Bayh woos party faithful in key stateBY MAUREEN GROPPE Star Washington Bureau
30 October 2005
Indianapolis Star
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., helped pack a hotel ballroom here Saturday night, slamming President Bush in one of the most important speeches of his nascent 2008 White House bid.
As proof that this speech mattered more than most, Bayh's wife and his top supporters were by his side for the first time since he began speaking to Democrats around the country this year.
The New Hampshire Democratic Party's fall fundraising dinner drew about 600 of the most active Democrats in the state that holds the first presidential primary.
"I'd like to begin this evening by sharing some good news with all of you," Bayh said, revving up the hard-core, sellout crowd. "In just about three years, the Bush era will be over. Done. Finished."
Bayh criticized the Bush administration for "needless division, misplaced priorities and ineptitude" -- somewhat stronger language than he's been using lately, even in all-Democratic settings.
"President Bush sought our nation's highest office pledging to be a uniter, not a divider, and has proceeded to divide this country more profoundly than any time since the Vietnam War," Bayh said, eliciting long applause.
He also said administration officials "don't have a clue" about how to make the country secure.
The party activists listening to Bayh are used to hearing from speakers like Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Sen. John Edwards, all of whom have previously headlined the annual fundraiser.
"It's the most hard-core activists from every part of the state," said Nick Clemons, the state party's executive director, who invited Bayh to speak.
Bayh traveled solo when he spoke earlier this year to Democratic gatherings in Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Iowa. But Susan Bayh accompanied him Saturday, sitting at the head table with New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch and many of the state's top Democrats.
Bayh also brought in about 50 people backing his political action committee, which is fueling his exploratory campaign. The group included longtime friends such as Indianapolis lawyer Bill Moreau and George Wendt, a mutual fund manager from California who said he likes Bayh's message that unites the country more than divides it.
Moreau, who was Bayh's chief of staff during his first term as governor and worked in the Senate for Bayh's father, has raised $60,000 so far for Bayh. He used his own money to fly to New Hampshire to attend Saturday's dinner and a meeting of the political action committee's supporters.
"I plan on spending a lot of time on Evan's staff over the next few years, traveling like this, going to Iowa or New Hampshire or Wyoming, if that's where we need to go," Moreau said.
He and the New Hampshire Democrats got to see how Bayh handled one of the early testing grounds for presidential hopefuls.
His prescription for change -- unity, opportunity, real security and accountability -- are four themes the moderate Democratic Leadership Council is pushing in a bid to reach beyond the party's liberal wing and take back the White House and Congress.
Bayh headed the Democratic Leadership Council for more than four years until stepping down this year and turning the chairmanship over to Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.
Bayh is not alone among potential 2008 candidates who hope the council will boost their chances -- the same way it boosted Bill Clinton's presidential bid.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York also has close ties to Democratic Leadership Council leaders. She recently was given a special role in the group, heading an initiative to talk to people across the country as part of an effort to shape a Democratic Party agenda.
Although Clinton, who is up for re-election next year, has not said whether she will run for president, she tops national surveys in which Democrats were asked whom they would back in 2008.
"I think the goal of every other candidate besides Hillary Clinton right now is to convince New Hampshire Democrats and Iowa Democrats to keep their options open," said Dante Scala, a New Hampshire political science professor who has written a book about the state's presidential primary process.
Debbie Butler, a certified public accountant and Democratic activist from Concord who supported Howard Dean in 2004, said potential candidates don't need to hit a home run at this point. They just need to be viewed as a contender, as Bayh was after his speech, she said.
"I don't think the crowd is walking out saying he's my first choice," Butler said. "I think they're saying he's on the list. When people come this early, they run the risk of knocking themselves off, and he absolutely did not do that."
Contact Star Washington Bureau reporter Maureen Groppe at (202) 906-8118 or at
mgroppe@gns.gannett.com.
Grand old crackup?
Is the conservative movement cracking up, or just the Bush White House?By Drake Bennett October 30, 2005
The Boston Globe
THE WHITE HOUSE may have endured a barrage of bad news last week, but in one small way, at least, it was a managed barrage: Most White House watchers agree that there was a reason the withdrawal of Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination came when it did, a day before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, in the CIA leak investigation.
''The idea was to get rid of [Miers] before the bad news of the indictments, and in doing that, energize the conservative base for the upcoming legal woes that the administration may face," says Marshall Wittmann, a former political strategist for both the Christian Coalition and the Heritage Foundation and the communications director of John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. ''The worst thing for the administration was to face legal foes with a weakened base."
