Get ready for the peace offensive. Worried Republican lawmakers are urging the White House to join an effort to signal new approaches in Iraq or risk further isolation from Capitol Hill — especially if the GOP loses significant ground in the congressional elections.
It might have been no accident that President Bush recently let slip in a television interview that he saw comparisons between the Iraq War and the Vietnam conflict. GOP operatives are encouraging party leaders to echo Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election strategy for restoring his popularity despite the 20,000 American soldiers killed in Vietnam during his first term. In that campaign, Nixon softened his hard line on the fighting and began talking up negotiations with the enemy.
In an interview last week with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, the president surprisingly endorsed the view that Iraq presents an election challenge similar to the fallout from Vietnam 34 years ago. “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election,” Bush said in drawing the comparison.
The president’s readiness to accept any Vietnam comparison was a departure from White House disputations of the past. Perhaps those Oval Office visits from Nixon’s Vietnam-era guru, Henry Kissinger, got the president thinking along these lines.
No one expects Bush to suddenly cave and call for negotiations with Osama bin Laden, but many Republican insiders are hoping to see more flexible-sounding rhetoric in his speeches and comments during the final two weeks of the midterm campaign. Their fear is that the war’s drag effect on GOP House and Senate races largely stems from a growing view among voters that Bush is simply too stubborn to pursue creative alternatives that would extricate American soldiers without a lost of dignity.
The recent maneuvering among Capitol Hill Republicans, while not necessarily orchestrated, reflects a widely held view that the party must demonstrate what one GOP consultant called “flexible realism” on Iraq — if only to reduce the risk that the war’s unpopularity could deny them control of Congress in two weeks.
Hence, the opening salvo from Senate Armed Services Chairman
Such words, coming from a staunch war supporter with a broad following on military matters, launched an aggressive intra-party campaign to pressure the White House to demonstrate a similar flexible realism. But the president, as is his nature, would not budge, instead harking back to the “cut-and-run” rhetoric against war critics that has served him well in the past.
The White House political team has insisted to its counterparts on Capitol Hill that the president’s tried-and-true steadfastness is the right tactic for holding security-conscious conservatives who decide pivotal congressional races. But the polling has not borne out this claim. While the president’s tough campaign talk produced some initial gains among conservatives, they were short-lived.
While many in GOP circles believe that Bush’s father had a hand in pushing his own secretary of State, James A. Baker III, to the forefront of this debate, the Bush family keeps such matters too close to the vest to confirm such a scenario. However Baker’s involvement was arranged, those Republicans hoping to shake up the party’s war image were quite relieved to see him quickly endorse Warner’s view and use the platform of an Iraq study group he leads to begin publicly suggesting a new course.
Baker, a longtime Bush family troubleshooter, wasted no time in promoting a message of flexible realism. For starters he dubbed Iraq a “hell of a mess,” sounding a bit like a parent telling the kids to clean up their room.
After delivering his dose of realism, Baker began talking about solutions that many in the GOP are hoping to hear echoed from the White House before Election Day. “I believe in talking to your enemies,” Baker said in a recent ABC News interview. “It’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be determined. You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”
Talking to the enemy is exactly what Nixon proposed in the closing days of his re-election campaign — a move that took the steam out of his anti-war opposition. The Warner-Baker wing of the Republican Party’s Iraq thinking is prepared to see little movement from a historically intransigent White House. But if Bush fails to get behind an election-eve peace offensive, look for these party elders to cut him out and run with it anyway.
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.