Parisians had barely returned to the streets last weekend before analysts on this side of the ocean started talking about
the effects of the latest terrorist attacks on 2016. Frank Luntz, the
Republican pollster and cable personality, reacted to Saturday’s
Democratic debate on Twitter: “The Democrats don’t realize or recognize
how afraid the #ParisAttacks have made the country. We are not the same
country today.”
Taking a more sober view,
the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin, one of the best political
reporters around, wrote that the “assault on Paris had thrust national
security to the heart of the presidential race” in a way that would
recast the primaries, if not the general election too. His colleague
Brendan Nyhan cast doubt
on this idea; he noted, correctly, that even the killing of Osama bin
Laden in the spring of 2011 had little effect on the way voters judged
President Obama the following year.
My
own sense, based on recent history, is that terrorism probably will
have some significant impact in 2016 — but not in the way we’re talking
about it right now.
In
the short term, of course, the sudden reemergence of terrorist threats
presents yet another sharp turn in a primary campaign that has seemed to
be about something different every week — immigration, growth and
taxes, Planned Parenthood, stabbing one’s mother.
Running for the Republican nomination this year is like constantly
merging onto a crowded highway only to have the GPS keep chirping at
you: “Recalculating … recalculating.”
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