Why Bush's Security Pitch May Not Work This Time

By Mike Allen

Thirty-five minutes after President Bush finished his surprise East Room announcement last week about plans for prosecuting some of the world's most prominent terrorists, White House and Republican officials convened a conference call of conservative TV pundits and other allies, and later of state party leaders around the country. A participant said listeners were urged to spread the word about the aggressive speech "by talking about it in the context of the election." The message: Republicans are strong, and Democrats are weak. The White House strategy isn't subtle. With Republicans worried about losing the House and conceivably even the Senate in November, the President is taking a big gamble that an unflinching focus on national security will be his party's political salvation. That approach helped Bush defy history in 2002 when the Republicans, the party in power, avoided midterm losses. Two years later, his re-election rode largely on reminding Americans that they were a nation at war. But will the gambit work one more time? Many Republicans harbor doubts, and a few dissenters are even steering clear of the President and his game plan. One problem with rerunning an old play is that the opposition figures out how to thwart it. Democrats, having largely steered clear of national-security issues in the 2002 and 2004 campaigns for fear their war reservations and civil-liberties concerns would brand them as effete, are embracing the topic, and they appear to have found their voice with a steady insistence that Iraq has been mishandled. Thus, for the first time in the five years since 9/11, national security is a jump ball.

Recognizing the stakes for his legacy and his party, Bush is dropping into key states and districts with a schedule so ferocious, he seems to be running for a third term. Retreat from his Iraq policy, he has argued, would mean that some 2,660 American soldiers "have given their lives for nothing." In an effort to convince an increasingly skeptical public that Iraq is a critical part of the broader war on terrorism, the Administration has declassified letters, videos and audiotapes of top al-Qaeda members talking about Iraq, including a message from Osama bin Laden in which he calls Iraq a "war of destiny between infidelity and Islam."

Deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, the architect one last time, says he is confident that voters will buy the President's message. "Given a choice between doing the job and walking away, they will want to do the job," Rove tells TIME. "Given a choice between winning and losing, the American people will always pick winning." But the trouble for Bush is that, at the moment, lots of folks think he lacks a winning formula. In a TIME poll last month, 63% of those surveyed disapproved of the President's handling of the Iraq war, and the figure was 51% for the war on terrorism. What's more, 54% thought the Iraq engagement was hurting U.S. efforts to combat terrorism.

Other polls have shown Bush losing security moms, NASCAR dads and plain ole Southern women--all groups that were tent poles in the coalition that re-elected the President. Voters cite a large stew of concerns, including gas prices and immigration. But political consultants say they find the sourness grounded in the war. "It's the only issue that matters," says a strategist working closely with the White House.

The issue is poisonous enough to have provoked a revolt by a few imperiled Republican candidates, who either have refused to follow the White House advice to beat the war drums or are modifying it drastically to try to save their skin. Representative Tom Reynolds of New York, chairman of the House Republican campaign committee, says that local issues are more important than national security. "The national media always asks, 'What's your national issue?'" says Reynolds. "We don't have a national issue." At least, that's his hope. Most of the Republicans in tough races who distance themselves from Bush do so subtly, by not inviting him in to campaign, for instance. Not so Mike Fitzpatrick, a Representative facing stiff opposition in Philadelphia, who sent out a mailer last month blaring "Mike Fitzpatrick to President Bush: 'America needs a better, smarter plan in Iraq.'"

Democrats, of course, agree. The G.O.P. has scourged the opposition as the party of cut and run, but that tack is of limited value when the Democratic leadership has reined in calls by members for a prompt withdrawal from Iraq and when most Americans no longer support the war. In any case, the Democrats are now playing offense on Iraq. The home page of Diane Farrell, a Democrat seeking to unseat Representative Christopher Shays in Connecticut, features a calculator for the cost of the war in Iraq that updates second by second--$313 billion and counting. In a crucial seat in New Mexico, challenger Patricia Madrid bought a TV ad chiding the incumbent, "Heather Wilson is on the Intelligence Committee, but she never questioned George Bush on the war--and she never said a word about how we've spent $300 billion there."

And it's not just Bush's handling of Iraq that Democrats are targeting but also the larger war on terrorism. Democrats have begun to echo a message template e-mailed to them by party leaders: "President Bush and his Republican Congress have not learned the lessons of 9/11 and, as a result of their failed policies in Iraq and in the War on Terror, America is less safe."

This is where the White House does not want Democrats to get traction. If Bush's Iraq policies are a tough sell with voters, at least he has enjoyed credibility as a terrorism fighter overall. During the summer, Republican consultants watching focus groups of married women with children, a sector that strongly supported Bush's re-election, found that the mothers often asked questions about Iraq like "Does this go on forever?" But if the women were reminded of Iraq in the context of a war on terrorism--say, by being shown a video of a plane flying into the World Trade Center--their opposition waned.

Which may help explain why the White House so excitedly trumpeted Bush's announcement last week that the Administration was transferring 14 high-profile al-Qaeda terrorists to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bush had to acknowledge that the 14 had been held in secret CIA facilities in undisclosed locations, a fact that had been reported and had generated international controversy. But the value for the Administration in bringing these men into the light was to remind Americans of the very real enemies they face.

In the same speech, the President asked Congress to pass an Administration bill allowing the Pentagon to try the 14 before military commissions that would replace the tribunals Bush originally set up, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in June. The bill also spells out specific acts that U.S. interrogators of terrorists are banned from committing--such as torture, murder, rape and infliction of severe physical or mental pain--and by design, some legal scholars say, permits anything else.

If the idea was to dare Democrats to oppose those counterterrorism measures, they were on to the trick. In a private memo to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid on Jan. 31, his staff laid out the danger in mounting too aggressive a criticism of the freshly disclosed National Security Agency's espionage program: "National security issues are the only issues propping up President Bush. Democrats in general cannot permit themselves to be characterized as being weak on terrorism. We must make it clear that Democrats believe the terrorist threat must be dealt with forcefully and effectively." With that in mind, Democrats were largely quiet about Bush's calls for legislation. Instead, they let Republican Senators argue about it among themselves. "This time we're not taking the bait," declared a Democratic aide.

That took the air out of Bush's premature October surprise. Anyway, an October surprise isn't much use in September. And between now and the November voting, Bush is likely to find that opportunities for spinning news about terrorism, which tends to help the Republicans, will come up less often than bad news about his millstone, Iraq. The day after his East Room talk, at least 45 people died in violence in Iraq. It wasn't even a particularly bad day.

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr., Massimo Calabresi, Karen Tumulty/Washington, Pat Dawson/Billings, Rita Healy/Denver, Christopher Maag/Cleveland, Eli Sanders/Seattle