$130 billion by the start of the FY 2005 fiscal year and the Government Accountability Office
(GAO) warned Congress that the Pentagon would need additional billions to continue operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
7
Economic calculations of the war’s cost on the American economy
arrived at figures approaching $150 billion in lost gross domestic product since March 2003, or
approximately one percentage point of growth.
8
Questions were raised about the management of
the $18.4 billion congressional appropriation for reconstruction purposes; in particular, analysts
in and out of the federal government estimated that “...less than half of the aid in the Bush
Administration’s reconstruction package for Iraq is being spent to benefit Iraqis.”
9
Costs for
security services, property losses and insurance, contractors’ salaries and profits, overhead, and
corruption reduced the impact of the reconstruction funds. Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blamed the slow pace of spending on “the
incompetence of the administration.”
10
These rapidly rising expenditures contributed to the
national government’s annual deficit and increased pressure to cut federal discretionary spending
on domestic programs, in particular programs aiding state and local governments. But neither
candidate made much of these costs as an election issue.
The 2004 presidential contest was dead even with three weeks to go, and remained so
until the very end. Both parties and their allies engaged in what most observers judged to be the
most expensive and negative political media war ever conducted. A total of more than a $1
billion (compared to $100 million in 1996) was spent, and during the last week, money was
consumed at the rate of $10 million a day.
11
But with both sides engaged in media blitzes, the
decisive factor turned out to be old-fashioned, “retail” politics of get-out-the-vote activities. The
Democrats in 2000 had bested the Republicans in the door-to-door “ground war,” and for four
years the Bush campaign team worked incessantly to build up and energize the Republican base
vote of evangelical and conservative Christians, small-town and rural voters, pro-gun, anti-gay-
Convention