White House counselor Dan Bartlett told Ron Brownstein that the 2002 vote on Congress’ Iraq resolution was not about campaign politics.
“The president, during the run-up to the war, went out of his way not to make it political,” Bartlett said.
That Bartlett, he has quite a sense of humor, doesn’t he? It was probably helpful that Bartlett said this over the phone, so Brownstein wouldn’t have to watch Bartlett struggle to say it with a straight face.
After all, former Sen. Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader at the time of the 2002 vote, saw first hand Bush’s “commitment” to not politicizing the vote.
The time was September 2002. The place was the White House, at a meeting in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed congressional leaders for a quick vote on a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.
But Daschle, who as Senate majority leader controlled the chamber’s schedule, recalled recently that he asked Bush to delay the vote until after the impending midterm election.
“I asked directly if we could delay this so we could depoliticize it. I said: ‘Mr. President, I know this is urgent, but why the rush? Why do we have to do this now?’ He looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: ‘We just have to do this now.’ “
It’s not complicated. In fact, it’s helpful to compare 1990 to 2002.
As E.J. Dionne recently explained:
The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.
The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.
For that matter, the current Bush — the one who “went out of his way” not to make the war political — is now playing even more ridiculous games. In 2002, the president said Dems were too slow to help him invade Iraq so Americans needed to elect a Republican Congress. Now, the same president is saying Dems were with him in lock-step, looking at the same intelligence, so everyone was wrong together. This, too, is revisionist history.
Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is no dove, warned of rushing “pell-mell” into an endorsement of broad war powers for the president. The Los Angeles Times reported that Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, protested in September: “We’re being asked to go to war, and vote on it in a matter of days. We need an intelligence estimate before we can seriously vote.” And Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, put it plainly: “This will be one of the most important decisions Congress makes in a number of years; I do not believe it should be made in the frenzy of an election year.” But it was.
Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap partisan attacks. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against Democrat John Arthur Smith declaring: “While Smith ‘reflects’ on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city still remains.” Note that Smith wasn’t being attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even think before going to war.
Bush and his allies played callous partisan games in 2002 and they’re playing callous partisan games now. For Dan Bartlett to insist that Bush “went out of his way” not to make the war political is to make plain his cynical disdain for the electorate.