Through Republicans' Eyes . . . .

. . . . White House misjudged how presidential campaign would radicalize Democrats against Iraq war.

For Examiner, Bill Sammon writes:

President Bush’s chief of staff says White House officials misjudged how much the presidential campaign would radicalize the Democratic Party against the Iraq war.

In an interview for the new book, “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said he and other administration officials did not expect the Democratic presidential candidates to pull their party so sharply to the left.

“A lot of us probably underestimated the potency of presidential politics in all of this,” Bolten told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “The need of every candidate to remain in good stead with the Democratic Party’s left wing has pretty dramatically dragged not just the candidates, but the whole party to the left.”

Bolten said the phenomenon has been accelerated by the fact that primary elections and caucuses for the 2008 presidential cycle are scheduled earlier than ever before, creating pressure on the candidates to pacify the party’s liberal base.

“They have to move to the view rapidly that will satisfy the left wing of their party and I think that’s bled over into the approach of the Democratic leadership,” Bolten said. “It shifted more rapidly than I thought.”

Bolten said Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress “moved the party more rapidly and radically to the left on the war than you might have expected.” The leaders themselves are being pulled leftward by their party’s “netroots,” the uncompromising activists who write the liberal blogs proliferating across the Internet.

The resulting political acrimony between liberals and conservatives over Iraq is a far cry from 2002 when the parties agreed that Saddam Hussein should be removed.

“In the ideal world, there would be a consensus, a bipartisan consensus about how to go forward,” Bush told The Examiner in an Oval Office interview. “Whether or not that’s achievable, time will tell.”

Bush expressed sympathy for lawmakers who are being pressured by anti-war forces.

“I’m not going to second-guess anybody’s motives; it’s just a very difficult political environment for members of Congress,” the president said. “They’re worried about the different consequences of different decisions. And we’re constantly listening.”

Vice President Dick Cheney was less willing to give anti-war Democrats the benefit of the doubt.

“There are some who are against it just because we’re for it, who are looking for any excuse they can come up with to try to defeat George Bush and the Republicans. Substance doesn’t have much to do with it,” Cheney told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “I think it’s very shortsighted on their part, because if they prevail, then ultimately they’re going to have to deal with the world as it is, having opposed all of those things that have made it possible for us to be successful.”

These include controversial anti-terror measures such as the Patriot Act and the terrorist surveillance program. Although Bush has been working to institutionalize these programs, they could be undone by Democrats in the future, Cheney warned.

“A couple of possible outcomes here,” he said. “One is, obviously, the Democrats ultimately prevail and implement the policy they claim they support. I think it will do enormous damage. On the other hand, I think, ultimately, the country would look at that and make a decision that the Democrats can’t be trusted with the nation’s security.”

Karl Rove, who until this month was the president’s closest political adviser, said that even if a Democrat wins the White House next year, he or she will find it difficult to reverse Bush’s policies in the war on terrorism.

“What American president in the foreseeable future is going to say, ‘You know what? Let’s not rock the boat. Let’s accept the fact that we have authoritarian regimes that allow their people no means of expression, except through radical madrassas. We don’t need to foster democracy,’” Rove told The Examiner. “It’s going to be hard for any president of the United States to step away from the Bush Doctrine: If you feed a terrorist, arm a terrorist, train a terrorist, host a terrorist, you’re just as bad as a terrorist. It’s going to be very hard.

“People may be able to nibble around the edges, but future presidents — for the foreseeable future — are going to adopt the doctrine that we cannot wait until dangers fully materialize. We must take necessary pre-emptive action. The question is going to be what’s necessary and pre-emptive, but that doctrine is ingrained.”

In addition to being surprised by the impact of Democratic presidential politics on the war agenda, the White House has had difficulty adjusting to the new reality of this year’s Democratically controlled Congress.

“What’s different — and I think something of a shock to the system here — is we cannot control the agenda,” Bolten said. “And so if they want to talk about subpoenas … they can do it. They can dictate what the conversation is about and when it’s going to be.”

Another Bush aide groused that the White House can no longer hold cooperative discussions with the leadership of the House and Senate about the legislative agenda.

“We’ve gone from being able to know and discuss and plan,” the official said, “to basically having to wait for whatever the latest episodic revelation that’s handed down from the mountain.

“It requires you to be reactive, in a tactical sense. The way to sort of get above that is to be more ... strategically pro-active,” he said. “It also requires us to rely more on the Senate than we have. In the past, we used the House to drive action. Now we work with our Senate colleagues to both drive action and redirect action.”

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed grudging admiration for the ability of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an unabashed liberal, to control her caucus.

