Why Iraq Scares Republicans
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
08.31.2005
Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum normally is one of the biggest and loudest cheerleaders of Bush’s policies. But that’s not the case with Iraq. Santorum, and a slew of other key Republicans, are up for reelection in 2006.
They’re plainly worried about the war. They worry not so much about Bush’s bumbles. Not one of them has called for a quick withdrawal from Iraq. But how his war bumbles could damage Republicans in the 2006 national and 2008 presidential elections. A no-win, unpopular war always spells trouble for the party in power. The Korean War spelled trouble for President Harry Truman and the Democrats in 1952, and for President Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats again in 1968.
In both election years, the Democrats had a decisive edge over the Republicans in Congress, a wide body of public support, and political prestige. But Republican Presidential contenders Eisenhower, and later Nixon, painted Korea and Vietnam as a hopeless muddle that Truman and Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey made a mess of. Johnson saw the handwriting on the wall and declined to run. Santorum, Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, and even Henry Kissenger, know that history well and they don’t want to repeat it with Bush and the Republicans. There’s simply too much at stake.
A shift of a few seats in the House, and especially the Senate, could tip the political balance back to the Democrats. With a battle looming over the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court and one, possibly two seats on the Supreme Court up, more Democrats in the Senate, could make trouble for Bush’s nominees and policies. It could also derail the Republican’s quest to dominate American politics for years to come, and reduce the Democrats to a second tier party.
That almost happened to the Republicans in the early to mid 1960s. Following his smash victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, Johnson had big Democratic margins in the House and the Senate, and had the overwhelming bulk of public opinion on his side. The Democrats were the party of civil rights and economic prosperity. Vietnam was barely a blip on the chart. But mounting war casualties, a determined Vietnamese resistance, and ferocious international opposition to the war changed all that. By 1968, Johnson’s public mandate had evaporated. Four years earlier, Democrats had gotten more than 60 percent of the vote, pollsters projected that the Democrats would get half that number in 1968.
The Vietnam debacle and continuing racial turmoil also revived a Republican Party moribund for nearly a century in the South. In the next decades, Republicans Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. adroitly tweaked, refined, and massaged the Southern strategy to seal the White House.
While it’s overblown and premature to compare Iraq to Vietnam, it’s still much different than America’s wars and military engagements in Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama, Somalia, and Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. They were quick strike, limited, covert operations, or were fought by coalition forces or proxy armies.
The UN military strikes in Kosovo were a textbook example of a war that wasn’t a war. There were no large American ground troop engagements, and not a single American pilot was killed in the aerial bomb attacks. As long as the costs of U.S. military actions were low, and relatively bloodless, U.S. policy makers could delude themselves that a martial spirit again gripped Americans.
Much of the public sees Iraq differently. A recent Gallup poll that compared American opinion on Vietnam during the mid-1960s and Iraq in 2005 found that it took more than three years for a majority of Americans to sour on the Vietnam War. It has taken half that time for Americans to knock Bush for Iraq.
Bush, unlike Johnson, also didn’t have the luxury of a compelling racial crisis to grab public attention. Johnson’s performance and popularity in opinion polls was measured by how effectively he dealt with racial issues. The public’s deep preoccupation with race deflected attention from the mounting quagmire that Vietnam by 1965 had become. That gave Johnson the political breathing space to lie and deceive Americans that Vietnam was a crusade against Communism. This was crucial to sell the war to Congress and the public.
The Iraq War, however, quickly muscled out domestic issues to become the defining issue that Bush, and much of the American public, measures his administration’s success or failure on. Bush’s performance and approval ratings have and will continue to take hits as battlefield casualties mount, and more moms like Cindy Sheehan wag their moral finger at him for the deaths of their sons and daughters. It won’t sink Bush’s presidency, but it could cost Republicans votes, Congressional seats, and political supremacy. That’s more than enough to scare Republicans about Iraq.
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