Republicans on the RunBy Karen Tumulty and Mike Allen
TIME Magazine
Sunday 26 March 2006
As midterm campaigns gear up, Bush's party fears a backlash that could end its 12-year hold on the House.Considering that Vice President Dick Cheney had come a long way to help Florida Congressman Ric Keller raise $250,000 last week, the reception he got in the Sunshine State could have been a bit warmer. After extolling Cheney as "one of the most effective Vice Presidents in the history of the U.S.," Keller launched into all the times he had recently opposed the Bush Administration, including the deal to allow a Dubai company to manage operations at several U.S. ports. And then Keller went right for the punch line: "'Don't be too hasty,'" he claimed the Vice President had pleaded with him. "'Let's go hunting. We'll talk about it.'"
(snip)
Iraq is driving nearly all the big indicators the wrong way for Republicans. In a TIME poll conducted last week, Bush's job approval rating was mired at 39%; 3 in 5 Americans said the country is headed in the wrong direction, and
when those surveyed were given the choice between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat for Congress, the nameless Democrat won, 50% to 41%. The signs suggest an anti-Republican wave is building, says nonpartisan electoral handicapper Stuart Rothenberg, whose Rothenberg Political Report is closely followed in Washington. "The only question is how high, how big, how much force it will have. I think it will be considerable."
The danger signs for Republicans show up across the electoral map but nowhere more clearly than in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where the hottest Senate race in the country is being fought and where
Republican strategists say as many as five G.O.P. congressional seats are in play, out of a total 19. The President is still beloved by the state's Republican faithful, as evidenced by the fact that 500 of them showed up to see him at a $1,000-a-plate private fund raiser for Senator Rick Santorum last week in Sewickley Heights, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Santorum posed for photos with the President at the airport and leaned into a smiling handshake with political guru Karl Rove. But it was telling that Santorum, who is trailing state treasurer Bob Casey by 10 points in the latest polls, scheduled no public appearances with Bush. When Cheney flew to Newark, N.J., earlier in the week to raise nearly $400,000 that state senator Tom Kean Jr. badly needs in his bid for the U.S. Senate, the candidate didn't show up until 15 minutes after the Vice President's motorcade had left. Kean blamed the state's notorious traffic for his tardiness. Local papers confirmed that there hadn't been much congestion at the time.
(snip)
Indeed, the party's House leaders and committee chairs have begun making plans for their first moves if they take power, Democratic sources told TIME. Those sources said one of the first steps that a newly installed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would take would be to introduce legislation making college tuition more affordable for middle-class families, perhaps through tax credits and lower interest rates on student loans. Democrats would move immediately to tighten port security, seeking to have 100% of incoming container cargo inspected. A Democratic official briefed on the plans said the party would quickly push a bill designed to inhibit future lobbying scandals. The sources said Democrats would push for changes to the troubled Medicare prescription-drug plan, giving more control to Medicare and less to private providers and striking the provision that prevents the government from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies.
Administration officials say
they fear that losing even one house of Congress would mean subpoenas and investigations- a taste of the medicine House Republicans gave Bill Clinton. "Everything will grind to a halt," one said. That prediction could be a scare tactic designed to get out the G.O.P. vote. But Democrats say that if they are victorious in November, they plan to force Bush to be more accountable, and they intend to dig through records of contracts in Iraq, for homeland security and for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Democratic Representative Henry Waxman of California, one of the most dogged critics of the Administration, would be in line to chair the House Government Reform Committee and
could write witness lists instead of open letters to the West Wing.
More:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032706M.shtml
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
