The recent split between the White House and a solid bloc of Republican lawmakers over the definition of unlawful torture, while apparently real, did happen to serve both sides in their common goal to keep control of Congress.
Focusing national attention on this intra-party debate allowed GOP incumbents to showcase independence from an unpopular president while sidelining Democrats and diverting attention from the ever-worsening situation in Iraq to the overall war against terror.
That does not discount the genuine passions of the Republicans who resisted President Bush’s determination to liberalize the Geneva Conventions’ torture guidelines. The three senators who led this group —
Strategists at the White House had to know these men would react strongly to something as dramatic as rewriting the nearly 60-year-old terms of the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of enemy combatants. Indeed, it’s doubtful that Bush’s team ever intended to get such a radical idea through Congress. More likely, short-term political purposes drove the president to elevate a torture debate.
Whether by design or happenstance, the consequences of sparking this high-profile argument served Bush well. Once again, he presented himself as the toughest guy on the block, unyielding in the face of wailing civil libertarians when it comes to fighting terrorists in every way imaginable. And it allowed him to portray his foes as naive lambs who would let the lions devour us.
Even for Republicans who genuinely oppose the president on this point, their party stands to gain ground by publicly resisting him. To GOP-leaning voters who are getting grumpy about Bush and taking a look at the Democrats in this midterm election, it is helpful to demonstrate that the party is not always in lock step with him.
When Colin L. Powell, the former Army general and secretary of State, argued against Bush’s proposal to allow more extreme methods of interrogation, it was heralded by McCain and other Republicans in Congress as a rebuke of the president. That in turn reinforced the message that this is not just the party of Bush — that the GOP can be trusted to run Congress even if you don’t like the president.
Not surprisingly, last week’s compromise resulted in Bush getting other terrorism-fighting tools he wanted, while sacrificing the Geneva treaty rewrite he never really expected to achieve and helping his party look tough to moderate voters who could make the difference in whether the Republican Party will stay atop Capitol Hill after Nov. 7.
Democrats all but disappeared during this episode, sidelining themselves partly out of fear that opposing the president would make them look weak in the fight against terrorism.
Again, the president’s political team had to know how this debate would bedevil Democratic candidates. They’d be damned in the eyes of security-conscious voters if they fought Bush’s torture plans, or damned by their own liberal base if they proved ineffective against the president. Most chose the latter approach as the lesser of evils, incurring the wrath of liberal bloggers and other anti-Bush voters.
Perhaps the most politically useful result of the torture debate for Republicans was how it steered the nation’s focus away from the war in Iraq, instead spotlighting the overall war against terrorism. Anything that keeps voter attention away from the ever-spiraling statistics of death and destruction in Iraq is helpful to maintaining GOP stewardship of Congress. Better to broaden the discussion to the question of how best to glean information from detainees that could prevent further attacks on U.S. soil.
Republicans are always better off when framing the terrorism debate as a generic, worldwide matter than when defending the specifics of the truth on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are now having to fight resurgent Taliban forces.
A distracting torture debate was especially handy for Republicans because the military has not been able to justify the troop withdrawals from Iraq that White House political strategists had hoped to put in motion before November. Despite the earlier hints of lower troop levels from Secretary of State
With no chance for even spinning good news out of Iraq, the White House is stuck with only one option until Election Day: Change the subject.
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.