President Bush shifted his rhetoric on Iraq in recent weeks after an intense debate among advisers about how to pull out of his political free fall, with senior adviser Karl Rove urging a campaign-style attack on critics while younger aides pushed for more candor about setbacks in the war, according to Republican strategists.
The Iraq push culminated the rockiest political year of this presidency, which included the demise of signature domestic priorities, the indictment of the vice president's top aide, the collapse of a Supreme Court nomination, a fumbled response to a natural disaster and a rising death toll in an increasingly unpopular war. It was not until Bush opened a fresh campaign to reassure the public on Iraq that he regained some traction.
The lessons drawn by a variety of Bush advisers inside and outside the White House as they map a road to recovery in 2006 include these: Overarching initiatives such as restructuring Social Security are unworkable in a time of war. The public wants a balanced appraisal of what is happening on the battlefield as well as pledges of victory. And Iraq trumps all.
"I don't think they realized that Iraq is the totality of their legacy until fairly recently," said former congressman Vin Weber (R-Minn.), an outside adviser to the White House. "There is not much of a market for other issues."
You have to wonder why it took them until a year into the second term to figure out that Iraq is the legacy of Bush's presidency. Considering Bush ran his campaign around national security and the war on terror, of which he himself stated the Iraq war was the center-piece, you would think he or his advisors would realize they had limited the potential of their second term.
What was is this new approach?
That proved a galvanizing moment at the White House, according to a wide range of GOP strategists in and out of the administration. Rove, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House strategic planning director Peter H. Wehner urged the president to dust off the 2004 election strategy and fight back, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. White House counselor Dan Bartlett and communications director Nicolle Wallace, however, counseled a more textured approach. The same-old Bush was not enough, they said; he needed to be more detailed about his strategy in Iraq and, most of all, more open in admitting mistakes -- something that does not come easily to Bush.
"Admitting mistakes" of course has amounted to little more then acknowledging that there were mistakes made, such as with the handling in Iraq or the Katrina recovery. What is the strategy in Iraq?
Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University specialist on wartime public opinion who now works at the White House, helped draft a 35-page public plan for victory in Iraq, a paper principally designed to prove that Bush had one.
Bush's new approach is really the same as the old approach: politics over substance. Instead of admitting error as the first step in correcting error, Bush merely admits error to show that he's willing to admit error. Instead of crafting a wartime plan in Iraq in an effort to give direction to the mission there, he employs a public opinion specialist to create a plan to show that he has a plan. To me then, it seems that nothing much has changed at all.
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