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Iraq may split Bush and GOP
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst
Sun, Jan. 07, 2007
"As President Bush prepares to "surge and accelerate" in Iraq, conventional wisdom decrees that he needs to work closely with his Democratic foes. But maybe his biggest political problem right now is that he is on the verge of losing his friends.
Consider the metamorphosis of Gordon Smith. When I interviewed the Republican senator from Oregon during the spring of 2004, he was marching in step with Bush on the war, declaring that "we'll win only if we are resolute." But today he is fed up; in a Senate floor speech on Dec. 7, he declared: "I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore... . We have no business being a policeman in someone else's civil war."
When a mainstream Republican senator - as opposed to, say, Cindy Sheehan - is willing to suggest publicly that Bush's war strategy might be "criminal," one can reasonably conclude that the GOP on Capitol Hill is no longer willing to take its marching orders from the wartime commander in chief. The era of lockstep complicity is over.
Bush is a lame duck seeking to salvage the signature issue of his presidency, and hence his legacy. Because he never has to face the voters again, and because he clearly feels no particular obligation to honor the results of the '06 election, he can order a military escalation in Iraq - an option that draws 12 percent support in the latest polls. He is, in a sense, a free man. But his fellow Republicans are not so free. They have to run for office again in 2008, and the last thing they want is to have Iraq front and center when the voters render their next verdict.
So, politically speaking, there is a growing desire to cut and run from Bush. The first order of business is to make it clear that rank-and-file Republicans don't share the president's urge to "surge." Sen. Susan Collins of Maine doesn't like it. Neither does Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who says: "I think it would create more targets. I think it would put more life at risk." When Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the departing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked last weekend whether he backed a troop surge, he offered this stellar endorsement: "I don't know whether I do or not."
Washington columnist Robert Novak, who has excellent conservative sources, said the other day that roughly 37 of the 49 Republican senators are prepared to bail out on Bush over the troop-escalation plan. That number seems high, in light of the GOP's traditional party discipline. But, at the very least, it's clear that Republicans have studied the '06 election results - particularly the mass defection of independent swing voters - and rightly concluded that they would still be running Capitol Hill if not for Bush's elective war.
They saw what happened to Sen. Rick Santorum in blue-state Pennsylvania; he was actually more hawkish than Bush, and he lost by 18 percentage points. They also saw what happened to Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island; he said last fall that he would consider the surge idea but changed his tune after he took a lot of heat. He lost anyway, basically because he shared Bush's party label.
Hence the attempts by Smith, Collins and Coleman to distance themselves. All three Republicans are up for reelection in 2008. All three hail from blue states that voted Democratic in the '04 presidential race. Coleman, in particular, may have serious trouble, given the burgeoning anti-GOP mood in his back yard. Two months ago, Minnesota voters elected a new Democratic senator in a 20-point blowout; most tellingly, swing voters in that state favored the Democrat by 35 points.
Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire hasn't been surging for Bush, either. Nor has Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado. It's easy to understand their reticence. They, too, have to face the voters in 2008. New Hampshire has been trending blue; two House Republicans were defeated last November, not because they did anything wrong, but because they were broadly tied to Bush's war. And Colorado has trended blue in the last two elections.
All told, Republicans are in a tough position. They can't really hurt Bush; even if they bail on him over the war, he is still constitutionally empowered to pursue his elusive "victory." On the other hand, the longer Bush persists in Iraq, the more he threatens to hurt the Republicans politically in 2008 - much the way that the Democrats were torn apart by President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam misadventure in 1968.
The GOP presidential contest could prove to be particularly divisive. One potential candidate, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, is urging a phased U.S. withdrawal; he dismisses the troop-escalation idea as "Alice in Wonderland." It's also worth noting that Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have said virtually nothing about Bush's surge urge; even Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a religious-right favorite, has poured lukewarm water on it.
Yet Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the purported front-runner, is a surge architect. Indeed, he is sometimes more hawkish than Bush on Iraq.
It is a testament to the durability of first impressions that McCain has been able to hang on to his "maverick" image for so long, all track-record evidence to the contrary. In journalistic shorthand, he is still the centrist "independent" who wows independent swing voters. But McCain's stance on Iraq is at odds with the fundamental sentiments of most of those voters. Thus, the key question: Is an outspokenly hawkish Republican candidate really electable, given the temper of the times?
How ironic that McCain could wind up as the Hubert Humphrey candidate of 2008. Forty years ago, Vice President Humphrey was the favorite of the Democratic establishment; until the final weeks of the campaign, he basically argued that America needed to stay the course in Vietnam, echoing LBJ. But his ties to a lame-duck Texas president ultimately cost him the election."
