Washington Post columnist David Ignatius concludes that George Bush may now be moving into the phase that stymied another president — Lyndon Baines Johnson, during the Vietnam war:
Now it gets painful for George W. Bush. Iraq is wrapped around his presidency as tightly as Vietnam was around Lyndon Johnson’s. Bush keeps telling the country he has a plan for victory, but the polls suggest the public doesn’t believe it. Those big “Plan for Victory” signs at his rally in Wheeling, W.Va., this week read more like an exhortation than a statement of fact.
Indeed, whereas two years ago statements that victory was on the way sounded like you-could-argue-it assessments, those assertions now seem to be more like political self-affirmations to shore up the troops, shore up the Iraqis, keep supporters in line — and perhaps motivate the beset administration itself. MORE:
Bush works hard to disguise it, but one senses the same inner conflict that afflicted Johnson as Vietnam began to go bad. In “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam described LBJ’s torment: “He was a good enough politician to know what had gone wrong and what he was in for and what it meant to his dreams, but he could not turn back, he could not admit that he had made a mistake. He could not lose and thus he had to plunge forward.” But, recalls Halberstam, “instead of leading, he was immobilized, surrounded, seeing critics everywhere.”
It’s a dangerous situation. If Bush loses his ability to convince the country that his war aims make sense, America may be forced into a hasty withdrawal that will have devastating repercussions. To avoid this outcome and maintain its strategy of a measured handoff to Iraqi forces, the administration must bridge what in Johnson’s day was known as the “credibility gap.” Bush could shake up his team and add new voices that can speak more convincingly to the public. Or he could reach out to moderate Democrats who support a bipartisan foreign policy, if there are any who haven’t been chased off by Karl Rove. Or he could give a larger communications role to the uniformed military. The generals won’t like being political frontmen, but they may prefer it to a collapse of support for the wars.
Those are all strategies that would be useful but not easy.
Bush has given some veiled hints that he might in fact bring in a new face or two, but so far there’s no indication of an expulsion of tired blood and impending infusion of new blood. Karl Rove has indeed made it poison for many moderate Democrats to join with the White House since Rove has shown that his number one goal above anything else (read that above national unity on terrorism or on the war) is to defeat any Democrats if he possibly can (even if they worked with the White House) and paint the Demmies broad-brush as undermining the troops and the war on terrorism. The generals taking a larger p.r. role might shore up some support, but a segment of Iraq war opponents would dismiss whatever they say as soon as they say it as administration spin.
Still, some of these strategies could work if they were coupled with some solid, impressive tangible victories or changes in Iraq. Bush’s honest answer that the U.S. could be there for several years and the next President would be the one to evaluate whether to pull out didn’t help: that snuffed out the light at the end of the tunnel that some had hoped to soon see.
Bush’s fatal flaws as a President seem to be his reliance on a tightly-knit group of regulars who he won’t replace or shuffle around, his slowness to bring in new top managers, — and a near obsession with refusing to admit mistakes, partly out of seeming pride, and partly to ensure that he won’t give political foes an opening.
And that stems from a problem that goes way back: the seemingly low priority Bush has placed as President on trying to create consensual support on key issues. Just having your base’s votes and peeling off enough Democrats and Independents to win on election day isn’t a governing solution. If things go bad after the elections and you don’t have a broad, consensus-based coalition behind you, there’s no safety net to save you. That’s made even more difficult if you start to suffer a credibility gap on issue after issue and crisis after crisis. LBJ’s credibility gap was largely on the issue of the war; Bush seems to battle a new credibility gap on a new issue each week.
Can Bush rebuild some lost support? Possibly. Has he shown the will to do the things necessary try to broaden support enough so that more Americans tune into his arguments and don’t tune him out? So far? No. Which means the prognosis for the administration doesn’t look good.
FOR MORE THOUGHTS also see American Future
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.