Des Moines, Iowa – The Republican presidential candidates walked a delicate line in their latest campaign debate, seeking some distance from President Bush and an unpopular war in Iraq while offering assurances of change in a new Republican administration.
“I can tell you I’m not a carbon copy of George Bush,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said Sunday, even as he called for a “surge of support” for troops fighting in Iraq.
The Republican rivals, meeting at Drake University for an ABC News-sponsored debate, generally disagreed with Bush’s fundamental foreign-policy goal of exporting democracy around the world and quibbled with the handling of the war even while backing it.
“All of us feel frustration, sometimes anger and sorrow,” Arizona Sen. John McCain said of the war. “It was badly mismanaged.”
They even found room for delicate criticism of the enormously powerful role that Vice President Dick Cheney has carved out for himself in the Bush White House.
“I would be very careful that everybody understood that there’s only one president,” said McCain.
“I think the president has overrelied” on Cheney, said Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback.
Some strategists argued that the candidates’ posturing is a natural reaction to the need to establish among voters an independent presence, while not riling the party’s sharply conservative political base and while remaining respectful and polite.
“I think there is no advantage to a Republican candidate to personally attack George W. Bush,” said GOP strategist Tucker Eskew, a former high-ranking Bush aide. “There is a natural political advantage to someone trying to succeed this president to say how you would do some things differently.”
At the same time, the rivals made it very clear there would be no fundamental shift in policy in Iraq should they win the White House.
“The reality is you do not achieve peace through weakness and appeasement,” said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
One of the sharpest exchanges of the debate came over abortion and Brownback’s attack on Romney for not being strong enough in his opposition to it.
Romney replied, “I get tired of people that are holier than thou because they’ve been pro-life longer than I have.”
The exchange led some to wonder if the well-financed Romney had allowed a lesser candidate to get under his skin.
“I’m a little bit surprised that Romney would let himself get into sort of an angry exchange with Brownback,” said Ed Rogers, a Republican strategist. “If you have to find a mistake in the debate, that was it.”
