In Times Select (the paid part of the New York Times website which is worth the money) Frank Rich says the real story is not the one the news media has focused on — a seemingly growing belief in the nation’s pundit and political class that the Democrats may be split.
He argues the real story is the split within the GOP itself — and the fact that President George Bush’s vows for a new bipartisan era may turn out to be mere political stagecraft:
But the one truly serious story to come out of the election — far more significant than the Washington chatter about “divided Democrats� — is that the president has no intention of changing his policy on Iraq or anything else one iota.
Already we are seeing conclusive evidence that the White House’s post-thumpin’ blather about bipartisanship is worth as little as the “uniter, not a divider� bunk of the past. The tip-off came last week when Mr. Bush renominated a roster of choices for the federal appeals court that he knew faced certain rejection by Democrats. Why? To deliver a message to the entire Senate consonant with the unprintable greeting Dick Cheney once bestowed on Patrick Leahy, the senator from Vermont. That message was seconded by Tony Snow on Monday when David Gregory of NBC News asked him for a response to the Democrats’ Iraq proposals. The press secretary belittled them as “nonspecific� and then tried to deflect the matter entirely by snickering at Mr. Gregory’s follow-up questions.
Don Imus has been rerunning the video ever since, and with good reason. The laughing-while-Baghdad-burns intransigence of the White House makes your blood run cold.
And then Rich comes out and says what some pundits have hinted:
Everything in the president’s behavior since the election, including his remarkably naïve pronouncements in Vietnam, suggests that he will refuse to catch the political lifeline that Mr. Baker might toss him. Mr. Bush seems more likely instead to use American blood and money to double down on his quixotic notion of “victory� to the end. Not for nothing has he been communing with Henry Kissinger.
Indeed, the statements Bush made from Vietnam this past weekend seemed Kissinger-esque about never giving up the mission until there is victory.
So what then? A Democratic Congress can kill judicial appointments but cannot mandate foreign policy. The only veto it can exercise is to cut off the war’s funding, political suicide that the Congressional leadership has rightly ruled out. The plain reality is that the victorious Democrats, united in opposition to the war and uniting around a program for quitting it, have done pretty much all they can do. Republican leaders must join in to seal the deal.
You can now almost predict a scenario where the Baker group’s recommendations are verbally endorsed by the Bush administration, then nit-picked away in implementation until they virtually vanish entirely. And you can almost see and hear the locksteppers falling back in line with however this is spun by the administration. Will there then be a split in the GOP? Or will it again follow The Decider?
One indication that the final two years of the Bush administration may be more of the same versus a return to the more conciliatory style of politics for which Bush was known in Texas: the Times also has a piece squelching all the talk that Karl Rove may have to send his resumes out soon:
Karl Rove, the top White House political strategist, is coming off the worst election defeat of his career to face a daunting task: saving the president’s agenda with a Congress not only controlled by Democrats, but also filled with Republican members resentful of the way he and the White House conducted the losing campaign.
But serious questions remain about how much influence Mr. Rove can wield and how high a profile he can assume in Washington after being so closely identified with this year’s Republican losses, not to mention six years of often brutal attacks on the same Democrats in line to control Congress for the remainder of Mr. Bush’s presidency.
And then there’s this:
Republicans close to the White House say Mr. Rove has been arguing that the White House needs to shore up its standing with conservatives, whose support will be crucial to rebuild Mr. Bush’s popularity and ultimately give him some leverage.
It always comes down to that: Bush’s mission in the Oval Office seems to be defined as pleasing his conservative base. First and foremost.
Reflecting that strategy, Mr. Bush sent Congress a slate of conservative judicial nominees, which was taken as a provocation by Democrats who had previously rejected them. A close associate of Mr. Rove’s suggested that the strategy was first to placate conservatives, then tack to the middle to strike deals with Democrats on immigration reform or Social Security.
So it sounds as if it’ll be the usual shore up the base, play to the base and win over and excite the base — and, oh by the way, throw some bones to the Democrats and the country’s center.
If this is what’s on the horizon, does it seem likely that there will be some major Bush administration shift on the Iraq war?
Stranger things have happened in politics. But during the past few years, at least, the Bush administration has been quite predictable in its rejection of the center when decision crunch time comes and it scrambles to put smiles on its conservative base’s face.
UPDATE: In an editorial, the Minneapolis Star Tribune warns that a move is already afoot within the administration to undercut the Baker-headed Iraq Study Group:
Now, with the study group’s final report due in a few weeks, Bush has ordered the foreign-policy apparatus in his administration to put together a rush-job alternative to the study group report. This appears a blatant effort, most likely pushed by Vice President Dick Cheney, to pull the rug from beneath the study group’s feet. It strongly suggests that the Bush White House did not really absorb the lesson of the fall election and that it’s full speed ahead with Cheney-esque secret plans and clever tricks. The neoconservatives who gave us the Iraq war in all its dismal gore and disappointment have not given up. That should dismay all Americans….
…Many have wondered where the ascendant congressional Democrats will go on Iraq. It’s a good bet they will stand with Baker and Hamilton. So should Bush. Cheney and his muddle-headed neocon acolytes have lied their way to disgrace on Iraq. If Bush now realigns with them, a battle royal will be joined that Bush must lose.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.