[Mb-civic] Republican Wedge Issues, 2006 Edition - Harold Meyerson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Republican Wedge Issues, 2006 Edition

By Harold Meyerson
Saturday, February 4, 2006; A17

Old lies die hard. We grow inured to the administration's howlers in 
defense of its Iraq policy, so much so that the preposterous case the 
president made in his State of the Union address for our continued 
presence in Iraq went almost unnoticed. But he actually said this:

"A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi 
allies to death and prison, [and] would put men like bin Laden and 
Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country. . . ."

Is there one person anywhere inside the administration who really 
believes that Abu Musab Zarqawi's murderous band of outsiders would 
emerge as rulers over the vastly larger and very well-armed Shiite, 
Sunni and Kurdish legions if we pulled out? The same band of outsiders 
that tried to stop the Sunnis from voting in December's parliamentary 
election and held their turnout down, in some provinces, to a mere 90 
percent?

We've heard this one before. Before the war, the president told us that 
Saddam Hussein was an ally and co-conspirator of Osama bin Laden -- all 
evidence to the contrary. Now bin Laden is poised to take over the 
country if we leave -- all evidence to the contrary.

I don't agree with it, but there is a serious case to be made for our 
continuing presence in Iraq as a buffer and negotiator between the 
Shiite and Sunni populations. But George W. Bush said absolutely nothing 
on Tuesday night about the real tensions that threaten to pull Iraq 
apart and our role in trying to suppress them. Nearly three years after 
he took us to war, the president's justification for our intervention is 
nonsensical by every measure save one: the political. The only issue on 
which even 50 percent of Americans say Bush is doing a good job is 
fighting terrorism, so the war in Iraq must be conflated with the war on 
bin Laden.

By the measure of his past speeches, however, it was a perfunctory case 
that the president made for the war on Tuesday; indeed, we have to go 
back in time to BC (Before Clinton) to find a State of the Union as 
spiritless and themeless as this one. As conservatives promptly noted, 
what was missing from the text was the laissez-faire zeal that had 
previously suffused Bush domestic policy. Bush didn't even make much of 
a case for his health savings accounts, to which he devoted just a 
single sentence. Time was when he would have said that Americans should 
handle their own accounts. But Bush said that last year when he sought 
to privatize Social Security, and his countrymen recoiled.

Indeed, the only case for which Bush summoned his signature cockiness 
was his argument for warrantless surveillance. "If there are people 
inside our country who are talkin' with al Qaeda," he said (and the 
telltale dropped "g" shows that Bush means business), "we want to know 
about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again." This 
is, as Karl Rove made clear the week before, the one issue on which the 
president intends to hit the Democrats again and again. For a president 
given to attack lines, it was really the only attack line in his entire 
speech -- a point surely not lost on the increasingly anxious Republican 
lawmakers in the room.

For, other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in 
the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which 
Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? 
Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island 
of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running 
on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a 
theme that won't immediately backfire?

I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I 
suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will 
campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers 
in the United States.

This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay 
of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and 
won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term 
effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California 
Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied 
public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the 
party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized 
in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who 
had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants 
might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in 
November.

Warrantless wiretapping and immigrant bashing as the Republican wedge 
issues of '06? Well, what else can they run on?

Their competence? Their ethics?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020302510.html?nav=hcmodule
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