North Korea’s missile program, Iran’s brazen nuclear ambitions and the Supreme Court’s rebuke of presidential power might seem like bad news all around for President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress. They are just the kind of wild-card news developments that would appear to buffet an already beleaguered majority party in the middle of a wind-whipped election year.
But look more closely and you also can see how these events could actually form the driving force behind the party’s bid to keep control of Congress.
Karl Rove, the campaign guru who is finally freed from his grand jury distractions and now is focused exclusively on November’s midterm election, might not put it this blatantly in a campaign brochure. But you could sum up his battle plan with a simple phrase: Fear trumps change.
It’s a tried and true formula for political success in the post-Sept. 11 era. Rove voiced the mantra at the beginning of this year. “Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview,” he said in a speech to the Republican National Committee. “That doesn’t make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.”
Ever since the al Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon nearly five years ago, the president’s campaign team has skillfully played the fear card against Democrats, going so far as to herald what turned out to be outdated terror threats during the convention in Boston where
As the self-styled War President, Bush remains most comfortable and confident in his role as commander in chief. He brushes off his critics and check-balancers — not least the venerable New York Times — like sideline whiners and terrorist enablers. We are a nation at war, he constantly reminds us. He has re-fashioned Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature comfort line, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” into something more like, “We have only fear to hold on to.”
Today’s events fit neatly into Rove’s blueprint of six months ago. There’s nothing like potentially hostile missiles fired by a power-mad dictator for stirring up fears that the world is a much more dangerous place than it once was. Experts in international affairs might debate whether Bush has mishandled the North Korean threat all along. But on the campaign trail, Kim Jong Il’s July 4 rocket show provided a visual backdrop for Rove’s pitch that the evils of the post-Sept. 11 world call for Bush-style bravado.
Give the White House credit for self-control in first seeking to downplay the significance of North Korea’s missile tests. But you almost can hear the GOP campaign speech writers buzzing with loaded phrases soon to be aimed at those Democrats who advocate quiet diplomacy — even though that also is what Bush and Republican congressional leaders are advocating, so far. Bush can afford to speak softly while his GOP minions in Congress can now shout down their opponents, asserting that if Democrats win Congress, those missiles soon will be landing on U.S. soil.
Iran’s nuclear saber-rattling is another case that can be turned to Republican advantage despite the intense debate among experts over the Bush administration’s diplomatic skill. A hostile Iran slips right into the Rovian image of a dark and dangerous world not to be trusted to Democratic appeasers.
Even the Supreme Court ruling against the Bush administration’s plan for military tribunals for prisoners of war offers an opportunity that Rove must be salivating to put into play. This seems at first like a great blow to the president — and in the long run it certainly was a strike against the expanding powers of the executive branch.
But on the midterm political front, the court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld actually sets up Democrats to lose the national security debate in congressional campaigns. The ruling shifts power to Capitol Hill in deciding how to treat those terror suspects long held at Guantánamo Bay and other overseas locations without formal charges or access to lawyers — and whether to use interrogation tactics bordering on torture.
With Congress now center stage in this debate, the rights of terror suspects becomes a hot and relevant issue for House and Senate candidates. An up-or-down vote on these matters before November would be a nightmare for Democrats. Will their opposition to the president’s policies, as demanded by their party faithful, extend to putting themselves in the position of defending the rights of terrorists? Fair or not, that is how Rove and Co. will frame the issue.
All of these tactics depend on keeping Americans as afraid as possible. Until Democrats find a way to show they could be just as tough, but more competent, than Republicans at protecting the nation, they will be on the losing side of the politics of fear.
Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.