Craig Crawford: War to the Rescue
By Craig Crawford | 6:30 PM; Oct. 13, 2006
If the war in Iraq is such a loser topic for Republicans in their congressional campaigns, why is George W. Bush so eager to talk about it? Whenever the subject slides from view for a few days, it’s the president who yanks it back onto the front page, indicating that the White House sees more political advantage than conventional wisdom suggests.
The outcome of the balloting in three weeks will tell who is right and who is wrong, but there is no doubting that Bush’s strategists are contrarians to the opinion — widely held within their own party — that Iraq could be the GOP’s undoing in the struggle for control of Congress.
Getting Iraq out of the news was perhaps the only upside for Republicans in the metastasizing scandal over how their Capitol Hill leaders handled Mark Foley’s sexual harassment of teenage pages while he held a House seat from Florida. As a topic for chatter around the nation’s water coolers, Foley might have topped journalist Bob Woodward’s savagery of the administration’s Iraq policy in his blockbuster book “State of Denial.”
But the administration did everything in its power to elevate the book’s profile with an intensive counterattack, issuing point-by-point memos and dispatching officials to give interviews rebutting the book’s claims. The Bush-driven publicity was so effective that Woodward probably should share a portion of his royalties with the White House.
As bad as things look in Iraq, the Bush team might be on to something. The Foley mess is so awful for Republicans that they might be better off shifting the focus back to the war. The president sure seems to think so. At his Oct. 12 news conference, his first since the Foley scandal broke, Bush set the table by devoting the last half of his opening statement to Iraq. Sure enough, he only got one question about Foley during the next 60 minutes.
White House defenders of this Iraq-focused strategy insist that the war is less of a plus for Democratic candidates than the conventional wisdom holds. The Bush team’s thinking is that the pivotal voters in this midterm election live in conservative terrain, in rural and exurban areas where tough talk about standing firm against terrorists trumps Democratic carping about setbacks in Iraq. “Look at where this election is being fought the hardest: in the reddest areas of the red states,” one White House strategist noted.
A quick survey of the Senate battlegrounds underscores the White House strategy. Of the six states where the contests now appear to be tossups, only two are “blue”: John Kerry and Al Gore carried both New Jersey and Rhode Island. Bush carried the others — Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Tennessee — in both 2000 and 2004.
On the surface this situation would seem to put Republicans at a disadvantage, forcing them to concentrate resources on their own turf while sacrificing chances to raid the opposition in blue states. But as the majority party, the GOP only needs to protect its turf. It’s the Democrats who must seize enemy ground to capture control.
And when you examine where the red-state contests are being fought, it is true, as the White House strategist asserted, that GOP-leaning conservatives are getting the most action. In Missouri, for instance, Democratic state Auditor Claire McCaskill is crusading for rural voters in her bid to unseat Republican Jim Talent, crisscrossing the state in a motor home that stops mostly in small towns.
Reclaiming the Stage
Bush strategists are betting that while security conservatives are unhappy with the GOP on many fronts, enough will come back to the party on Election Day to at least eke out continued majorities in both that House and Senate. Hence, the continuation of the president’s tough words in the fight against terrorism. It has worked before. Democrats are the ones betting on a more fundamental change among those voters than recent balloting history would portend.
There is another reason for Bush to reclaim the stage in the wake of the Foley scandal. For all of his faults and unpopularity, the president presents a more forceful and decisive image than the GOP’s bumbling congressional bosses, who have handled the Foley story with remarkably poor skill.
Perhaps the worst result of the page scandal is how it spotlighted Republican leaders who come across as even more clueless than how many voters perceive the Bush White House. At least the president and his handlers exhibit a basic understanding of the discipline and focus required for effective damage control. But the broken-field running by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and his deputies have alarmed even the party’s most ardent supporters.
Some in the White House even chuckled a bit at the mess their party brethren on Capitol Hill made for themselves, after enduring months of complaints from Republican lawmakers about how they handled bad news.
For good or ill, the GOP is now stuck with Bush as the best face for the party going into this election. And he is sticking to his guns.
Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com. This column is scheduled to appear in the Oct. 16 issue of CQ Weekly. For more information about CQ Weekly, please visit CQ.com.
cqpolitics.com |
