White House Watch: Rolling out Bush for '06 campaign
White House strategists, admittedly worried about the president's slumping poll numbers, are not slowing the Republican Party's planning for a massive effort by President Bush to campaign for 2006 House and Senate candidates.
"We expect that he'll be out a lot, more than before," said a GOP official. "He can still raise huge amounts of money and charge voters up."
There have been suggestions in Republican circles that some candidates in troubled seats or states don't want to be associated with a president so low in the polls and bedeviled by the war in Iraq. But GOP officials believe that the sentiment will change as the elections near. And just to make sure Republican lawmakers understand the value of the president's help in keeping the majority in the midterms, some GOP strategists are playing up talk in Democratic camps that a switch in power would lead to a wave of ethics investigations and possibly impeachment proceedings against the president in 2007.
"We need to keep both houses or all that will come back to hit us," said one strategist.
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