Politics and War
The president pushes back as a deadly month adds to voters' anxiety
President Bush didn't do much homework to prepare for his news conference on Iraq last week. He spent a few minutes with advisers, who tried to predict the questions that reporters might ask (and got most of them right), but he didn't feel a need to rehearse. Aides saw this as a sign of Bush's expertise. "You have a guy who lives this issue [of Iraq]," White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told U.S. News. "He really thinks about it every day."
That's the kind of confidence that delights the president's allies and unsettles his critics. And it will be on full display this week as Bush makes his final push before the midterm elections. White House advisers say Bush recognizes that it is sagging public support for the Iraq war, more than anything else, that is jeopardizing the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Most Americans now oppose Bush's policy in Iraq, and 6 in 10 don't think the war was worth fighting in the first place. The latest USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 55 percent think the situation in Iraq is "out of control," and 58 percent say "neither side" is winning.
Rhetorical offensive. To lift his party's candidates, Bush will continue to make his familiar arguments that Iraq is a "central front" in the war on terrorism and, in a series of rallies, attack Democrats for criticizing his policies without offering a clear alternative short of pulling out. The closing theme of Bush's final week on the campaign trail, as described by his advisers: If the Democrats have a better idea, let's hear it. Bush will argue that the situation in Iraq is not nearly as bad as the news media are reporting. And Bush, along with military leaders in Iraq, will point to specific cases of success and courage shown by U.S. soldiers and marines to encourage voters to take heart.
In sum, Bush is gambling that voters will trust him one more time to do the right thing as commander in chief, as they did in 2002 and 2004. At his news conference last week, he admitted to being dissatisfied with how the Iraq venture is going. But he was much less clear about what he will do to make improvements and how much pressure he will exert on the Iraqi government to make reforms.
So far, the changes have been cosmetic. After Democrats began using Bush's catchphrase "stay the course" to portray the president as blindly wedded to a failed policy, White House strategists abandoned the slogan. Snow claimed that Bush hadn't used it much anyway (hardly accurate, since he had used the words on about 30 occasions, according to one TV network's research). This prompted considerable confusion about whether Bush was somehow trying to change the U.S. mission of building a stable, democratic, self-sustaining government in Iraq. But by week's end, the president said he wasn't altering his objective at all, and even Snow was spinning a different tune. "If you mean by 'stay the course,' be steadfast in your mission," Snow told U.S. News, "yeah, we'll stay the course." Added the press secretary: "It is not possible to do rapid, sudden shifting in a time of war. There will be no wrenching change."
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