In the poll, 45 percent said Democrats were more likely to make the right decision on Iraq, compared with 34 percent of Republicans.
Tables Turned for the G.O.P. Over Iraq Issue
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 19, 2006
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — Four months ago, the White House offered a set of clear political directions to Republicans heading into the midterm elections: embrace the war in Iraq as critical to the antiterrorism fight and belittle Democrats as advocates of a “cut and run” policy of weakness.
With three weeks until Election Day, Republican candidates are barely mentioning Iraq on the campaign trail and in their television advertisements.
Even President Bush, continuing to attack Democrats for opposing the war, has largely dropped his call of “stay the course” and replaced it with a more nuanced promise of flexibility.
It is the Democrats who have seized on Iraq as a central issue. In debates and in speeches, candidates are pummeling Republicans with accusations of a failed war.
Rather than avoiding confrontation on Iraq as they did in 2002 and 2004, they are spotlighting their opposition in new television advertisements that feature mayhem and violence in Iraq, denounce Republicans for supporting Mr. Bush and, in at least one case, demand the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
“I support our troops and I voted for the war, but we shouldn’t stay the course, as Mr. Corker wants,” Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, says in one advertisement.
Mr. Ford’s Republican opponent, Bob Corker, is shown against a backdrop of wartime scenes, saying, “We should stay the course,” a phrase that Republicans once described as a rallying cry for the campaign.
Taken together, the discussion on the campaign trail suggests just how much of a problem the Iraq war has become for Republicans. It represents a startling contrast with the two national elections beginning in 2002 with the preparation for the Iraq invasion, in which Republicans used the issue to keep Democrats on the run on foreign policy and national security.
The development also suggests that what has been a classic strategy of Mr. Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove — to turn a weakness into a strength — is not working as well as the White House had hoped.
“As the Iraq war gets more unpopular, the environment for Republican candidates erodes,” said Mark Campbell, a Republican strategist who represents several Congressional candidates, including Representative Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania, who is fighting for re-election in one of the toughest races.
“Only in an election year this complicated can Republicans be happy that Mark Foley knocked the Iraq war off the front page,” Mr. Campbell said.
A senior strategist familiar with Republican polling who insisted on anonymity to share internal data said that as of midsummer it was clear that “stay the course” was a self-defeating argument.
At that point, the strategist said, Republicans started trying to refine their oratory or refocus the debate back to discussing terrorism, where Republicans continue to say they wield the stronger hand and where candidates are running advertisements that Democrats describe as effective.
Democrats, seeing similar data in their polls, advised candidates to confront Republicans aggressively, in the view that accusations that Democrats would “cut and run” would not blunt Democrats’ efforts to mock Republicans as wanting to “stay the course.”
“For the first time in modern memory, Democrats are actually on the offensive when it comes to national security,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization that has been briefing Democrats on discussing the war and national security. “It is really stunning.”
As of this week, party officials said, Democratic candidates in at least 17 of roughly 35 closely contested Congressional seats and at least six of eight Senate races considered close are running television advertisements against the Iraq war, presenting viewpoints that extend to calling for a troop withdrawal.
More broadly, Democrats in all parts of the country, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Mexico are embracing the war issue.
“It’s not just the Northeast and the West Coast,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said. “It’s places like Virginia and Tennessee. Iraq and foreign policy are to a large extent albatrosses around the Republicans’ neck this year. And they don’t know what to do about it.”
Republicans and Democrats said the White House effort to turn the war into an affirmative Republican issue was undercut by the increasing violence there, along with more American deaths that have brought the war home in the form of mournful articles in local newspapers.
That complicated the White House effort to present the Iraq war as part of the antiterrorism effort, and it has contributed to support for the war reaching record or near-record lows.
In the New York Times/CBS News Poll taken from Oct. 5 to Oct. 8, two-thirds of respondents said they disapproved of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war and 66 percent said the war was going somewhat or very badly.
In the poll, 45 percent said Democrats were more likely to make the right decision on Iraq, compared with 34 percent of Republicans.
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