Josh Marshall noted this morning with the election just seven days away, the GOP’s “desperation will be ferocious. Imagine everything from the last six years rolled into one toxic week. An electoral gauntlet of hacking knives and fire.” And it starts, of course, with the president’s overheated rhetoric.
We seem to be building towards some kind of peak of hysteria with Bush lately. A few weeks ago, the president got the ball rolling with some unusually bitter rhetoric. “We know the enemy wants to attack us again,” Bush said, whereas Democrats “offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing.” Shortly thereafter, the president upped the ante, telling a partisan crowd, “If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party, it sounds like — it sounds like — they think the best way to protect the American people is, wait until we’re attacked again.”
As if these comments were a little too subtle, Bush pushed the envelope to the breaking point yesterday.
President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win and impose their policies on Iraq, as he and Vice President Cheney escalated their rhetoric Monday in an effort to turn out Republican voters in next week’s midterm elections. […]
“However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,” Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans packed in an arena at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, one of his stops Monday. “That’s what’s at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq.”
It’s a bit like a child who wants attention — the scream becomes increasingly shrill the longer he’s denied what he wants.
In the short-term, it’s not exactly a politically salient point, but the LAT’s Ron Brownstein noted the other day that there really is no precedent for this kind of partisan war rhetoric. Indeed, when it comes to politicizing a war for an election, Bush is in a league of his own.
As Brownstein put it, for a sitting president to tag his rivals “as the party of ‘defeat’ is nonetheless extraordinary language for a commander in chief to use in a political campaign.”
Other wartime presidents have been much more reluctant to argue that only their party was committed to success. Consider the way President Johnson approached the 1966 elections as the Vietnam War was escalating. To begin with, Johnson spent most of that October away from the campaign, on a 17-day tour of Asia that included Vietnam.
Then, at a news conference just before election day, Johnson dismissed the idea that congressional losses for the Democratic Party would affect either the thinking of the North Vietnamese or America’s support for the troops in the field. If Republicans gained seats, he continued, “They may talk, and argue, and fight, and criticize, and play politics from time to time, but when they call the vote on supporting the men … in the Senate it will be 83 to 2 and in the House it will be 410-5.”
In 1942, the first election after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was even more emphatic about separating war and politics. Roosevelt spent much of that fall visiting defense facilities on a tour during which he barred press coverage and insisted on being accompanied by Republican as well as Democratic local officials. When the chairman of the Democratic National Committee suggested that a GOP takeover of the House would be bad for the country, Roosevelt publicly rebuked him.
Even President Nixon displayed more restraint during the 1970 midterm election. Nixon barnstormed the country asking voters to elect members of Congress who would support his war policy. But he took pains to avoid claiming that only his party wanted to win. “This is not a partisan issue,” Nixon declared that October at a rally for a Texas Republican Senate candidate named George H.W. Bush.
I know, this isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Bush is willing to shamelessly and baselessly politicize a war? You don’t say.
But I think it’s probably worth remembering that the political discourse doesn’t have to be this way … and before Bush, it wasn’t this way. When the president swore to “change the tone,” he apparently meant it.