The GOP's Political Patriotism
As Democrats attack the President, Republicans fight back
Tuesday, Sep. 23, 2003
Last week, the Democratic presidential candidates competed to see who could egg the president more effectively. Now they’re back to smearing each other. That should please the Bush team. But it might not, judging from how enthusiastically Republicans competed to take offense at the attacks coming from the opposition. "It's completely out of bounds," said one top Bush adviser last week after the Democratic debate in which Senator John Kerry compared Bush to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. "Totally political," said another of Dick Gephardt, who among other things labeled Bush a "miserable failure” and launched a website by that name. The umbrage campaign had been kicked off by Republican party chairman Ed Gillespie on Meet the Press. "The kind of words we're hearing now from the Democratic candidates go beyond political debate," he said, citing Al Sharpton and others who had compared Bush to Saddam Hussein and his administration to the Taliban. "This is political hate speech."
Sure, Democrats are testing the old Cold War rule that politics should stop at the water's edge, but Republicans are doing more than charging the Left is gauche. The GOP campaign is itself political. Party members are making such a public fuss in the hopes of de-legitimizing all Democratic criticism of Bush’s handling of the war on terror. On the Hill, Republican leaders dismissed questions about the president's $87 billion request for Iraq rebuilding as merely "political." Secretary Rumsfeld went even further, suggesting that criticism of the president's war stewardship was giving comfort to the enemy.
Painting the opposition as rank opportunists not only waters down the particular attack, but also serves to make a larger point: Democrats don't treat national security issues with enough maturity to leave out the politics. "They are not serious about national security," says one top administration official of the criticisms.
In an election that many Bush advisers believe will turn on which candidate makes Americans feel safer, the GOP hopes to cement the idea that the world is too dangerous to be left to a Democratic president. The strategy worries Democrats who believe Bush successfully deployed a similar strategy in 2002 to pick up seats in the House and Senate. Vows have been made to fight back this time. "The one-two shot from the GOP playbook," says Kerry's campaign Manager Jim Jordan. "First, impugn the patriotism of the critic, then dismiss even the most thoughtful and merited criticism as partisan. They've had success with it for a couple of years, but Bush's crumbling approval numbers prove the public's not buying it anymore."
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