Conservatives, who were loudest in denouncing Miers's nomination, are no doubt relieved. But are they reassured? After all, only a few days ago there was still talk of a ''conservative crackup," the dissolution of the conservative coalition forged 25 years ago by Ronald Reagan, and the waning of support for Bush among those Americans who identify themselves as conservatives-those voters, in other words, who have throughout Bush's presidency made up his loudest and most loyal and organized supporters.
''The long-predicted 'conservative crackup' is at hand," Newsweek's chief political correspondent Howard Fineman wrote early this month. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it similarly last Sunday: ''We are going through one of our periodic conservative crackups," he wrote, presumably referring to crackups past such as 1964, when Goldwater conservatives seized control of the Republican Party and led it to one of the worst defeats in presidential election history, and 1992, when conservatives abandoned the first President Bush and helped tilt the election to Bill Clinton.
By this logic, the outrage over Miers was fed by a number of grievances that are only tangentially related to her nomination-and which may still trouble the relationship between Bush and his conservative base. Irked by the Bush administration's free-spending tendencies and bitterly divided over the issue of immigration, disconcerted by the continuing bloodshed in Iraq and put off by the whiff of cronyism and mismanagement coming from the White House, the conservative movement's various factions-social, fiscal, supply-side, foreign policy realists, and neoconservatives alike-are either edging out of the Big Tent or fighting over where to pitch it.
Or so the story goes. Much still depends on who Bush nominates in Miers's stead. But according to many of the pollsters, political strategists, and scholars who have made a study of modern American conservativism, one thing is clear: Complain as they may, conservatives still really like Bush.
''There wasn't ever going to be a crackup," says Wittmann, now a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council (and thus something of a conservative apostate). Bush and his conservative base, Wittmann argues, ''were never going to divorce court. They just needed to go to some counseling and therapy."
Presidents always have problems with their wingers," says Michael Barone, the principal author of The Almanac of American Politics and a prominent conservative commentator. One of his earliest political memories, he says, is reading The New Republic's vehement denunciations of the Kennedy administration's insufficiently liberal domestic policies in the early 1960s. What's most notable, Barone believes, ''is that Bush's problems have only become articulated in his fifth year."
Indeed, part of the reason that today's conservative dissent shows up as vividly as it does is that the Bush presidency has been, up until now, a period of remarkable unanimity in both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A few moderates, like Senator James Jeffords of Vermont and Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and Bush's first EPA administrator, have condemned what they saw as a rightward trend in the party. But as a whole, there's been a striking singularity of tone and purpose since Bush took office, with congressional Republicans almost never breaking ranks on party-line votes.
That unity has frayed of late: Earlier this month 46 of the Senate's 55 Republicans voted in favor of a measure-strongly opposed by the White House-to regulate the treatment of prisoners held by the American military. And an indictment of Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, would deprive the conservative coalition, many observers agree, of the man best able to manage its sometimes fractious blocs.
And yet, even before the Miers withdrawal, few saw Bush's situation as analogous to that of his father in 1990, when the elder Bush alienated conservatives by reneging on his pledge not to raise taxes.
''With the first President Bush," Wittmann argues, ''there was no true bond with the conservatives. The first Bush actually got them angry. This President Bush has a deep bond with most of the grass roots of the party. That's been shaken at this point, but it's certainly not in jeopardy."
The numbers would appear to back this up. Although GOP pollster David Winston has seen a drop in support for the president among conservative Republicans, he notes that ''it's from the low to mid-90s to the high 80s"-hardly the kind of numbers that suggest a brewing revolt. A recent CBS News Poll showed similar results.
Winston sees both the Miers backlash and the Fitzgerald investigation as a concern predominantly of elites, not the party's rank and file. To the extent that conservative support has sagged, he argues, it's been less about Miers and Libby than about high gas prices.
Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University and coauthor of ''The Rise of Southern Republicans," points out that even in 1992, with the defection of many conservatives to Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, Republicans still made gains in Southern congressional seats. He sees little chance that the current conservative discontent will translate into Democratic wins in the South.
As Winston puts it, ''Outside the Beltway, conservative Republicans still very much support this president."
