992

The Bush take on U.S. opinion
May 28, 2007
By JENNIFER LOVEN

Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.

Democrats view the November elections that gave them control of Congress as a mandate to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. They’re backed by evidence; election exit poll surveys by The Associated Press and television networks found 55 percent saying the U.S. should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq.

The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn’t want the troops pulled out — they want to give the military more support in its mission.

“Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq,” he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. “I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course.”

Increasingly isolated on a war that is going badly, Bush has presented his alternative reality in other ways, too. He expresses understanding for the public’s dismay over the unrelenting sectarian violence and American losses that have passed 3,400, but then asserts that the public’s solution matches his.

“A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?” he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. “When are you going to win?”

Also in that session, Bush said: “I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it’s just not worth it. Let’s just leave.’ I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well.”

In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving — not winning — is their main goal.

In one released Friday by CBS and the New York Times, 63 percent supported a troop withdrawal timetable of sometime next year. Another earlier this month from USA Today and Gallup found 59 percent backing a withdrawal deadline that the U.S. should stick to no matter what’s happening in Iraq.

Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out. Failure, Bush says, is not what the public wants — they just don’t fully understand that that is just what they will get if troops are pulled out before the Iraqi government is capable of keeping the country stable on its own.

Seeking to turn up the heat on this argument, Bush has relied lately on an al-Qaida mantra. Terrorists remain dangerous, and fighting them in Iraq is key to neutralizing the threat, he says. “It’s hard for some Americans to see that, I fully understand it,” Bush said. “I see it clearly.”

Independent pollster Andrew Kohut said of the White House view: “I don’t see what they’re talking about.”

“They want to know when American troops are going to leave,” Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, said of the public. “They certainly want to win. But their hopes have been dashed.”

Kohut has found it notable that there’s such a consensus in poll findings.

“When the public hasn’t made up its mind or hasn’t thought about things, there’s a lot of variation in the polls,” he said. “But there’s a fair amount of agreement now.”

The president didn’t used to try to co-opt polling for his benefit. He just said he ignored it.

In Ohio in mid-April, for instance, Bush was asked how he feels about his often dismal showings. “Polls just go poof at times,” he replied.

It was the same the next day in Michigan. “If you make decisions based upon the latest opinion poll, you won’t be thinking long-term strategy on behalf of the American people,” the president said.

After weeks of negotiations between the White House and Capitol Hill’s majority Democrats, last week ended with things going Bush’s way. Congress passed and he signed a war spending bill that was stripped of any requirement that the war end.

But the debate is far from over.

The measure funds the war only through Sept. 30 — around the time that military commanders are scheduled to report to Bush and Congress on whether the troop increase the president ordered in January is quelling the violence as hoped. Even Republicans have told Bush that a major reckoning is coming in September, and that they will be hard-pressed to continue to stand behind him if things don’t look markedly better. Also due that month is an independent assessment of the Iraqi government’s progress on measures aimed at lessening sectarian tensions that are fueling the violence.

Between now and then, Democrats don’t intend to stay quiet. They plan a series of votes on whether U.S. troops should stay in Iraq and whether the president has the authority to continue the war.

Bush isn’t likely to stay quiet, either.

Wayne Fields, an expert on presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, said the president’s new language exploits the fact that there is no one alternative strategy for the public to coalesce around, which clearly spells out how to bring troops home. Bush can argue that people agree with him because no one can define the alternative, Fields said.

But, with the president’s job approval ratings so low and the public well aware of what it thinks about the war, Bush is taking a big gamble.

“This is a very tricky thing in our politics. We want to think that we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion. But we also like to think of ourselves as being in a democracy where we are listened to,” Fields said. “He risks either the notion of being thought out of touch … or to be thought simply duplicitous.”


NOW can we impeach him?

of course, impeachment won’t actually solve the problem… they impeached clinton and he stayed in office. what’s to prevent the same thing from happening if we impeach bush?

it’s getting so that, even with my consciously ignoring news sources, enough news leaks through anyway, and what i hear has been causing me to worry even more than i do ordinarily. other-than-christians and other-than-heterosexuals violently discriminated against at home and abroad, political mayhem wherever i look… even the strikethrough, subsequent exposure of the dominionist christian terrorists, and LJ/6A “back-pedaling” has sinister overtones. i have to keep remembering something that i learned when i was first entering the seminary: “things are going to get worse before they get better. things are going to become more and more polarised, and you will be forced to adopt one side or the other in order to survive. but not long after that, the saviour will come and ‘straighten everything out’.” i was always lead to believe that it meant an internal polarisation and an internal saviour, but it may be that the microcosm and the macrocosm are reflections of each other…

4 thoughts on “992”

  1. How could I not? As the sage master Red Forman put it on That 70’s Show, “Why the hell’d you pardon Nixon, Jerry?”

    We can argue until the warranty runs out (Dec. 21, 2012) that Bush, Cheney and the rest of them belong in jail, but the reality is that the Justice Department is so screwed right now… I mean, a man even slightly more honorable than Gonzales would commit suicide in a cheap motel room, forget quitting the post of Attorney General. How long can the Justice Department stonewall? Long enough, I imagine.

    Dubya has filled everyplace he can with sycophants who, even with immunity aren’t willing to admit that anyone did anything wrong. Half of ’em are incompetent bastards who aren’t qualified to manage a car wash, much less a government post, and the other half are amoral bastards who would sell their mothers for five bucks.

    Somehow I expect most of them to walk straight out of the White House on January 19th and into cushy lifetime jobs with Haliburton on the 20th. I mean, we don’t have extradition with Dubai, do we?

  2. if someone doesn’t press criminal charges against him it will be a grave miscarriage of justice, but somehow i don’t see it happening… remember nixon?

  3. While I agree that he long should have been impeached, with only 20 months left there’s no way that it’s going to happen in time.

    Now I would be interested in seeing what would happen if criminal action were brought against members of the administration after he leaves office so that there’s no question of presidential pardon.

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