Portion of a political column from KY's largest newspaper.
I LIKE the last sentence especially!
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007701210413The President's man?
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The polls that are most on McConnell's mind, though, are surely those that show strong opposition to Bush's Iraq policy. They have Republican senators scared of losing their seats next year, and the party worried about being consigned to minority status in the Senate and House for several years -- a status brought about last November by voters whose main gripe was Iraq.
As leader of the President's party in the Senate, McConnell's major task right now is to block a bipartisan resolution expressing disapproval of Bush's troop surge.
McConnell has said he might filibuster the issue, but that would only emphasize the party's current weakness, and Senate Republicans are too divided on the issue to have a party position. So look for McConnell to get Republicans to agree on a list of amendments to be offered by Republicans, including skeptics of the policy, and strike a deal with Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., about how the bill will be handled on the floor, in return for not filibustering it.
But all that is a holding action. At some point this summer, American troop levels in Iraq will have to start going down -- either because Gen. David Petraeus of Fort Campbell fame makes the surge work, and military strategy dictates a drawdown; or because the surge fails, and Republican political strategy dictates a drawdown.
Senate Republicans may have to push the President on that. McConnell hinted at the possibility in a speech he gave recently about Alben Barkley, the only other Kentuckian who was the leader of a party in the Senate.
It was the longest tribute I have ever seen him give to a Democrat, perhaps a reminder that he says he wants to work with Democrats to pass bills on big issues like Social Security and immigration -- and maybe a nod to those registered Democrats in Barkley's Western Kentucky who were keys to putting McConnell in the Senate and keeping him there.
More than a third of the speech was about Barkley bucking President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. It included this quote from a Democratic senator: "By his one-vote margin in the 1937 contest when he was first elected leader, the impression was given, and it has been the impression ever since, that he spoke to us for the president. Now he speaks for us to the President."
With that quote, McConnell seems to have been telling a lame-duck President, "I'm not your water boy."
McConnell seems skeptical that Bush's surge will work. When Wolf Blitzer asked him on CNN last Sunday why he believed it would succeed, he didn't confirm Blitzer's assumption. "I think we ought to give it a chance," he said. "The President believes it will succeed."
If McConnell agreed with Bush, he probably would have said so. Publicly, on the biggest issue of our time, he just about had to stand with the President of his party in his first crack out of the box as party leader. But 2008 looms, and the patience of congressional Republicans is short.
McConnell told Blitzer, speaking of the Iraqi leaders, "We will find out very shortly if they can produce." Yes, they deserve one more shot to stand up to Muqtada al-Sadr and his thugs. But if they do not, McConnell will have to deliver a message to Bush from the Senate -- that if he doesn't start putting an end to his Mesopotamian misadventure, Congress will.
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