In a closely divided country, however, the conservative coalition needn't fall apart for the balance of political power to shift. Since recent elections have turned on which party can more successfully galvanize its base and get supporters to the polls, demoralization rather than outrage might be enough to swing the election, keeping just enough conservatives at home on election day. Barone sees this as a real danger for the Republicans: ''The balance of enthusiasm favored the Republicans in 2002 and 2004, it's possible to think that it will favor the Democrats in 2006 and 2008."
And some observers think the talk of a crackup may not be exaggerated after all. ''When everything a party does seems to be turning out wrong," says Ruy Teixeira, a demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress and coauthor of the book ''The Emerging Democratic Majority," ''the potential for a crackup has to be there, because everyone in the party wants to blame someone."
Still, the far more important development, Teixeira believes, is the fact that Bush is polling so poorly with moderate and independent voters. Conservative votes alone, he points out, can't elect a president. ''The conservative coalition wasn't ever much of a coalition," he says. In the past two presidential elections, ''they were just able to get enough voters in the center to go along with them to make it work."
The conservative coalition, analysts note, is far from monolithic. Republican politicians and activists who care most about cutting federal spending, for example, will be little moved by the Miers withdrawal. And immigration in particular, according to Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of the book ''The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America," will remain a ''big looming battle" among conservatives, regardless of how the Supreme Court nomination plays out.
Nevertheless, Wittmann believes that, because the Supreme Court is so central an issue for most conservatives, dropping Miers will quiet most discontent for now. ''If he replaces Miers with a hard-core conservative," he predicts, ''the talk will be 'Harriet Who?' They'll forget it overnight, it will be instantaneous. This was a nice little lovers' squabble that was patched over with a nice replacement."
Last week, the reaction to the Miers withdrawal among conservative commentators seemed to bear this out. ''You know what the relief is this morning?" wrote the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez on the magazine's blog a few hours after the Miers announcement. ''A return to the feeling that this president gets the big things right. There was a detour, but I'm confident we're going to have good news shortly on [the Supreme Court]....That's the confidence so many of us have always had in him."
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail
drbennett@globe.com.
Alito draws mixed Iowa reviews10/31/2005
Rod BoshartThe Gazette
DES MOINES, IA - President Bush's nomination today of Judge Samuel Alito, Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court is drawing mixed reviews in Iowa.
Iowa GOP Chairman Ray Hoffman calls Alito "a fantastic nominee" who has an extensive legal career and is well qualified to serve on the high court. Hoffman said Alito has a track record of integrity and impartiality and a reputation for being "even tempered and fair-minded" as a member of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals the past 15 years.
Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, said he can't comment on Alito's qualifications because he knows little about his background.
However, Vilsack said it appeared that Bush's quick turnaround after the withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination amid a political firestorm among GOP conservatives indicates today's announcement may have some political motivation.
"I think it is fairly clear the president made a decision to shore up his political base and his political support with the appointment," Vilsack said.
"I think unfortunately there was an opportunity for the president to show real leadership and have a Supreme Court that was reflective of the nation and that looked like the United States of America," he added. "I suspect that it will be a tough nomination."
Alito's nomination is subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
Bush War Policy Is Now in Play
Democrats renew their criticism as public opposition solidifies, the body count grows and prewar intelligence is under a new assault.Janet Hook and Ronald Brownstein
3 November 2005
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON
For months, the politics of the Iraq war have been frozen in place, with stalwart Republicans defending President Bush's policy and most Democrats shunning a direct challenge.
Now the ice has begun to crack.
In the face of solidifying public opposition to the war, a mounting U.S. body count and a renewed focus on the faulty intelligence used to justify the war, Democratic lawmakers and candidates have sharpened their critique of the administration's policy and, in some cases, urged a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
"The mood has really shifted," said Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who in August became the chamber's first member to call for a troop withdrawal. "We are in a whole different period."
Meanwhile, some Republicans who were strong backers of Bush's policy increasingly are distancing themselves from his optimism that the U.S. mission will be successful -- even after the recent approval of an Iraqi constitution.
"I hope that is a turning point," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said of the constitution's passage. "But there is increasing skepticism. We've had a lot of events that appeared to be turning points, but the violence continues."
The changing political dynamic was dramatized this week when Democrats launched an unusually bold challenge: They essentially shutdown the Senate to force the release of a languishing report on whether the administration had distorted or mishandled intelligence in making the case for invading Iraq. Republicans, although angered, quickly agreed to investigate the status of the report.
