GOP Senator Voinovich joins Lugar in call for military disengagement from Iraq. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
Today’s Must Read: finally given an opportunity to expound on the “fourth branch” theory of the vice presidency, Cheney’s lawyer backs down. Looks like Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) called his bluff.
Hardball (from the Post …)
Iraqi law enforcement officials stretched a dragnet over the Green Zone and other parts of the capital Tuesday, seeking to arrest the country’s culture minister in connection with an attempted political assassination two years ago in which three people were killed, Iraqi officials said.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said an arrest warrant had been issued for Culture Minister Asad Kamal al-Hashimi in the February 2005 attempted assassination of Mithal al-Alusi, a newly elected independent member of parliament who had been harshly criticized by many politicians here after he visited Israel in 2004. Alusi was not injured in the attack, but two sons, Ayman, 22, and Jamal, 30, were killed, as was a bodyguard.
The front blurb on the new CNN Iraq poll is sufficiently to-the-point that I’m going to quote it in its entirety …
Public support for the war in Iraq has fallen to a new low and Republican support is beginning to waver, a poll published Tuesday found. In the latest CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll, 69 percent of those polled believe things are going badly in Iraq, and anti-war sentiment among Republican poll respondents has suddenly increased.
Dick Lugar’s very public pulling of the plug on the president’s policy is an indicator of the trend.
The number referenced toward the end is 38% — the number of self-identified Republicans who say they oppose the war. (I wasn’t able to find a partisan break-out of the numbers in the CNN data. So I’m not clear what the number jumped up from.)
This all puts in stark terms the intense anxiety now palpitating Republican hearts in Washington, DC. One number is 38%. Another number is 17, the number of months before the 2008 election.
President Bush gives every indication that he intends to keep troop deployments at their current level through January 2009. Sure, if everyone chills out in Iraq and finally throws him the parade the president is holding out for, he’ll begin bringing the troops home. But on planet Earth it’s stay through course through 1/09.
The president’s ability to pull that off — both in terms of raw votes and public sentiment — rests almost entirely on a solid phalanx of support among congressional Republicans and 2008 Republican presidential aspirants. They don’t have to be for the president’s war or his conduct of it. But they need to stay resolutely opposed to Democratic efforts to end it.
As long as that’s the case, as long as the vast majority of Republicans oppose Democratic attempts to end the war, that will keep Democrats (not saying it’s right, just observing the dynamics) from really going to the mat over it. And as long as Democrats don’t force a major confrontation that keeps it all sort of murky in the public mind who’s for or against. But eventually — maybe as soon as September — public opposition will become so overwhelming that the Democrats may be willing to really force the matter and not worry about lacking any bipartisan cover. Or maybe by September enough Republicans will see the numbers and give in and give the Democrats their veto-proof majorities.
However it happens, whatever gives way first, the trend is unmistakable. And even if the Republicans can maintain unity and defy political gravity through 2008 they can see as well as anyone what will happen if they go into the 2008 election with sub-30% support on the defining issue of the day.
The key is — for some liminal period over the next several months — there’s still a paradoxical safety in numbers for Republicans, sticking with the president. But no one wants to be the last one to the door. If you’re a Republican congressman and you’ve been carrying the president’s water on Iraq for years you don’t want to be on the losing side when the Congress finally ends the war in spite of the president. At that point, even if you flip flop and start saying we’ve got to change course and try to get on the right side of public opinion, then you’re probably just doubly screwed. And if it’s mid-2008 at that point you’re really not in a good place.
Someone better versed than I in the intricacies of game theory could suss out all the dynamics. But the key is that folks are getting nervous and they’re quite right to do so.
The truth is that the president is playing a very high-stakes game of chicken with his fellow Republicans. He’s driving a hundred miles an hour toward the cliff, way too fast to jump out of the car without risking serious injury. But as the cliff gets closer, they’ll start to jump.
FBI talked to fisherman about Alaska senator better known for pork.
Rudy again bashes Bill Clinton as soft on terrorism, even though nine months ago Rudy said that Bill…shouldn’t be criticized as soft on terrorism. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
Elizabeth Edwards just called in to Hardball and launched a surprise confrontation of guest Ann Coulter. Quite a showdown ensued.
Video soon.
Late Update: Here’s some more on the political context at play here.
Former #2 at the Interior Department Steven Griles sentenced to 10 months of jail time for lying to congressional investigators about his ties to Abramoff.
As Josh wrote last night, Vice President Cheney’s office has had some bad luck with safeguarding classified material.
And no wonder. According to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), White House officials have a bad habit of leaving classified documents unattended and then shutting down security officers when they seek to investigate. Things are so bad, officers from the White House Security Office have told Waxman, that over half of the staff from that office has resigned in the past year.