From The New York Times, 5/18/08:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/opinion/18rich.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
McCain Can Run, but Bush Won’t Hide
By FRANK RICH
THE biggest gift President Bush has given his party this year was to
keep his daughter’s wedding nearly as private as Connie Corleone’s.
Now that his disapproval rating has reached the Nixon nadir of
negativity, even a joyous familial ritual isn’t enough to make the
country glad to see him.
The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney
to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.
Republicans finally recognized the gravity of their situation three
days after Jenna Bush took her vows in Crawford.
As Hillary Clinton romped in West Virginia, voters in Mississippi
elected a Democrat in a Congressional district that went for
Bush-Cheney by 25 percentage points just four years ago.
It’s the third “safe” Republican House seat to fall in a special
election since March.
Party leaders have been haplessly trying to identify possible remedies
ever since.
It didn’t help that their recent stab at an Obamaesque national
Congressional campaign slogan, “The Change You Deserve,” was
humiliatingly identified as the advertising pitch for the
anti-depressant Effexor.
(If they’re going to go the pharmaceutical route, “Viva Viagra” might
be more to the point.)
Yet for all the Republican self-flagellation, it’s still not clear
that the party even understands the particular dimensions of its
latest defeat and its full implications for both Congressional races
and John McCain in November.
The Mississippi election was actually a runoff, required by law after
a preliminary vote left neither candidate with the required 50
percent.
In the last round, on April 22, the Democrat, Travis Childers, beat
the Republican, Greg Davis, 49 percent to 46 percent.
(The rest went to minor candidates.)
On Tuesday, that margin increased dramatically:
the Republican remained at 46 percent while the Democrat jumped to 54
percent.
What happened in the intervening three weeks helps explain why.
The G.O.P. didn’t merely step up its expensive negative campaign,
attempting to take down Mr. Childers (who is a white, conservative
Democrat) by linking him with Mr. Obama, a ranting Rev. Jeremiah
Wright and Nancy Pelosi.
It also brought in the party’s big guns.
Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain recorded mass phone pitches for Mr. Davis.
Karl Rove and Mr. Cheney campaigned for him.
The vice president’s visit was last Monday, the centerpiece of a
get-out-the-vote rally in DeSoto County, a G.O.P. stronghold.
“We’ll put our shoulders to the wheel for John McCain,” the vice
president promised as he bestowed his benediction on Mr. Davis.
Well, he got out the vote all right.
In the election results the next day, the Childers total in DeSoto
County increased 142 percent, while the Davis count went up only 47
percent.
The district as a whole is the second whitest in Mississippi.
(Its black population is 27.2 percent.)
It’s the sole district Mr. Obama lost to Mrs. Clinton in the state’s
Democratic primary in March.
Yet even in this unlikely political terrain the combination of a
race-based Republican campaign and the personal intervention of Mr.
Cheney energized enough white moderates and black voters to flip the
district to the Democrats.
Keep in mind, it’s the Deep South we’re talking about here.
Imagine how the lethal combination of the Bush-Cheney brand and
backlash-inducing G.O.P. race-baiting could whip up a torrential
turnout by young voters, black voters and independents in true swing
states farther north and west.
Just 36 hours after the Mississippi debacle, Mr. McCain tried to
distance himself from the administration by flip-flopping on his
signature issue, Iraq, suddenly endorsing just the kind of timetable
for withdrawal he has characterized as “surrender” when proposed by
Democrats or Mitt Romney.
(When Mr. McCain proposes it, he labels it “victory.”)
But hardly had Mr. McCain spoken than his message was upstaged by Mr.
Bush’s partisan political speech in Israel.
The president implied that Mr. Obama would have enabled the Nazis even
more foolishly than his own grandfather, Prescott Bush, did in the
1930s when he maintained “investment relation****ps with Hitler’s
Germany,” as Kevin Phillips delicately describes it in “American
Dynasty.”
Mr. McCain’s Iraq stunt was his second effort in a week to flee Mr.
Bush, following a speech bemoaning administration inaction on climate
change.
These gambits were in turn preceded by Mr. McCain’s attack on the
White House response to Hurricane Katrina.
Too bad he took this strong stand nearly three years after it might
have sped relief to those suffering in New Orleans.
