Posted by Mark Silva at 6:10 am CST
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE — President Bush cannot run from the war in Iraq, so he is running with it. Embracing the one issue that has made him both unpopular and a potential liability for his own party’s congressional candidates, Bush will head out today for a campaign-closing tour in which he defiantly is defending his stance on the war and challenging the Democratic Party’s “cut and run” policies.
For Bush, this represents the final political campaign of a long journey that started in Texas with his first election as governor in 1994, carried him to the White House in the election of 2000 and into a second term in 2004. He has made his stance on national security a mainstay of recent campaigns, and hopes to make it the linchpin of this midterm election. For more, see this story from today’s Tribune:
Bush to hit GOP campaign trail
By Mark Silva
Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — On voters’ minds though not on the ballot, President Bush is defiantly embracing the issue that has made him both unpopular and a possible liability for Republican congressional candidates this year: unyielding support for the war in Iraq.As he heads out for a campaign-closing tour through the weekend—starting out West on Thursday and carrying him to Iowa and Missouri on Friday—the president is stumping with the fervor of someone whose own office is at stake. And in many ways it is, considering the impact on the remaining two years of his presidency if the Democrats take control of the House and possibly the Senate.
Insisting that this contest is “far from over,” Bush has escalated his campaign-trail rhetoric about the war with a warning: “However they put it, the Democrats’ approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.”
As Florida Gov. Jeb Bush put it, “My brother loves a fight. He enjoys to be underestimated. He has defied the pundits in the last three election cycles. He will take risks on behalf of his cause.”
The risk of putting so much behind support for the war in Iraq in the face of so much distressing news from the battlefront is that public opposition to the war will take the same toll on some of his party’s candidates that it has taken on Bush’s own public approval ratings. They have been below 40 percent for months.
Yet analysts say the president’s resolve for fighting the war against terrorism remains his strongest suit politically and represents his best chance for stirring conservative turnout Tuesday in taut races, such as Missouri’s contest between Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) and Democrat Claire McCaskill.
As unpopular as the war in Iraq has become, they say, the president cannot run from it—so he is running with it.
“All other issues are taking second fiddle to Iraq,” said Philip Hughes, a communications consultant who served on the National Security Councils of the previous Bush and Reagan administrations. He said flatly that the current Bush administration “has really done a lousy job of communicating its policy” on Iraq.
“There is nothing that seems to be so quite in the minds of Americans—not gay marriage… not taxes. There is nothing that overshadows Iraq,” Hughes said. “The president, it seems to me, has no choice but to defend his policy, to defend Iraq. It seems to me this is the only option, the only play.”
Playing to the issue that has carried his party through the last two elections, the president is portraying the GOP as the party prepared to protect Americans from terrorism and Democrats as the party ready to “cut and run” from the fight in Iraq.
“You can’t win a war unless you’re willing to fight the war,” Bush said as he campaigned for a Republican House candidate in Sugar Land, Texas, this week. “Retreat from Iraq before the job was done would embolden an enemy and make this country more vulnerable to attack.”
Democrats complain that the president is tarring critics of the war in Iraq by waging a campaign of “fear.”
The administration is “massively overstating” the threat that terrorism poses to the United States, according to John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State University and author of a new book, “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.”
Yet for Bush, Mueller said, campaigning on a perceived threat of terrorism following any failure of the U.S. mission in Iraq remains “his strongest suit. … In politics, what you always do is play to your strong suit.”
The Republicans also have found fresh fodder for their argument that Democrats don’t understand the stakes in Iraq with Sen. John Kerry’s “botched joke” this week. If “you study hard … you can do well,” Kerry said. “If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Kerry said he botched a prepared line about Bush getting stuck in Iraq, but Bush and fellow Republican leaders accused Kerry of insulting the intelligence of American troops.
“Of course, now Sen. Kerry says he was just making a joke, and he botched it up,” Vice President Dick Cheney said at a campaign rally in Montana on Wednesday. “I guess we didn’t get the nuance. He was for the joke before he was against it.”
Kerry apologized Wednesday to “any service member, family member or American” offended by his comment and said he regretted that his words were “misinterpreted to imply anything negative about those in uniform.”
In another pointed effort to turn out conservatives, the president also is campaigning for passage of several state proposals to ban same-sex marriage.
Having failed to win congressional support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and woman, Bush has raised the issue anew in recent days, since the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the state must give gay and lesbian couples the same legal rights as it affords married couples.
“For decades, activist judges have tried to redefine America by court order,” Bush said, campaigning in Georgia this week. “Just this last week in New Jersey, another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage.”
Twenty states have enacted constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, and voters in another eight states face amendments on Tuesday—including Tennessee and Virginia where Republicans are fighting to turn out the vote in close races that could determine the balance of partisan power in the Senate.
“It’s really a base-mobilization argument,” said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. “The issue had lost some of its immediacy…. What the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling did was make it possible to talk about the return of that urgency. It may indeed help mobilize conservative Christians.”
Campaigning on the war, too, can help mobilize conservatives disenchanted with the president’s stance on other issues, such as deficit spending, Green said. “These are people who nonetheless care a great deal about national security,” he said.
Keeping the spotlight focused on Iraq is not without risk in elections where many Democrats are trying to frame them as a referendum on Bush in general, and the war in particular.
This is the case, Green said, “because Iraq is becoming less and less popular—even within his own party. On the other hand, he doesn’t have much alternative…. It’s a variation on [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld’s comment that you go to war with the army that you have…. You go into the last week of a campaign with the policies that you have.”
mdsilva@tribune.com
