Former Clinton adviser and present Clinton nemesis Dick Morris, writing in The Hill, says North Korea has “changed the subject” for President George Bush and that he can use it to beat back what seems to be a Democratic party surge in the polls:
In one deadly moment, North Korea has succeeded in doing what no amount of backtracking by Speaker Dennis Hastert or his beleaguered Republicans could do: It has changed the subject of the national debate. With nuclear weapons in the hands of the most deranged regime in the world, e-mails to pages will have to fade from the forefront of the public’s attention.
This whole media term “changed the subject” is one of the smelliest to come down the pike.
The way Morris uses it, it’s suggesting that the North Korea testing could be a welcome diversionary subject — yet another victory for the politics of cynicism.
But it is also undeniable that a nuclear test by North Korea is not an irrelevant news event.
Editors that give the story big play are not “changing the subject” at all (except in the view of Republicans who want the subject changed and Democrats who don’t want it changed) but doing their jobs in putting a vital story on the front pages or at the top of their newcasts. More Morris:
Will Bush be able to deal with the North Korean crisis? This is truly the moment for a test of his leadership. If he is able to lead a strong global effort to face down the renegade nation and can set in motion a demonstrable process that could lead to a reversal of Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, he will have pulled off a coup akin to JFK’s in the Cuban missile crisis and rescued his party from midterm election defeat in 2006 as surely as Kennedy saved it in 1962.
He then gives an analysis at what’s at stake for some of the countries impacted by North Korea’s test. And then he gets back to his political point:
In the grim logic of nuclear deterrent, only weapons in the hands of the nation actually under potential threat can constitute a real deterrence to aggression, particularly on a peninsula that has already seen one major war.
There is nothing like a national security crisis to force Americans to realize the consequences of paralyzing a presidency by sending to Washington a Congress with which he cannot work. We fell into just that trap in the final years of the Clinton presidency and we would do so now at our peril.
But Bush has to produce and has to do it in the next five weeks. Just like JFK did in 1962.
Will it work this time? It’s hard to believe (but then stranger things have happened in American politics).
Bush has suffered enormous erosion in the polls, Iraq war support continues to go south, independent voters are tilting towards the Democrats and the Bush/GOP political style basically excommunicates, marginalizes and alienates Americans who are not part of the GOP’s coveted party base. Wwill the bulk of these voters suddenly return to the GOP fold because they won’t want Bush to have to work with a Congress that might question him, provide greater oversight, or act as a restraint on nearly unfettered exercise of executive branch power?
The most cynical part of Morris’ column is at the end: this policy must be done within five weeks so voters will forget about all the other problems of the administration.
Could it work? Yes. Is it likely? Not easy to pull off, in policy terms. And the election would be another cliff-hanger if it worked since some of the alienated are alienated due to Bush and the GOP’s credibility problems so it won’t be easy getting a large chunk of them back.
Charlie Cook, a NationalJournal.com contributing editor, weekly columnist for National Journal magazine and the founder and publisher of the Cook Political Report, writes in his most recent column that North Korea COULD change the political dynamics — but it might not be easy and right now the GOP is facing a grim situation:
The combination of the worsening situation in Iraq and the Foleygate scandal have effectively crowded terrorism, national security and falling gasoline prices out of the public eye, shifting the venue of this campaign away from three things that had, albeit briefly, advantaged Republicans. Still, with four weeks to go, the nuclear test in North Korea should serve as a reminder that events could shift this spotlight yet again to more favorable — or at least less unfavorable — terms for the GOP. We will be watching the situation with North Korea to see if it gives Republicans any traction.
But, as of today, Cook writes, it doesn’t look too good:
The combination of the worsening situation in Iraq and the Foleygate scandal have effectively crowded terrorism, national security and falling gasoline prices out of the public eye, shifting the venue of this campaign away from three things that had, albeit briefly, advantaged Republicans. Still, with four weeks to go, the nuclear test in North Korea should serve as a reminder that events could shift this spotlight yet again to more favorable — or at least less unfavorable — terms for the GOP. We will be watching the situation with North Korea to see if it gives Republicans any traction.
