Bush, GOP Hoping Terror Card Can Save Them From Election Drubbing
Bush, GOP hoping terror card can save them from election drubbing
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s/15441251.htm
By Thomas M. DeFrank
9/5/2006
WASHINGTON - President Bush and the Republicans expect a stinging defeat in November, but they're betting the terror card saves them from an electoral debacle.
"The security issue trumps everything," a senior Bush official said last week. "That's why even though they're really mad at us, in the end they're going to give us another two years."
Nevertheless, many other senior Bush loyalists privately believe anti-Iraq and anti-Bush sentiment will cost the Republicans the House nine weeks from today, a doomsday scenario that would cripple Bush for his final two years in office.
"We'll lose the House," one of the party's most prominent officials flatly predicted, "and the president will be dead in the water for two years."
Even a perennially optimistic senior Bush strategist conceded, "I'm pretty worried about it. The House is not looking good."
The Democrats need a net gain of six seats in the Senate or 15 in the House to gain control of one chamber. Barring a huge national wave of Bush-backlash, the GOP is widely expected to lose seats but hang on to its slim majority in the Senate.
The House - which was thought to be impregnable until Iraq, immigration and Hurricane Katrina sent Bush's approval ratings into a tailspin - is "very much in play and very much in flux," according to a White House number-cruncher.
"This cake is baked," predicted Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report newsletter. "You just don't have a wave of this magnitude and not see 15 seats turn over."
The best-case scenario offered by several White House and Republican Party optimists projects losing three Senate seats and eight to 10 House races. That would diminish Bush's legislative clout, but keep the GOP in control.
If the election were held today, a top analyst closely allied with the White House said, the Republicans would lose at least 20 seats, more than enough to make Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California speaker of the House and New York's Charles Rangel chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which controls billions in government spending. A key Bush official called those prospects "suicidal for the country" - a theme Republicans will trumpet throughout the campaign.
Bush's handlers acknowledge he's an unpopular president whose leadership credentials have been shattered in the last year, even though his poll approval ratings have ticked back into the low 40s from their lows in the 30s.
Americans have "decided the personal characteristics that kept him afloat for a long time aren't that appealing anymore," an influential Bushie told the New York Daily News. "They also think Iraq is a failure."
But Bush political guru Karl Rove believes a massive GOP counteroffensive begun last week re-emphasizing the terror threat and linking the war in Iraq to keeping America safe will carry the day.
Bush planners also believe Republicans have a superior "ground game" that will prove more effective in identifying and turning out their vote than the Democrats.
"We enjoy a severalfold strategic advantage on the ground," said a confident top Bush strategist. "A well-executed mediocre plan will beat a poorly executed brilliant plan every day."
