As G.O.P. Mopes, Bush Adds the Duties of Optimist in Chief
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JIM RUTENBERG
WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 — The capital is filled with Republicans convinced that they will lose the House and maybe the Senate. So last week, the White House and party leaders convened a “friends and allies” teleconference to dispute what Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, considers flawed conventional wisdom.
For 20 minutes, Mr. Mehlman and the White House political director, Sara Taylor, tried to lift the cloak of gloom that has descended on the top ranks of Republican strategists, using what one of the dozens of lobbyists, donors, party aides and other supporters who listened in later called “happy talk.”
President Bush and his political strategists may be the most outwardly optimistic Republicans in Washington these days, and perhaps the only ones. They are doing their best to fend off the sense of impending doom within their party that they fear will become a self-fulfilling prophecy on Nov. 7.
They are enlisting longtime allies for an all-hands-on-deck effort to change the mood for the final push to Election Day, and they are putting out the word for Republicans to keep a lid on any pessimistic talk. They are also planning a travel blitz for Mr. Bush during the final week to 10 days of the campaign.
And though they fully expect to lose seats, they are also keeping their fingers crossed. They are counting on a barrage of last-minute advertising and their 72-hour voter turnout operation to keep Democrats from taking over the House and Senate, even if it means they only eke out a victory.
But those the White House counts on to help raise party morale at such low moments say they are having a hard time of it, when so many polls augur ever-worsening election results and when so many things have gone wrong, including the Mark Foley scandal and grim news from Iraq.
“I’m trying to buck people up, but let’s just say I’m hiding all the sharp objects in my office,” said Rich Bond, a former Republican National Committee chairman who now runs a consulting firm.
Even Mary Matalin, the longtime Bush family aide and confidante, confessed, “I’m in my stoic mode now,” though she said she believed that the party would prove the dire predictions wrong.
Mr. Bush has been saying for months that he believes Republicans will keep control of the House and the Senate, and he is not changing his tune now, even if it means taking the rare step of rebuking his own father.
In an interview shown Sunday on ABC News, Mr. Bush was asked about a comment by the first President Bush, who said this month that he hated to think about life for his son if Democrats took control of Congress. “He shouldn’t be speculating like that, because he should have called me ahead of time,” the president said, “and I’d tell him they’re not going to.”
The president’s professed certainty, shared with outside friends and advisers, is a source of fascination among even his staunchest allies. In lobbying shops and strategy firms around town, the latest Republican parlor game is divining whether the White House optimism is staged, or whether Mr. Bush and his political team really believe what they are saying.
There are hints that the mood is not so upbeat or unremittingly confident in the West Wing. Mr. Bush and his inner circle, people in regular contact with them say, are well aware of the Democratic surge recorded by polls, and of the stakes for the final two years of an administration already burdened with troubles like the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
A strategist close to the White House said Mr. Bush’s own political team had polling that showed as many as 14 House seats were probably already lost to Democrats, just one shy of the 15 seats they need to gain to win control.
Though White House aides said that account was exaggerated, they acknowledged that polls have shown at least that many races with Democrats leading Republicans. “Their attitude is, ‘We’ve got our backs against the wall, but we know how to fight our way out of this,’ ” said Charles Black, a Republican strategist who has been in regular contact with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior adviser. “They’re not unrealistic, but they’re optimistic that we can still win.”
Officials are telling their friends that they believe a final volley of intensive attacks by the White House will return the party to where it was before the Foley scandal, by casting the election as a choice between Democrats and Republicans over national security and taxes.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are discounting predictions of Republican demise in part because they believe they have turned out wrong before. “I remember 2004,” Mr. Bush said in the interview shown on “This Week.” “I was history as far as the punditry was concerned.”
Mr. Rove has told associates that the party’s turnout machinery, through which the White House will continue to pump an unrelenting message against Democrats on taxes and terrorism, gives Republicans an advantage of four to seven percentage points in any given race. Though Democrats call that too generous, they acknowledge that it accounts for at least a few percentage points.
Mr. Rove and Ms. Taylor are said by associates to have spent hours going through data on volunteer efforts, voter registration tallies and financial matchups between candidates throughout the states, and they see a path to victory.
“You’ve got 452 races this year; many of them are already settled,” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said in an interview on Sunday. “Our view is fight hard to win the ones you can win. And we think there are enough of those that we will win both houses.”
For all the difficulties this year, Mr. Bush is said to have full confidence in Mr. Rove, Mr. Mehlman and Ms. Taylor.
Mr. Bush has always relished political combat. On the campaign trail, he can be seen slapping backs and clapping hands with coachlike enthusiasm, even as he embraces candidates whose campaigns seem like lost causes.
And far more than he lets on, Mr. Bush is a student of politics, up to speed on the nuances of races and tactics. Meeting with conservative talk radio hosts last month, Mr. Bush expressed optimism that Republicans would win. But he also lamented that victory would come in spite of “stupid moves” by some candidates, according to one host, Michael Medved, who participated in the meeting and wrote about it on his Web site.
Saulius Anuzis, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, said that on two recent occasions, Mr. Bush indicated that he understood the minutia of the state’s electorate and how it would affect the Republican candidate for Senate there, Sheriff Michael J. Bouchard of Oakland County. “He knew more than the perfunctory,” Mr. Anuzis said. “He said having the sheriff out of Oakland County, which is a swing county, ought to be a big help.”
In some respects, Mr. Bush has been stuck in the stable this political season, with low approval ratings that have made him less of an asset on the campaign trail, unlike in 2002 when he blitzed through the states giving pep talks and rallies as a far more popular president. White House aides say it has been far more important to have the president helping to raise money, often at closed events, than to have him at rallies that cost money to organize.
His schedule has not seemed as packed as Mr. Snow and other aides predicted last month, when they said he was likely to be on the road almost constantly through October. The president’s schedule for this week shows him campaigning on only two days, Tuesday and Thursday, in Florida, Iowa and Michigan.
But aides said rallies and fund-raisers in the final week of the campaign would keep him front and center, making an increasingly pointed argument against Democrats.
The president’s stump speech is the only place where he publicly contemplates Democratic control, raising it only to motivate Republicans. Mr. Bush’s aides say he has refused to let them even be seen planning for a possible Democratic takeover so as not to give volunteers or donors any reason to doubt that their efforts will pay off.
And he demonstrates annoyance with questions about what his administration is doing to plan for a potential Democratic takeover of the House.
“I don’t buy into that premise,” Mr. Bush told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Calling the query a “trick question,” he added: “The minute I start answering your question, the word is ‘Well, Bush anticipates losing.’ I don’t anticipate losing.” |