The fact that the situation has turned grim for the GOP can hardly be disputed. On a macro level, Republicans have lost the ground they gained in early September, with the generic congressional ballot test now back to where it was before gasoline prices began to fall, the terrorist suspects were arrested in London and the focus was on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In a just completed Oct. 5-8 national survey by RT Strategies for the Cook Political Report, Democrats held an 11-point lead among the 837 registered voters interviewed, 49 percent to 38 percent (margin of error +/-3.3 percent).
Among the 321 voters deemed most likely to vote, Democrats led by nine points, 50 percent to 41 percent. Combining these results with the Cook Political Report polling from the two previous weekends, among 2,491 registered voters (m.o.e. +/-1.8 percent), Democrats had a 13-point lead, 49 percent to 36 percent, and among 997 most likely voters (m.o.e. +/-3.1 percent), Democrats had a 12-point lead, 50 percent to 38 percent. Even allowing for a five-point historic skew in favor of Democrats for the generic ballot test, this is a real bad situation for the GOP.
He says some of the important factors in the end will be:
–External events (news).
–Party turnout. There are signs that GOP voters are lethargic.
–GOP House seats are more vulnerable than Democratic seats.
–It is “not far fetched” to think the Democrats could win enough to take the Senate, too.
Four weeks is a lifetime in politics and the tide still could shift. But for Republicans to salvage their majorities in the House and Senate, quite a bit would have to change.
A key question is: is North Korea going to be enough to shift it or are impressions now too entrenched? And if there is another big event will cynicism among some voters lessen its impact as either a coincidental or non coincidental “October surprise?” Is this simply one of those years when voters want to toss out a lot of the established order, regardless of party and ideology?
And, our question: has a sizable chunk of voters of all parties now concluded that one party running all three branches is NOT the healthiest or most effective way to implement sound policy or keep our system of government running way our founding fathers meant it to run?
If that’s the case, all of the breaking news stories, speeches and JFK emulations may not be transformational in the end.
UPDATE: Political columnist Dick Polman looks at this question on his blog. Part of what he says:
The GOP is already working to place much of the blame on Bill Clinton, by contending that his administration allowed the North Korean despot to run wild. They do have some raw material to work with: Clinton talked directly with the renegades, and those talks yielded a pact that the North Koreas soon began to cheat on, by setting up a secret uranium-enrichment program. The political argument here is that, if voters elect Democrats, they would choose to negotiate directly with enemies who will merely take advantage.
The potential downside to that argument, however, is that voters – already in a foul mood about the incumbent party – might not be so willing to re-debate the 1990s, not when they have six Bush years in the foreground. The Bush/GOP foreign policy record is on the ballot this year, not Clinton’s. And even if the issue is about whether it’s a sign of softness to talk directly with enemies, there are plenty of Republicans and intelligence experts who believe that Bush has been wrong not to talk to the North Koreans.
Polman notes that GOPer and Bush family friend/advisor James Baker, who is heading the bipartisan commission looking into Iraq at GWB’s request, said on Sunday:”“I believe in talking to your enemies. 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.â€?
He also quotes the “scathing comments” of CIA official Donald Gregg, a senior Bush as a national security advisor and as ambassador to South Korea, about the present President George Bush administration’s view that diplomacy and dialogue with adversarial countries is somehow weaknesss. Polman writes:
With people like Baker and Gregg openly rebuking the administration, it’s no surprise that the press is asking the White House whether it thinks it could have done more to halt or reverse the North Korean nuclear program, especially since Bush had declared three years ago that such weaponry would not be tolerated. That very question came up today. But Bush spokesman Tony Snow replied, “It’s a silly question.” When a reporter objected and said that, in fact, it was “a fair question,” Snow explained that “you need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt when national security is involved.”
You need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt…That was certainly an interesting remark, given the fact that, at 2:21 this afternoon, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this subhead: “Clinton administration made a deal with North Korea and failed.”
What does all this mean? Polman believes “at the very least, however, these remarks hint at disunity within the GOP camp, and undercut the notion that the North Korean test can be an election-eve boon to ailing Republicans. Iraq is a glaring and easily graspable vulnerability; and the nuances of Far East diplomacy, past and present, are too complex for the casual voter – unlike the nuances of the Foley scandal.”
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, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.