Bush’s Pushback

WASHINGTON – For a good long while, 2005 looked like a disastrous year for the Bush administration and the Republican Party.President Bush’s approval rating had steadily declined all year long. The public appeared to be losing faith that anything could be accomplished in Iraq. Fiscal conservatives accelerated the tearing out of their own hair over out-of-control spending. Legal minds on the right launched a full revolt over the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. Scooter Libby was indicted, and the off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and California went poorly.But in the past several weeks, Mr. Bush and his allies finally have some reason for cheer, just in time for the holiday season.Mr. Bush’s public communications efforts for much of the year were sporadic at best. Now, the White House is clearly back in campaign mode, with Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney giving high-profile speeches, laying out plans and progress in Iraq on a nearly daily basis. The White House press office is offering specific, point-by-point refutations of inaccurate, sneering articles from hostile members of the press.Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld unleashed a frontal challenge to the press on their failure to cover any good developments in Iraq – prompting a discussion of whether Iraq war coverage was sufficient or fair on Chris Matthews’ program and in other unexpected places. Pentagon officials were ebullient.House Republicans challenged their antiwar counterparts to put their votes where their rhetoric was and brought up a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Almost all of the Democrats ducked, demonstrating that the party isn’t willing to vote for the policy change they have been loudly demanding.And now there are signs of a reversal of Mr. Bush’s fortunes. The latest New York Times/CBS poll, conducted December 2-6, showed Mr. Bush’s approval rating at 40%, up from 35% a month ago, the low point of his presidency. That’s not exactly a reason to break out the party hats, but it’s the first sign in months that the numbers are headed in the right direction.But perhaps the biggest sign that the tide had shifted came on the front page of Wednesday’s Washington Post, in an article entitled, “Democrats Fear Backlash at Polls for Antiwar Remarks.” The article quoted and cited a slew of nervous comments from non-Deaniac Democrats, including Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, and Patrick Murphy, a Democrat running for a suburban Philadelphia House seat. These not-so-liberal voices feared that recent comments by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean had painted the party as hopelessly dovish and defeatist.As National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has observed, Democrats have “made the Iraq war the central and defining political issue of the decade while at the same time having no clue what it is they want to do about it.”And then there is Rep. John Murtha, the latest darling of the antiwar left (who dropped Cindy Sheehan like she was John Kerry).With each passing day, Mr. Murtha seems less like a crusty Marine whose antiwar position is worth heeding to a man thoroughly confused by the circumstances on the ground and the mission in Iraq. In a recent press conference, Murtha declared, “my plan says redeploy to the periphery, to Kuwait, to Okinawa, and if there’s a terrorist activity that affects our allies or affects the United States’ national security, we can then go back in.” Kuwait may make sense, but Okinawa is about 4,800 miles from Iraq. American forces there will not exactly be breathing down Abu Zarqawi’s neck.As one Army major noted, “I was amused to see Murtha, touted by the Democrats as a military expert, suggest that troops in Iraq could and should be deployed to the periphery, particularly Okinawa. It’s been announced in just the last month that the bulk of our forces in Okinawa (the Marines’ 3rd Division) will be redeployed to Guam over the next few years. I’m sure it would come as somewhat of a surprise to the Okinawans and Japanese for us to unilaterally move tens of thousands of troops there, since the presence of young Americans there and some high profile crimes have been a source of consternation for at least the last decade. You would think an ‘expert’ like Murtha would know all of this.”For all the nervousness among Congressional Republicans, the GOP’s position is pretty clear: Don’t lose your nerve, keep training the Iraqis, and don’t leave too early, because the consequences of an anarchic Iraq would make the current problems seem mild. The Democrats’ positions remain all over the map – from Dr. Dean’s “we can’t win” gloom to Mr. Murtha’s bizarre long-range redeployment to Senator Lieberman’s full-throated support of remaining until the Iraqis can stand on their own.As 2005 draws to a close, Washington has been forced to consider the unexpected but plausible argument that the Democrats have more problems on Iraq than Bush and the GOP.Mr. Geraghty, a contributing editor to National Review, is writing a book on how the September 11 attacks affected American politics, to be published by Simon & Schuster in August of 2006.

Bush’s Pushback

Bush’s Pushback

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