By now, everyone following the midterm elections has noticed the gameplan: Dems want to nationalize the campaign cycle, Republicans want to localize it. To that end, Bob Novak writes today, Bush has been screwing things up for the GOP.
At Sellersburg in southern Indiana on Oct. 28, George W. Bush began 10 days of nonstop campaigning for his party’s congressional candidates. That posed a Republican conundrum. Since GOP policy aimed to prevent Democrats from “nationalizing” scattered congressional elections, what was the president doing in the national spotlight crowding out House and Senate candidates? Wasn’t he playing into Democratic nationalizing efforts?
The approved answer given to me by high-ranking Republican political operatives is that Bush was really furthering the local campaigns and local issues. Actually, the president was trying to change the subject nationally from Iraq to national security. But experienced Republican political leaders privately grumble that Bush has only underscored Iraq as the preeminent issue, adding that he would have done better to get lost for the past two weeks.
As I understand it, Bush recognized the concerns about nationalizing the elections, but the White House thought of a way around it: nationalize them in a way that benefits Republicans. He’ll hit the trail and say Dems are weak! He’ll make constant references to the grammatically-incorrect “Democrat Party.”
Except, apparently, the Bush gang were the only ones who thought this would be an effective strategy.
A prominent Republican who asked me not to use his name said the last effective play by the White House came at the end of the summer when it defended its war policy. Then, in all seriousness, he proposed this course of action should have been taken by Bush: “The president should go on a 2 1/2 -week vacation, and when he gets back, go right into the hospital for minor surgery. In other words, he should have disappeared.” […]
Where Bush went, he showed differences between Republican and Democratic members of Congress on tax cuts, judicial confirmations and national security. But he could not crowd out Iraq as the national issue. George W. Bush’s ineradicable step affecting this election was going to war against Saddam Hussein in March 2003.
That sounds right to me. Bush’s campaigning and over-heated rhetoric may have helped in recent weeks in bringing disillusioned Republicans back into the fold, but I suspect they would have “come home,” so to speak, anyway. Rove tried to press his luck — he put an unpopular president out on the trail, reminding voters about an unpopular war. He counted on people making a distinction between national security (an alleged Bush strength) and the war in Iraq (an obvious Bush weakness).
If the election goes the Dems’ way, I expect more than a few GOP insiders to blame Bush (and Rove) directly for a strategy that, even on the surface, never made a lot of sense.