With the Dubai ports disaster fresh in everyone’s mind, and Harriet Miers still in everyone’s memory, its becoming clearer than ever that Congressional Republicans believe that President Bush could be a political liability in this year’s elections.
“He has no political capital,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. “Slowly but surely it’s been unraveling. There’s been a direct correlation between the trajectory of his approval numbers and the — I don’t want to call it disloyalty — the independence on the part of the Republicans in Congress.”
Republican politicians are, first and foremost, politicians. They want to be re-elected in November and they look upon Bush’s consistently falling poll numbers, and the Administration’s inept handling of issues ranging from the ports deal to the Miers nomination, as evidence that being associated with Bush will hurt them more than it will help.
[M]any Republicans are less willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt as they once did. That became evident last year on domestic issues, when they abandoned his Social Security plan, criticized his handling of Hurricane Katrina and forced the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. Just yesterday, the Senate Budget Committee passed a budget resolution that dropped Bush’s proposals for tax relief, Medicare cuts and expanded health savings accounts. A frustrated Bush pushed back earlier in the week, accusing Congress of shortchanging Katrina relief efforts.
And the GOP is even loosing confidence in Bush’s leadership on his signature issue, national security.
Now the estrangement increasingly appears even on national security issues, where Republicans long deferred to the president. Recent rebukes run from the ports deal to a ban on torture to Patriot Act revisions forced on Bush in exchange for congressional approval. Partly in the name of national security, Republican leaders also seem poised to dismiss Bush’s proposal for a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants.
“He cannot afford another breach related to national security, I can tell you that,” said Patrick Griffin, who was the chief congressional liaison for the Clinton White House. “That would be devastating.”
Notwithstanding the merits of the ports debate or which side was right, politically it was a disaster for the Bush Administration because it opened up an opportunity for Democrats to do something they’ve never been able to do since 9/11 — outflank the Republicans on an issue related to National Security.
The port deal has provided ammunition to Democrats who have begun making the case more broadly that Bush is in over his head. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) yesterday called the port situation a “case study in the administration’s incompetence,” and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said the administration “was clearly asleep at the switch” and “bungled the oversight of this deal.
But it’s not clear whether Democrats will be able to turn that issue to their benefit in the fall. Republicans on Capitol Hill were every bit as vocal as their opponents in standing against the port deal, making it harder to draw a clear distinction come campaign time. By turning against Bush, some GOP strategists believe Republican leaders may have saved themselves a worse fate.
Whether this will happen is unclear, what is clear is that Bush has reached the peak of his political power and is beginning the long, slow ride to lame duck status. Republicans running for election in 2006 will begin to distance themselves from the Administration, and, within months after the 2006 elections are over, the focus will shift to the race for the 2008 election. Before you know it, President Bush will be watching his successor being sworn in.
Update @ 8:20am: And as if to confirm the Republicans’ fears about Bush, Outside The Beltway reports that the Bush’s poll numbers have hit yet another low in the latest AP Poll.
Update @ 3:00pm At QandO, Dale Franks points out in connection with the ports fiasco that the Bush Administration forgot an elementary truth about American Government.
At the end of the day, the United States has a government where Congress is supreme. Since this is so, the president should never, ever pick a fight with Congress unless it knows it can win.
For instance, when it came to shutting down the government over budget squabbles, Bill Clinton?who was, whether you liked him or not, a masterful politician?knew that he couild always frame the issue in a way that made him look better than Newt Gingrich. But with an issue like this, there’s no way to win unless you have Congress on your side. Congress can always frame the issue as “Arab terrorists controlling US Ports”. If the administration can’t provide a simpler, less threatening narrative, then the political battle’s lost.
That’s Politics 101. Apparently, they didn’t cover that in Harvard’s MBA course.
Apparently not.
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