of school testing, mandating that schools get the performance of its worst students up. He has also created an entire new prescription drug entitlement for seniors. NEA funding, NASA funding, all kinds of funding are up. If your voter is a big-government type, he might like this and again put a check in the Bush column. On the other hand, if your candidate is a small-government type, he might be pretty pissed off about this and go looking for candidates promising at least to constrict the growth of spending. I’ll let someone who is a Democrat spell out which candidates are promising to undo those new programs and not roll out any new ones.
And he cut taxes. Yes, most of the money went to people that most people consider “the rich.” They pay the most. But many middle-class families got cuts, and many more lower-class families became exempt from paying any taxes at all. Your voter, if he’s married and has kids, probably got a tax cut. So he’s probably at least a little happy about that.
The result of increased spending and decreased taxes is deficits. If your guy is a deficit hawk, he might not like that at all! But not everyone is a deficit hawk. Our economy somehow got through the Reagan deficits and earier deficits, so maybe your guy doesn’t care or doesn’t care enough to make it a deciding factor. To the extent he does care, again, he’s going to want to quiz the Democratic candidates about how exactly the deficit will be closed, and his opinion might be swayed by how. Is it entirely by raising taxes again? Are those new entitlements going to disappear? Maybe we’ll not keep our promise to the new Iraq? It all depends on what your voter believes.
I don’t think many people choose a President because he has or doesn’t have a secrecy fetish – maybe that’s too bad. If your voter does, he’s certainly not going to give any points to Bush for it! So he’ll want to look at how the leading Democratic candidates have treated their records and weigh the records accordingly. Some seem to be better than Bush in this regards and would get points. Others, not so much, And of course some of them don’t really have much in the way of records at all, or a least ones you’d want public, so you kind of have to take them on faith.
Lemme think of some more reasons later.
Its called partisan politics. Ain’t this a great country??