It happens every six years during a two term Presidency. The final mid-term elections come and, more likely, than not, the President’s party suffers a defeat, though not typically on the scale that the Republicans saw on November 7th. So, on some level its not surprising that the Bush Administration is winding down; after all, we’ve already got people announcing their plans to try to replace him come January 20th, 2009. What is surprising, though, is the extent to which even Bush’s former supporters are moving away from him:
The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.
Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.”
And Adelman isn’t the only own:
Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.
“People expect a level of performance they are not getting,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.
“If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference,” Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. “I’d still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”
I kind of doubt that Specter is correct on that one. The public demonstrated at the polls that they are clearly opposed to the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, or lack thereof. Ousting the Defense Secretary largely seen as responsible for that policy might have helped, but only if it had been accompanied by a change in policy that we are unlikely to see even now.
Besides, its clear that the Bush Administration’s mistakes go beyond just keeping Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon:
Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. “Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they’re judged by a different standard,” said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House’s faith-based initiatives who wrote “Tempting Faith,” a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. “And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy.”
(…)
The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.
(…)On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.
In other words, everything that people have been criticizing Bush for virtually since the day of his Second Inauguration.
As time goes on and the 2008 election gets closer, this rift between the White House and the GOP is likely only to grow.
