While President bush’s political party frets about its future under what remains of his watch, his aides are trying to assure Republicans on Capitol Hill that they have a grand strategy to defuse the Iraq War as an issue that could lead to another disastrous defeat in next year’s election.

One Republican consultant who is privy to internal party discussions about the White House plan — but highly skeptical about its promise — describes the emerging strategy as “an elaborate distraction.”

The idea is to spend the next few months engaging and entangling Democrats on some of their favorite issues: education, health care, immigration and energy. By doing so, the White House hopes to buy the time needed to give the president’s new Iraq policy a chance to settle things down and possibly move the war story off the front page.

The White House is betting that many Democrats will privately welcome a diversion from the Iraq debate because they do not know how to resolve the thorny problems there and would rather let Bush take all the heat.

This approach rejects the widespread view among Republican lawmakers that it would be best to bring Democrats to the bargaining table on Iraq policy so that, come the next election, the public sees the party controlling Capitol Hill as also bearing responsibility for how the war is going. But Bush has set a course that now must play out: defying Democrats on Iraq while cutting deals on other matters.

In his State of the Union address, the president led with domestic issues and did not mention Iraq until nearly 30 minutes into the speech. That was deliberate. He was using the address as the second stage in a one-two punch aimed at ultimately changing the subject from the war to less volatile issues. The first step was choosing the low-end option of sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq.

The Bush team is gambling that the so-called surge is small enough to avoid a congressional response that goes beyond non-binding resolutions. The logic behind having the president personally announce the troop buildup, which he could easily have left to the Pentagon, was to go ahead and provoke congressional war critics to vent for a while — until they run out of steam. The logic behind talking about domestic issues on State of the Union night was to tempt Democrats with a sense of possibility for legislative accomplishment on a set of issues they care deeply about. Indeed, the first section of the address to Congress was so focused on the Democratic Party’s nurturing issues that newly installed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might well have delivered it herself.

Bush’s surprising acceptance of an invitation to confer with congressional Democrats at their Feb. 3 retreat in Williamsburg, Va., fits neatly into his strategy of push-pull posturing toward the opposing party. While he will continue to push back on Iraq, the president will probably use the private gathering to pull Democrats onto common ground that opens the way to headline-making agreements on other fronts.

An immigration overhaul tops the list of possibilities for a Bush compromise with Democratic congressional leaders, given that the president is closer to them on this issue than he is to many Republicans. And the White House has been studying how Bill Clinton regained momentum after his party’s 1994 loss of control on Capitol Hill by crossing the political aisle to enact welfare reform. Indeed, it was in Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address that he set the stage for compromise with the opposing party by repeating his initial campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.”

The furious response within Clinton’s own party to his deal-making with Republicans on welfare is what the current White House expects from many GOP lawmakers in the immigration debate. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill are so angered by the potential for an immigration deal that it might have been more appropriate for them to give the “opposing party” response to the State of the Union.

Still, in reaching out to Democrats, the Bush team is aiming for the improved public standing that Clinton gained from his bipartisan success on welfare reform. And equally important to the Bush camp is how offering progress on social programs could distract and delight Democrats who are eager to get results on their pet issues after suffering the irrelevancy of so many years out of power.

This does not mean that Bush will cave in to the Democrats on major points of difference between the parties. He only needs to bend enough to keep those stories high on the front page in hopes of one day crowding out the Iraq coverage.

For now, the president’s own party is all but hostage to White House strategists, waiting to see whether they are once again being led to an Election Day slaughter.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for NBC, MSNBC, CNBC. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.