Bush's Battles and the Off-Year Election

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

The president, defending himself against criticism of prewar intelligence, his party not having too much to cheer about in this week's elections, and the Congress having trouble deciding on a package of tax and spending cuts; the developments that we'll now put to our guest political observers: E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and The Brookings Institution.

Welcome back, E.J.

Mr. E.J. DIONNE (The Washington Post; The Brookings Institution): Thank you.

SIEGEL: And substituting for David Brooks this week, Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.

Welcome, Rich.

Mr. RICH LOWRY (Editor, National Review): Thanks for having me.

SIEGEL: First, today's speech by President Bush, Rich Lowry, it reads a lot like your last column today online, The Gullible Party, in which you criticize the--who question the president's integrity in the run-up to war. There now seem to be a majority of Americans who question his integrity. It's a big problem to dig your way out of.

Mr. LOWRY: Well, the charge that he lied about the war has ended up being extremely corrosive, and I think the White House thought, `Look, we had this debate in 2004. We effectively won it and won the election. Time to move on and we don't have to address it anymore.' That's turned out to be wrong, and I think this will be a part of a very aggressive push-back. And I think the White House has a pretty good case to make, 'cause you look at the major national Democratic figures in the Senate: the Hillary Clintons, the John Kerrys, the Evan Bayhs. They all voted for the war and they all believed roughly the same thing that Bush did on intelligence. And even on some of the more controversial questions, these aluminum tubes that we've heard so much about, they were looking at the evidence that they had at the time. It turned out to have been wrong.

SIEGEL: Bu the administration has to both argue about what happened a couple of years ago and also point to what's happening in Iraq right now.

Mr. LOWRY: Well, that's really the rub, and everything's that's happening to Bush now, the premise of it is the difficulties on the ground in Iraq. That is what is weakening him fundamentally. It is what makes him vulnerable to these kinds of opportunistic infections which are basically any charge can be leveled at him, and people tend to believe it because the casualties there and the bombings people see every day are just dragging him down and weakening him. And it only--his position will only improve if the situation on the ground improves, and that's going to be a long and difficult haul.

SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne, let's turn to the Tuesday election. Is that what happened there? Did we hear the reflected pain of Iraq in New Jersey and Virginia and California, or a bunch of local issues that were expressing individual local concerns as opposed to a chorus of anti-Bush complaint?

Mr. DIONNE: How about neither of those?

SIEGEL: OK.

Mr. DIONNE: I think that it's not Iraq primarily in these elections. I just want to say one quick thing about what the president said. He talked about people rewriting history. This administration still has a problem. It was Condi Rice who said, `We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.' So they do have a problem with what they said before the war.

What I think happened on Tuesday was the sort of running out of steam of a certain style of Republican politics. I think in New Jersey, certainly, President Bush played badly for the Republican candidate, Doug Forrester. In some ways, the more interesting race was in Virginia, and I think some old Republican issues really failed there and Democrats found a new voice. The Republican, Jerry Kilgore, went after Tim Kaine, the victorious Democrat, very hard for his personal opposition to the death penalty. And Kaine turned that around. He is the first Catholic to be elected governor of Virginia, and he turned that around by saying, `Look, my opposition to the death penalty is rooted in my religious faith.' And I think a lot of Democrats are going to have to take a look at that and say that when Democrats who are religious are wiling to talk about it openly--you can't fake it--it can be helpful. And it really turned around a difficult issue...

SIEGEL: Which, ironically, he talked about it to say, `These are my moral reservations, which I will overcome as governor. I will, in fact'...

Mr. DIONNE: That's true. He said, `I will obey the law because the law says that we have executions in Virginia.' That's absolutely right. But even--you've never had a candidate win in the South who even said anything in opposition to the death penalty. And in the case of Kilgore, he said he was the pro-gun, anti-tax, limited government, anti-illegal-immigration, pro-public-safety, pro-death-penalty, culture-of-life, trust-the-people conservative. And that whole litany lost against a campaign that focused much more on very practical things: schools, transportation, sprawl, balanced budget.

SIEGEL: So, Rich Lowry, a message to the National Review, write more about highway construction and traffic flow into major metropolitan areas?

Mr. LOWRY: Well, I think there's something to that. The problem with the death penalty is that it's an issue that's so early 1990s, when crime was really high on the agenda. It's just not that important now. If Southern voters and voters in Virginia notionally support the death penalty, they don't wake up every morning, as some Republican told me today, thinking, `Gosh, I wish we could execute someone today.' So, you know, Kaine was able to talk to issues that did have more of a connection with voters.

SIEGEL: What should we make of the debate on Capitol Hill, largely it seems among Republicans, about what sort of package of taxes and spending cuts should solve the budget problem this year?

Mr. LOWRY: Well, it's a nightmare for Republicans, and there's a whiff of that moment in the summer of 1994--and I'm sure E.J. remembers it well--when Democrats, when they had the majority, couldn't pass the rule on the crime bill, a routine procedural vote where they couldn't get it done and it showed they'd just run out of steam and run out of energy and they really couldn't govern anymore. And there's...

SIEGEL: And in November they were run out of town ...(unintelligible).

Mr. LOWRY: Correct. And there's an aspect of that in what's happening on the Hill now. And what's traditionally been the case is Republicans can get to 200 votes on pretty much everything, and then they would buy off the remaining Republicans to get to 218, whether it was CAFTA or whether it was the Medicare prescription drug bill. In this case, there are just too many votes to buy, and they're in something of a meltdown.

Mr. DIONNE: It's funny that Rich says that. Yesterday, I got a call from Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat--prominent Democrat in the House, who was in the Clinton administration in 1994, and he said exactly the same thing. This is their crime bill. They are losing control of the House. And I think what matters for the near future is less what Rich and I think than what Republicans in Congress make of the elections on Tuesday. And what you seem to be seeing are moderate Republicans who are far more concerned with supporting President Bush and the political dangers of that than with opposing him. And so I think you're seeing a shifting power within the Republican Caucus, and it's becoming a very, very difficult group of politicians to manage. And that's very bad news for Bush and the Republicans in 2006.

SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Georgetown University, and Rich Lowry of the National Review, thanks to both of you.

Mr. LOWRY: Thank you.

Mr. DIONNE: Thank you.

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