>snip<
link
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst
Sun, Jan. 07, 2007
"As President Bush prepares to "surge and accelerate" in Iraq, conventional wisdom decrees that he needs to work closely with his Democratic foes. But maybe his biggest political problem right now is that he is on the verge of losing his friends.
Consider the metamorphosis of Gordon Smith. When I interviewed the Republican senator from Oregon during the spring of 2004, he was marching in step with Bush on the war, declaring that "we'll win only if we are resolute." But today he is fed up; in a Senate floor speech on Dec. 7, he declared: "I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore... . We have no business being a policeman in someone else's civil war."
When a mainstream Republican senator - as opposed to, say, Cindy Sheehan - is willing to suggest publicly that Bush's war strategy might be "criminal," one can reasonably conclude that the GOP on Capitol Hill is no longer willing to take its marching orders from the wartime commander in chief. The era of lockstep complicity is over.
Bush is a lame duck seeking to salvage the signature issue of his presidency, and hence his legacy. Because he never has to face the voters again, and because he clearly feels no particular obligation to honor the results of the '06 election, he can order a military escalation in Iraq - an option that draws 12 percent support in the latest polls. He is, in a sense, a free man. But his fellow Republicans are not so free. They have to run for office again in 2008, and the last thing they want is to have Iraq front and center when the voters render their next verdict.
So, politically speaking, there is a growing desire to cut and run from Bush. The first order of business is to make it clear that rank-and-file Republicans don't share the president's urge to "surge." Sen. Susan Collins of Maine doesn't like it. Neither does Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who says: "I think it would create more targets. I think it would put more life at risk." When Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the departing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked last weekend whether he backed a troop surge, he offered this stellar endorsement: "I don't know whether I do or not."
Washington columnist Robert Novak, who has excellent conservative sources, said the other day that roughly 37 of the 49 Republican senators are prepared to bail out on Bush over the troop-escalation plan. That number seems high, in light of the GOP's traditional party discipline. But, at the very least, it's clear that Republicans have studied the '06 election results - particularly the mass defection of independent swing voters - and rightly concluded that they would still be running Capitol Hill if not for Bush's elective war.
They saw what happened to Sen. Rick Santorum in blue-state Pennsylvania; he was actually more hawkish than Bush, and he lost by 18 percentage points. They also saw what happened to Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island; he said last fall that he would consider the surge idea but changed his tune after he took a lot of heat. He lost anyway, basically because he shared Bush's party label.
Hence the attempts by Smith, Collins and Coleman to distance themselves. All three Republicans are up for reelection in 2008. All three hail from blue states that voted Democratic in the '04 presidential race. Coleman, in particular, may have serious trouble, given the burgeoning anti-GOP mood in his back yard. Two months ago, Minnesota voters elected a new Democratic senator in a 20-point blowout; most tellingly, swing voters in that state favored the Democrat by 35 points.
Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire hasn't been surging for Bush, either. Nor has Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado. It's easy to understand their reticence. They, too, have to face the voters in 2008. New Hampshire has been trending blue; two House Republicans were defeated last November, not because they did anything wrong, but because they were broadly tied to Bush's war. And Colorado has trended blue in the last two elections.
All told, Republicans are in a tough position. They can't really hurt Bush; even if they bail on him over the war, he is still constitutionally empowered to pursue his elusive "victory." On the other hand, the longer Bush persists in Iraq, the more he threatens to hurt the Republicans politically in 2008 - much the way that the Democrats were torn apart by President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam misadventure in 1968.
The GOP presidential contest could prove to be particularly divisive. One potential candidate, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, is urging a phased U.S. withdrawal; he dismisses the troop-escalation idea as "Alice in Wonderland." It's also worth noting that Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have said virtually nothing about Bush's surge urge; even Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a religious-right favorite, has poured lukewarm water on it.
Yet Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the purported front-runner, is a surge architect. Indeed, he is sometimes more hawkish than Bush on Iraq.
It is a testament to the durability of first impressions that McCain has been able to hang on to his "maverick" image for so long, all track-record evidence to the contrary. In journalistic shorthand, he is still the centrist "independent" who wows independent swing voters. But McCain's stance on Iraq is at odds with the fundamental sentiments of most of those voters. Thus, the key question: Is an outspokenly hawkish Republican candidate really electable, given the temper of the times?
How ironic that McCain could wind up as the Hubert Humphrey candidate of 2008. Forty years ago, Vice President Humphrey was the favorite of the Democratic establishment; until the final weeks of the campaign, he basically argued that America needed to stay the course in Vietnam, echoing LBJ. But his ties to a lame-duck Texas president ultimately cost him the election."
>snip<
link