Even before the Senate showdown, challenges to administration policy had been multiplying. Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, recently called for new ways to accelerate troop withdrawals. Several Democratic congressional candidates began to urge Bush to set a timeline for ending U.S. involvement in the war.
The new focus on Iraq -- especially after the U.S. casualty count passed 2,000 last week and after the indictment of a top White House aide who allegedly sought to discredit a high-profile war critic -- underscores the issue's likely prominence in next year's election.
When other hot issues fade, "the first thing that pops back up is concern about Iraq," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. "Iraq is fundamental to the political debate in 2006. People are going to focus on and want to know: Where are we going and what's the plan?"
The debate next fall could look very different from the arguments today. In both parties, many believe the administration could reshape the political landscape by beginning to withdraw troops. And many Republicans believe that increased Democratic criticism of Bush's policies will drive more Americans to rally behind the president.
Democrats remain deeply divided on what alternative to offer -- and whether they should offer one at all.
Yet persistent public discontent with the war has clearly strengthened the position of Democrats who urge more confrontation.
Most Americans now consider the decision to invade a mistake, according to recent polls.
And in a survey released in mid-October by the Pew Research Center, a narrow majority said the U.S. should set a timetable for withdrawing its forces.
Among rank-and-file Democrats, disillusionment with the war has become overwhelming, the polls show. After months of nearly complete disconnect, more Democratic elected officials and candidates are echoing those sentiments.
In a speech last week, Kerry argued that the U.S. should link troop reductions to "specific, responsible benchmarks" of progress in Iraq -- for instance, by bringing home 20,000 soldiers after Iraqi elections in December.
In an e-mail to supporters Wednesday, Kerry said if Bush didn't meet that goal, "we will demand that Congress acts to take the decision out of his hands."
Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the traditionally hawkish ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, wrote to Bush last week, saying the U.S. should withdraw one combat brigade each time three Iraqi brigades are fully trained.
Democrats Bryan Lentz and Patrick Murphy, two Iraq war veterans challenging Republicans in potentially competitive House races in Pennsylvania, are promoting benchmark-linked timelines for withdrawing U.S. troops.
"As long as we are doing the job, the Iraqis are going to say, 'The Americans are here,' " said Murphy, who served eight months in Iraq as an Army captain. "You need to give them the incentive to do it."
In Ohio, Paul Hackett, another Iraq war veteran, generally opposed a timetable for withdrawal during his unsuccessful high-profile summer campaign for a House seat.
But Hackett, as he faces off in a Democratic Senate primary against Rep. Sherrod Brown, has embraced a time limit set in cooperation with the military.
Brown has endorsed legislation that would require Bush to draft a withdrawal plan by year's end.
Democratic Senate contenders Matt Brown in Rhode Island and Patty Wetterling in Minnesota are backing a complete U.S. withdrawal by the end of next year.
Liberal activists welcome those positions. Tom Matzzie, Washington director of the group MoveOn.org, said the party would benefit from disillusionment over the war in next year's elections only if it presented voters "a vision for how America will get out of Iraq."
But most of the big names in the Democratic foreign policy establishment -- such as Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark -- fear that a push for a fixed timetable for withdrawal will hurt the Iraq war effort and the Democratic cause in 2006.
"I think the only thing that can rescue Bush from the consequences of his inept handling of Iraq is overkill by zealous Democrats," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.
The divisions among Republicans are more subtle, but they are growing.
The vast majority of Republicans support the war and argue that there is no viable alternative to staying the course. But it is increasingly difficult for them to keep the bad news in Iraq from eclipsing what they see as good news.
"We try to keep an ear to the ground, and the ground is rumbling," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). "I offer my constituents the assurance that this is a path on which we must be successful. But it's being reacted to with unease and uncertainty."
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), facing a tough reelection fight in 2006, has been accused by his opponent, Democrat Bob Casey Jr., of uncritically backing the administration's policy in Iraq. Aides to Santorum -- the Senate's No. 3 Republican leader -- responded by combing his record to find criticisms he voiced about aspects of the war.
Rep. Anne M. Northup (R-Ky.), who represents a Democratic-leaning district, distanced herself from Bush on Iraq in a recent interview with National Public Radio.
"I don't say, as the president does, that I am sure that we are going to be successful in Iraq," she said. "I don't say that because I am not sure."
Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), who is up for reelection next year, also is far more cautious than Bush in his comments about the war's course. DeWine said that when he was asked about the issue by worried constituents, "I tell them the jury is still out.
"People are very concerned."