“What’s amazing,” the official said, “is that they have been able to effect discipline on people. You’ll have a conversation and somebody will say, in essence, ‘I’m not for the first measure that we’re using for withdrawal, but I’ve got to vote for it because the leadership has told me I’ve got to. It’s not where I am, but I feel obligated.’ Or, ‘I’m uncomfortable about the budget resolution because it’s got way too much in taxes and not enough in spending restraint, but I’ve got to vote for it.’”

Bolten agreed. “Speaker Pelosi has turned out to be a stronger figure than most people expected,” he said, adding that she “is a tougher disciplinarian on her party than most people expected.”

Bush Quietly Advising Hillary Clinton, Top Democrats, Says New Book

For Examiner, Bill Sammon writes:

President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.

In an interview for the new book “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked in where you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, things could change dramatically.’ ”

Bolten said Bush wants enough continuity in his Iraq policy that “even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there.”

“Especially if it’s a Democrat,” the chief of staff told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

“It’s different being a candidate and being the president,” Bush said in an Oval Office interview. “No matter who the president is, no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and seriously consider the effect of a vacuum being created in the Middle East, particularly one trying to be created by al Qaeda, they will then begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”

To that end, Bush is institutionalizing controversial anti-terror programs so they can be used by the next president.

“Look, I’d like to make as many hard decisions as I can make, and do a lot of the heavy lifting prior to whoever my successor is,” Bush said. “And then that person is going to have to come and look at the same data I’ve been looking at, and come to their own conclusion.”

As an example, Bush cited his detainee program, which allows him to keep enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay while they await adjudication. Bush is unmoved by endless criticism of the program because he says his successor will need it.

“I specifically talked about it so that a candidate and/or president wouldn’t have to deal with the issue,” he said. “The next person has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary. But my only point to you is that it was important for me to lay it out there, so that the politics wouldn’t enter into whether or not the program ought to survive beyond my period.”

The Examiner asked Bush why Democratic candidates such as Clinton and Barack Obama, who routinely lambaste his handling of Iraq, should take his advice.

“First of all, I expect them to criticize me. That’s one way you get elected in the Democratic primary, is to criticize the president,” Bush replied. “I don’t expect them to necessarily take advice from me. I would expect their insiders to at least get a perspective about how we see things.”

He added: “We have an obligation to make sure that whoever is interested, they get our point of view, because you want somebody running for president to at least understand all perspectives, apart from the politics.”

Besides, Bush suggested that Clinton and Obama just might benefit from his advice.

“If I were a candidate running for president in a complex world that we’re in, I would be asking my national security team to touch base with the White House just to at least listen about plans, thoughts,” he said.

So far, Bush has been encouraged by the fact that Democratic candidates are preserving enough wiggle room in their anti-war rhetoric to enable them to keep at least some troops in Iraq.

“If you listen carefully, there are Democrats that say, ‘Well, there needs to be some kind of presence,’” Bush said.

A senior White House official said the administration did not put much stock in pledges by Democratic presidential candidates to swiftly end the Iraq war if elected.

“Well, first of all, if you’re a presidential candidate,” the official said, “you’re able to [finesse] the public posturing that you may be required to do, or that you fall into doing.

“The other thing is, they are being advised by smart people,” the official said. “We’ve got colleagues here on the staff who have good communications with some of the thinkers on that side.

“And there is a recognition by most of them that there has to be a long-term presence by the United States if we hope to avoid America being brought back into the region in a very precarious way, at a point where all-out resources are required.”

One topic discussed by the White House and Democratic presidential campaigns is whether such a long-term presence should be inside Iraq, as Clinton prefers, or just outside, as Democratic candidate John Edwards has suggested.

Asked by The Examiner whether the Democrats were reluctant to have private contacts with the administration, the White House official replied: “No, I think they sort of welcome conversation.”

Besides, he said, Democrats understand the negative consequences of moving too quickly to reverse Bush’s Iraq policy. The official noted that in the wake of Vietnam, anti-war Democrats “suffered for 20-some-odd years because they were identified as the party, when it came to national security, of being weak.”

“If I were a Democrat, I would not want to be in a place where I was forcing us to withdraw in ’08,” he said. “It’s an election year and any bad consequences would immediately be on their head.

“One of two things will happen if a Democrat gets elected president,” he said. “They will either have to withdraw U.S. troops in order to remain true to the rhetoric — in which case, any consequences in the aftermath fall on their heads. Or they have to break their word, in which case they encourage fratricide on the left of their party. Now that’s a thorny issue to work through.”

Vice President Dick Cheney was philosophical about the possibility of a Democratic president fundamentally reversing the policies that he and Bush have worked so hard to implement in Iraq.

“It’s the nature of the business, in a sense,” he shrugged during an interview in his West Wing office. “I mean, you get two terms. We were fortunate to get two terms. And I think we’ll increasingly see a lot of emphasis on deciding who the next occupant of the Oval Office is going to be.”