Washington
There were 5,000 Republican elected officials, apparatchiks and big-money donors at the convention center here on Monday night, and President Bush left them with no doubt about their party’s strategy for the 2006 election.
For good or ill, Bush cast the November balloting as a referendum on the war in Iraq.
“An early withdrawal would embolden al-Qaeda and bin Laden,” said Bush. “An early withdrawal, before we completed the mission, would say to the United States military, your sacrifices have gone to vain.
“There will be no early withdrawal,” Bush said, “so long as we run the Congress and occupy the White House.”
Rarely do American politicians state a choice so clearly.
There was no audible dissent from Republicans on Capitol Hill where, in the course of the last two weeks, members of the Senate and the House debated the war.
If Republicans from blue states or contested districts harbored doubts, they kept their mouths shut, and marched in lock step to the president’s tune.
Even the blandest Democratic resolution, co-sponsored by Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar – respectfully “urging” the president to consider a “phased redeployment” of U.S. troops by January – was scorned by the Republican-controlled Senate.
GOP backbones had been fortified by reports that the Iraqis had finally formed a government, which Bush dashed to visit. The death of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was more good news. And sifting through the public opinion polls, Republicans found signs of optimism.
The latest Pew Research Center poll showed the public has made quite a turnaround when asked if the U.S. is winning the fight against the Iraq insurgency. In March, only 36 percent of the public thought the U.S. was making progress, and 51 percent said we were losing ground. But now 48 percent believe we’re gaining, and just 36 percent think we’re losing.
There was also a significant shift on the question of whether to pull out of Iraq. In March, a slight majority (50 to 44 percent) wanted to bring the troops home; today a similarly small majority (50-45) favors staying the course.
But the polls also exposed the risk in the Republican strategy.
By a 34-to-28-percent margin, Americans still think the Democratic Party, not the GOP, can do a better job handling things in Iraq. And 52 percent of Americans believe that announcing a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces is a pretty good idea.
For now, it seems, Bush is simply doing better at singing to the choir. The poll numbers reflect a return of disgruntled conservatives to the fold, a trend that may be fueled by the Republican decision to consign border-security legislation to political limbo.
For Republicans in conservative districts, the vote to indefinitely occupy Iraq is a safe one. But in contested congressional races, Iraq may yet emerge as a noose for Republican moderates forced to go on record in unconditional support of Bush’s war. They know that his overall approval rating still lingers at a dismal 36 percent.
Even the president seemed to signal as much in his June 16 appearance on behalf of Republican Rep. Heather Wilson in New Mexico.
Bush failed to carry Wilson’s Albuquerque-based district in either 2000 or 2004. It is 91 percent urban and 43 percent Hispanic, and antiwar sentiment is strong. Her Democratic challenger, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, says the U.S. should establish “a definite timeline for troop withdrawal.”
In his visit to Albuquerque, Bush went out of his way to hail Wilson as a “strong woman” and an “independent soul” and “independent-minded.”
“I’m close to Heather, you know,” said Bush. “She, ah … as I told you, she’s independent.”
But that morning, in Washington, Republican congressional leaders gave Wilson little room to demonstrate independence. With 213 other House Republicans, she voted to endorse the president’s conduct of the war, and to reject timetables for a U.S. withdrawal.
“That is the choice we face as a nation,” Wilson said. “I choose resolve.”
The president and her party are now wagering their future that Americans will make the same choice in November.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Read and comment on his columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
