San Diego Union Tribune November 19, 2005 ANALYSIS Risk is great as Bush slaps back on foreign soil By George E. Condon Jr. COPLEY NEWS SERVICE BUSAN, South Korea – On this, the most heavily armed peninsula in the world, they are accustomed to tough talk from their foes. But when American presidents travel here, their target is normally the communists dug in across the DMZ, not the Democrats back home in Washington. This time, though, the visiting president threw out the rule book, approving a political counteroffensive even as he was representing the country in high-level summitry with more than 20 other world leaders during a four-country tour of Asia. The stakes for President Bush could not be higher and the risk is great, affecting his ability to wage the war in Iraq and push his agenda during the remaining three years of his presidency. Despite the risk, White House strategists and some of the president's key political advisers insist that he had no choice but to hit back hard at critics of the war who had been emboldened to step up their attacks on Bush as his popularity has sagged to new low levels. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the counteroffensive is that it came both before a military audience in Alaska and while the president was overseas. Presidents traditionally shun politics while on foreign soil, and partisan remarks before on-duty military personnel are hard to recall. But on this presidential trip through Asia there has been no pretense of politics stopping at the water's edge. "It will be sustained," said presidential counselor Dan Bartlett, calling it "a strategic decision made by the White House." The critics, he contended, are pouring millions of dollars into the attacks on Bush, "deliberately calling the president a liar" and this "requires a sustained response." And Bartlett brushed aside criticism that the White House campaign could be counterproductive or that it is unusual to be so partisan while addressing troops or at overseas summits. "The president is . . . blowing the whistle on the difference between traditional dissent and give and take between two parties on a critical issue such as war and peace, and those that are willfully and knowingly saying something that happens to not be true," Bartlett said. He said it was not inappropriate for the president to make the remarks that he did while addressing troops in Alaska because "they are most interested in understanding where their elected leaders stand on an issue as critical as the conduct of a war." He added that the critics should not be telling the troops "that their commander in chief had misled them or lied to them." The counteroffensive comes at a particularly perilous time for the president, with polls showing that he no longer is trusted by a majority of Americans. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 57 percent of the American people believe the president deliberately misled them about the war, and only 33 percent said that "being honest and straightforward" described him. "Once a president has lost his credibility and people doubt what he says, attacks from him are taken less seriously and what he says goes unheeded," said Charles Cook, editor of a respected nonpartisan political newsletter in Washington. "He's in a bad place." Cook said the fierce counteroffensive "seems panicky. You get a sense that the White House has just discovered that they have a huge problem. And they've gone into a panic." The decision to give Vice President Dick Cheney such a prominent role in the campaign at a time when his stock is low because of the indictment of his top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is "typical of the decision-making going on right now. It's just faulty," Cook said. Bush also risks throwing away one huge advantage enjoyed by any president when overseas. He cannot be seen as above politics when his aides' entire focus seems to be on domestic politics. "It is a risky move – not at all presidential, especially during wartime – and runs against the reality that a substantial majority of Americans now believe the president did mislead the country in going to war," said Thomas Mann, a veteran political analyst at the Brookings Institution. Samuel L. Popkin, an expert on political persuasion at the University of California San Diego and an adviser to past Democratic campaigns, said Bush is "throwing away the commander-in-chief status." Popkin called it a mistake for Bush to lower himself to the level of his critics and to approve such a campaign while overseas. "It is definitely unusual and a major gamble with very high stakes, and I believe this is intended to rally Republicans and not to bring back Democrats or independents," he said. Ken Khachigian, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses who is close to some of Bush's top strategists, agreed that it would have been better to mount the counteroffensive while the president was at home. But he said the White House had no choice. "What they were doing wasn't working," he said. "They are embattled at the White House and when you're in that situation you can't always pick your timing," he said. "But I think their strategy of not letting one more moment go by with the other side propagating a lie, I'm for that." He said Bush's hand was forced by the Democrats. "They have gotten so shrill and because Bush wasn't slapping back as hard as he could, they were basically saying anything they wanted to say." He added, "They kept saying, 'Bush lied, Bush lied, Bush misled us into war.' They were making it sound like there wasn't any support for it when he sent troops in and we weren't fighting back." Now, he said, Bush is slapping back. »Next Story»