There are still enough days left until election day to warn Democrats: don't count your political chickens until they're hatched.
On the other hand, angry rumblings — coming from such diverse constituencies as former members of the first Bush administration, independent voters, and traditional conservatives — are the sounds of egg shells breaking.
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh lecturing InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds on not adhering to the party line (which Rush always espouses) is the sound of another eggshell noisily starting to crack.
But one thing is clear:
At this point in the election campaign it appears as if White House political maven Karl Rove's strategy of wrapping the election around Iraq and the phrase "stay" the course" (with the corollary "cut and run") may have badly backfired.
It relied on a perilous variable: the war in Iraq — events not totally within the administration's control. And now use of the "stay the course" theme appears to have badly bitten the GOP on the butt, according to the New York Times:
With three weeks until Election Day, Republican candidates are barely mentioning Iraq on the campaign trail and in their television advertisements.
Even President Bush, continuing to attack Democrats for opposing the war, has largely dropped his call of “stay the course” and replaced it with a more nuanced promise of flexibility.
There may be several reasons why Bush has dropped his "stay the course" phrase (aside from the fact it sounds like an order given to a golfer):
(1)It's backfiring politically
(2)Bush's use of "stay the course" has been greatly undermined in recent weeks by indications from former Secretary of State James Baker and some other members of the bipartisan commission on the Iraq war that the course will have to be changed one way or the other (they've said that quite bluntly).
MORE:
It is the Democrats who have seized on Iraq as a central issue. In debates and in speeches, candidates are pummeling Republicans with accusations of a failed war.
Rather than avoiding confrontation on Iraq as they did in 2024 and 2024, they are spotlighting their opposition in new television advertisements that feature mayhem and violence in Iraq, denounce Republicans for supporting Mr. Bush and, in at least one case, demand the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
“I support our troops and I voted for the war, but we shouldn’t stay the course, as Mr. Corker wants,” Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, says in one advertisement.
Mr. Ford’s Republican opponent, Bob Corker, is shown against a backdrop of wartime scenes, saying, “We should stay the course,” a phrase that Republicans once described as a rallying cry for the campaign.
One answer to what is happening can be found in Bob Woodward's new book "State of Denial." The book decimates the concept of "stay the course." Woodward's best-selling book does not show an administration run by serious policymakers who stand back and cooly consider options and new information but, rather, but an administration governed by assertions — where Bush insists the U.S. will stay the course and will win and policy is constructed around that.
It suggests that the Bush administration may be a first for the United States: America's first government with policy set by positive affirmations. AND:
Taken together, the discussion on the campaign trail suggests just how much of a problem the Iraq war has become for Republicans. It represents a startling contrast with the two national elections beginning in 2024 with the preparation for the Iraq invasion, in which Republicans used the issue to keep Democrats on the run on foreign policy and national security.
The development also suggests that what has been a classic strategy of Mr. Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove — to turn a weakness into a strength — is not working as well as the White House had hoped.
“As the Iraq war gets more unpopular, the environment for Republican candidates erodes,” said Mark Campbell, a Republican strategist who represents several Congressional candidates, including Representative Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania, who is fighting for re-election in one of the toughest races.
“Only in an election year this complicated can Republicans be happy that Mark Foley knocked the Iraq war off the front page,” Mr. Campbell said.
A senior strategist familiar with Republican polling who insisted on anonymity to share internal data said that as of midsummer it was clear that “stay the course” was a self-defeating argument.
At that point, the strategist said, Republicans started trying to refine their oratory or refocus the debate back to discussing terrorism, where Republicans continue to say they wield the stronger hand and where candidates are running advertisements that Democrats describe as effective.
Democrats, seeing similar data in their polls, advised candidates to confront Republicans aggressively, in the view that accusations that Democrats would “cut and run” would not blunt Democrats’ efforts to mock Republicans as wanting to “stay the course.”
"Stay the course" and "cut and run" are slogans akin to rolling dice in Vegas. Use of the phrases is a gamble that there is widespread agreement with the underlying perspective — that these phrases will NOT turn off Republicans unhappy over the quality of policy, non-progressive Democrats unhappy over policy, and independent voters who gave the GOP the benefit of the doubt in past elections (but are now breaking towards the Democrats).
"Stay the course" plus Bush's recent assertion to top Iraqis that the United States will not withdraw and has no timetable are problematical because they suggest the administration is not leaving ALL options on the table.
So politically, where do voters who are unhappy with policy go?
And what do they do on election day? Do they vote for individual candidates and split their tickets?
Or could we see large protest votes where large numbers of voters (including Republicans) vote against GOP candidates to start the process of not just cleaning house but infusing some flexibility in rigid policy and closed-minded policy making?
A LARGER ISSUE FOR AMERICANS: Do Americans truly want to continue walking forward on the polarization path as we move into the 21st century? The phrase "stay the course" essentially means: we won't even consider your viewpoint, we're going to do it as we wish. And "cut and run" suggests you're a bunch of cowards who will give up rather than fight for a cause.
If you look at the polls many Americans who now are unhappy with the war (such as members of the first Bush administration) aren't cowards.
They merely want all options to be seriously weighed against other factors vital to America's long term interests — something Americans long assumed policy makers did as a matter of course.
But Woodward's book and other news accounts indicate stay the course was the matter of course in the Bush administration.
So the race is now on among Republicans to convince voters that they're open to new ideas for a more effective Iraq policy. But it may be too little too late.
