Misunderestimating Bush?

Pollsters and pundits are falling all over themselves predicting that the Republicans will lose control of the House and Senate in next month’s congressional election. However, President Bush, often misunderestimated as a politician, offered a different view in yesterday’s press conference in the Rose Garden. “I still stand by my prediction, we’ll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate,” Mr. Bush said. “We’ll maintain control because we’re on the right side of the economic issue and the security issue,” Mr. Bush said.Well, we’re not going to gainsay Mr. Bush’s prediction. The economy is growing so strongly that, as the president said yesterday, he reached his goal of cutting the deficit in half — three years ahead of schedule. The stock market is soaring, and unemployment is low. Not a situation in which the Democrats tax record looks inviting. The Democrats, Mr. Bush warned, “will raise taxes. Now, I know they say only on rich people, but that’s — in my judgment, having been around here long enough to know, it’s just code word. They’re going to raise them on whoever they can raise them on.”On national security, one can point to mistakes Mr. Bush has made in handling Iraq or Iran or Syria, but it is clear the Republicans are the party that wants to pursue the war on terrorists most aggressively. The president mentioned wiretapping and interrogations as two areas where Democrats want to deny “those on the front line of fighting terror the tools necessary to fight terror.” The fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and even, if but for a few fleeting minutes, yesterday’s plane crash on the Upper East Side, though it was apparently not terror-related, were reminders of the threat.By our lights it is the substance that will bring a Republican victory, but the Republicans are also being underestimated on tactics. On page one this morning, our Josh Gerstein reports a hitherto little-noticed effort to pour more than $30 million into compelling television commercials that reinforce the Republican message on national security. The ads take the message Mr. Bush has been delivering in a series of hour-long speeches and capture it in 30-second commercials. The Republican voter identification and get-out-the-vote effort in 2004 took nearly everyone by surprise. Karl Rove and his operatives like to talk about it to the press only after the election.Mr. Bush could be wrong, and if the congressional Republicans are ousted, there will no doubt be substantive reasons, too — starting with their failure to follow through on Mr. Bush’s campaign promises of private accounts as part of Social Security and of visas for more immigrant workers, but including also the delays and failings in the war. A lot can happen in the number of weeks left between now and election day.We have to say that an outcome that includes a Senate of 50 Democrats plus Senator Lieberman — making the Democrats dependent for a majority on the senator that so many of them, such as even New York’s own two senators, rushed to abandon in favor of anti-war candidate from Greenwich, Ned Lamont — has a certain appeal to us, if only for the fun of watching Mr. Lieberman make his colleagues squirm for a day or two or a year while he ponders his options. To Democrats popping the champagne corks already, we’d caution against misunderestimating Mr. Bush’s political sense.

Misunderestimating Bush?

Misunderestimating Bush?

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