The McCain campaign is hoping that such showy, if tardy, departures
from Bush-Cheney doctrine will constitute a galaxy of Sister Souljah
moments, each with headlines reading “McCain Breaks With Bush on...”
and the usual knee-jerk press references to Mr. McCain as a
“maverick.”
Enough of these, you see, and those much-needed independent voters
might be flimflammed into believing that the G.O.P. candidate bears no
responsibility for the administration’s toxically unpopular policies.
You can’t blame him for trying.
Independents favor Democrats over Republicans on most issues,
according to the April New York Times/CBS News poll, including the
economy (by 30 points), Iraq (by 13 points) and health care (48
points).
But are independents suckers?
They’d have to be to fall for the pitch that Mr. McCain is an apostate
in his own party in 2008.
He has been an outspoken Bush defender since helping him sell the Iraq
war in 2002 and barnstorming for him in 2004.
Despite Mr. McCain’s campaign claims to the contrary, he never
publicly called for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld.
He is still one of the president’s most stalwart sup****ters in
Congress, even signing on to the president’s wildly unpopular veto of
an expansion of children’s health insurance.
Mr. McCain’s one major domestic policy rebellion, over the Bush tax
cuts, has long since been ditched.
Last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” his economic surrogate, Carly
Fiorina, implied that Mr. McCain would make budgetary ends meet by
cutting earmarks — federal ****k that, in her inflated estimate,
amounted to $42 billion over the past two years.
But even if he cut all $42 billion, total federal spending would still
be reduced by only 0.78 percent.
Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he
sup****ts, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney
themselves.
When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush’s endorsement at the White House in
March, he referred three times to the president’s “busy schedule,” as
if wi****ng aloud that the lame-duck in***bent would have no time to
appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies.
Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.
Just look at Mr. Rove. Some Democrats are outraged that he is now
employed as a pundit by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as well
as Fox News.
Instead of complaining, they should be thrilled that Mr. Rove keeps
inviting Republican complacency by constantly locating silver linings
in the party’s bad news.
His ubiquitous TV presence as a thinly veiled McCain surrogate has the
added virtue of wrapping the Republican ticket in a daily and
suffocating Bush bearhug, since Mr. Rove is far more synonymous with
his former boss than Mr. Obama is with his former pastor.
The Democrats can only hope that Mr. Rove will be a color commentator,
so to speak, at the conventions.
The parties’ weeklong infomercials are shaping up as quite a study in
contrasts.
For all the fears of a Democratic civil war, the planets may be
aligning for a truce, and possibly a celebration.
As fate has it, the nominee’s acceptance speech is scheduled for the
night of Aug. 28, exactly 45 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. electrified the nation with “I Have a Dream.”
The next day brings another anniversary:
Mr. McCain turns 72.
And then, on Sept. 1, comes the virtually all-white G.O.P. vaudeville
in Minneapolis.
You’ll be pleased to know the show will go on despite the fact that
the convention manager, chosen by the McCain campaign, had to resign
last weekend after being exposed as the chief executive of a lobbying
and consulting firm hired by the military junta in Myanmar.
The conventioneers will arrive via the air****t whose men’s room was
immortalized by a Republican senator still serving the good people of
Idaho.
This will be a most picturesque backdrop to the party’s eternal
platform battles over family values, from same-*** marriage to
abortion.
For good measure, antiwar demonstrators from within the G.O.P. — Ron
Paul devotees — could provide at least a smidgen of the 1968-style
disruptions the Democrats may avoid.
In April, the Nevada Republican state convention abruptly adjourned in
midsession after the Paul forces won rule changes.
The Los Angeles Times re****ted last week that other Paul cadres,
operating below the national press’s radar, have also been fighting
guerrilla battles “at county and state conventions from Wa****ngton and
Missouri to Maine and Mississippi.”
Already one of the national convention’s de facto hosts — Minnesota’s
endangered Senator Norm Coleman — is frantically trying to save his
seat by disowning his record as an Iraq war booster and disentangling
himself from the president.
Good luck!
But how can Mr. McCain escape the dread specter of this White House at
the convention?
Surely Mr. Bush will exercise his prerogative to address the nation in
prime time.
Unless, of course, Labor Day week just happens to be the perfect
moment for a second Bush daughter to tie the knot in Crawford.
________________________________________________________
Harry
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