Does war help presidents get re-elected?

Though major combat is over in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush likes to describe himself as a "war president." No doubt that's partly because he and his campaign team think that such an image will help him get re-elected. When we recall Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War or Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, we impart to them a heroic aura, imagining Americans muting political rivalries and rallying behind the president and the war at hand. Few citizens, we suppose, could have opposed these valiant leaders.

But serving as president during wartime has in fact been a mixed blessing and certainly no guarantee of re-election. Lincoln and FDR, who led the nation through cataclysmic wars, were indeed re-elected, but not without difficulty. Presidents who waged more remote and less popular wars, such as Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, found incumbency a liability. Although polls suggest that Bush should feel good about his prospects in November, he shouldn't expect that wartime leadership will ensure his victory. On the contrary, his best hope may be convincing the public that he also knows how to talk about peace and problems at home.

The question for Bush is whether he'll be perceived as a Roosevelt or Lincoln, or as a Truman or Johnson. In 1944, when FDR sought his fourth term, the United States and the Allied powers seemed likely to prevail over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Yet bloody combat continued across Europe and the Pacific, and peace remained a distant hope. More than 7 million Americans were under arms. The country was fully mobilized.

But the fact that the nation's and the world's fate hung in the balance didn't guarantee a Roosevelt cakewalk. The proposals FDR outlined in his 1944 State of the Union address got nowhere in a Republican-heavy Congress. Thomas E. Dewey, the GOP nominee, slammed the president as an incipient dictator and (in a foretaste of future Republican campaigns) a pawn of radicals. 

It certainly helped FDR that the public approved of his wartime leadership—but probably more important was the robust prosperity that the country was finally enjoying. FDR pollster Hadley Cantril's surveys found that the burning issues in 1944 were domestic. Accordingly, FDR campaigned on an "economic bill of rights" that promised 60 million jobs, help for small businesses, and the construction of homes, hospitals, and highways. Although he won a fourth term comfortably, he garnered fewer electoral votes in 1944 than he had in 1932, 1936, or 1940.

Bush also might hope to create an aura like that of Abraham Lincoln, who is remembered today for holding the Union together during dark times. But even though Lincoln governed during the bloodiest war ever on American soil—the number of deaths at the Battle of Gettysburg alone dwarf those on Sept. 11—he didn't have an easy road to re-election or even to renomination.

In early 1864, victory for the North, once a sure thing, seemed newly elusive. Republican leaders considered Lincoln's emerging plans for reconstructing the South too timid; some also fumed over his suspension of habeas corpus. Boomlets sprang up to replace him on the GOP ticket with a more passionately antislavery candidate such as Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, Gen. John C. Fremont, or Gen. Benjamin Butler.

The Democrats, for their part, nominated the disgruntled Gen. George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln had fired as head of the Union army. McClellan attacked the president's handling of the war and urged conciliation with the South. For much of the summer of 1864, many people, including Lincoln, expected McClellan to win. But a sudden series of military victories in the South, including Gen. William T. Sherman's conquest of Atlanta, turned the tide. Internal GOP opposition to Lincoln faded, McClellan softened his opposition to the war, and the president won in November with 55 percent of the vote.

Incumbency was even less helpful to those presidents who conducted controversial and remote wars that lacked broad public backing. In those situations, which Bush's predicament resembles more closely, being a wartime president was a hazard when the re-election campaign began.

Truman was never more disliked than in 1952, during the middle of the Korean War. The war initially enjoyed public support but by mid-1951 had become a gory standoff. Casualties mounted, with no prospect of a speedy victory for the U.S.-led United Nations force. By late 1951, the number of Americans who favored dropping nuclear bombs on North Korea to hasten the war's end climbed from 28 percent to 51 percent. Critics spoke spitefully of "Truman's War."