The Summer Wind in American Politics: Domestic Events Overshadowed by Foreign Terror Acts

From Dr. Larry Sabato:

"The summer wind came blowin' in from across the sea," as Frank Sinatra famously sang, and clearly the single most significant political development of Summer 2005 has come from abroad. No, not Iraq--there has been no change there in the dismal story of well intentioned plans gone awry, thanks to a vicious, never-ending insurgency. Rather, it's the London bombings that will have the greatest long-term impact. With no domestic terrorist act in the U.S. since September 11, 2001, the specter of terrorism was beginning to fade a bit from our politics, with more and more Americans believing that Al Qaeda and affiliated groups had lost the capacity to pull off "the big event." Great Britain is still America's staunchest ally and, despite ethnic diversity aplenty in the 21st century United States, the U.K. maintains its position as the Mother Country. Most Americans of all ethnic stripes have affection for her. The brutal, deadly attacks in the heart of London have convinced Americans anew that terrorism is here to stay, much as a series of intermittent crises (Berlin, Korea, the U-2 spy plane, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Czechoslovakia and all the rest) after World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union convinced Americans that the Cold War was "Issue One" in our politics. (The Madrid subway bombings on March 11, 2004 had relatively little impact, both because Spain is not England, and because the new Spanish government reacted to the event by cutting its ties to the U.S. effort in Iraq--guaranteeing an adverse reaction among many Americans at the time.)