At the risk of stating the semi-obvious, George W. Bush’s decision to go on national television tomorrow night and announce a plan to deploy 20,000 more U.S. troops in a long-term operation to “secure” Baghdad and some Sunni territory as well, is as mystifying as anything “the decider” has done in the course of his mystifying presidency.Hardly anyone thinks this deployment will work, even within the Pentagon and the White House, as the vast number of blind quotes in the news media questioning the decision makes clear. (Fred Kaplan’s exhaustive review of the operational implausibility of the Bush plan is definitely worth reading). It’s also clear the Maliki government, on whose willingness to fully commit Iraqi forces the slim chances of the whole enterprise rest, is being dragged kicking and screaming into line with Washington’s edict. And that’s hardly a surprise, since “clearing” Baghdad of “terrorists” or “extremists” or whatever Bush chooses to call them, will inevitably involve armed clashes with the Mahdi Army, one of the pillars of Maliki’s political base.Even fans of the idea of deploying more troops typically think the troop levels Bush is talking about will be insufficient to make a difference, other than convincing Iraqis that we’ll never, ever leave. And then there’s the little matter of Bush’s willingness to give American public opinion a big middle finger; as new polls indicate, despite relatively strong (if probably temporary) Repubublican rank-and-file support for the escalation, it’s anathema to the coalition of Democrats and independents that flipped Congress in November.The big symbolic factor in Bush’s decision is supposedly this: he’s finally abandoned the old stay-the-course rap, even if he doesn’t acknowledge the shift tomorrow night. But the strange timing of the escalation strategy helps illustrate something about the administration’s post-invasion Iraq policies that has often been obscured by the consistent happy-talk: they’ve repeatedly flip-flopped, but almost always far too late.Think about it. Rumsfeld took us into Iraq absolutely determined not to conduct an occupation, assuming instead that he could turn over the country to Iraqi exile politicians. That determination barely outlasted the invasion itself. When chaos broke out, administration talking heads first welcomed the phenomenon as the natural exuberance of a liberated people, and savaged anyone who suggested an organized insurgency. When that claim became increasingly absurd, the Bushies described the insurgency as a temporary rear-guard action by Baathists with no real popular base. Then they shifted to a description of the newly-recognized insurgency as composed primarily of “foreign fighters” recruited by al-Qaeda (which, BTW, was thereby “pinned down” in the “flypaper” of Iraq, and couldn’t conduct terrorism operations anywhere else, until they did). When the indigenous Sunni insurgency was finally acknowleged, the administration suggested its increasing ferocity was a sign of desparation. For many months, the president’s men dismissed intra-Pentagon arguments for adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy. And they finally started talking about “clear, hold and build” strategies–and have now placed their chief advocate, Gen. David Petraus, in charge of the “new direction” in Iraq–when the conditions necessary for successful counter-insurgency have all but vanished.What has united all these horribly belated “decisions,” of course, has been the administration’s remarkably consistent resistance to empirical evidence of failure and folly. And by that standard, there’s nothing about the “new direction” that really breaks new ground.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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August 10: Will the Congressional Legislative Blitz Help Democrats in November?
After a sudden period of long-stalled legislative activity, I took a look for New York at the possible midterm election payoff:
Not that very long ago, Joe Biden’s job-approval rating seemed chronically and endlessly depressed; the Democratic-controlled Congress couldn’t get anything done; and all the indicators for the 2022 midterm elections looked terrible for the party, in part because its own voters were deeply disappointed with the lack of legislative productivity and a perceived absence of presidential leadership.
Now, in a series of legislative victories highlighted by the Schumer-Manchin budget-reconciliation agreement (now known as the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA), Senate Democrats are suddenly walking tall, as Punchbowl News noted:
“Senate Democrats have put together an impressive resume this summer, most especially during the last two months. The CHIPS Plus Act, PACT Act, Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO, gun control and reconciliation were all passed in this period, a number of them with big bipartisan majorities. All in a 50-50 Senate.”
Assuming the House finishes action on the IRA later this week, it’s quite the late-innings home run, complete with a rebranded title that shows Democrats at least trying to address what has been the dominant issue of the midterms: inflation. Along with the Kansas abortion-rights referendum on August 2 that shows that Democrats may have an issue of competing significance to both swing and base voters, the landscape is most definitely getting brighter for Democrats. And though Biden and his party probably had little to do with it, they will get credit for falling gasoline prices if they continue to drop.
In an interview with Politico, Biden’s pollster John Anzalone used a gambling analogy for the turnaround. “We put our last silver dollar in our slot machine and came up big,” he said. “And they were sitting there with a stack of chips and are down to just one. The turnaround is unbelievable.”
Spin aside, things are clearly looking better for Democrats, but the question (other than uncertainty over the future direction of crucial economic indicators) is whether midterm losses are already baked into the cake. After all, with the exception of George W. Bush in the immediate wake of 9/11, every president going back to the 1930s has lost ground in his first-term midterm election. Even very small House and Senate net losses would flip control to Republicans. And while a yearlong downward drift in Biden’s job-approval rating has now been replaced with small gains, it’s still dreadful at the moment: 39.6 percent in the averages at both FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics. At this point in 2018, Donald Trump’s RCP job-approval average was 43.4 percent, and his party was on the way to losing 41 House seats. Then, too, the “direction of the country” right-track, wrong-track ratio was 41-51. Now it’s 20-73.
Sure, Democratic base voters unhappy with earlier legislative misfires may now have a sunnier outlook on the party’s congressional candidates. That, along with the growing anger at conservative Supreme Court justices and anti-abortion Republican state officials, could certainly improve Democratic turnout. But Republicans will likely retain an advantage of core swing-voter concerns that are unlikely to go away by November 8, as Senator Marco Rubio suggested in a taunting floor speech on the IRA over the weekend:
“There isn’t a single thing in this bill that helps working people lower the prices of groceries, or the price of gasoline, or the price of housing, or the price of clothing. There isn’t a single thing in this bill that’s gonna keep criminals in jail. There isn’t a single thing in this bill that’s going to secure our border. Those happen to be things that working people in this country care about.”
That too is spin, of course, but the point is that GOP talking points really don’t have to change in light of the IRA’s passage.
The best empirical news for Democrats is the trajectory of the congressional generic ballot, the midterm indicator that has had the most predictive value in the past. As recently as June 13, Republicans had a 3.5 percent advantage in the RCP averages for this measurement of congressional voting preferences, with the expectation that the margin would widen as voting grew near. Now the generic ballot is basically tied (Republicans: 44.7 percent, Democrats: 44.6 percent). Historically, the party controlling the White House loses steam late in the midterm cycle, but at the moment, Biden’s party does seem to have some momentum. And in the national contest where Democrats have most reason to be optimistic, the battle for control of the Senate, Republicans continue to suffer from candidate-quality problems that could lose them seats they probably should win in a midterm. John Fetterman keeps maintaining a solid lead over Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania; this race is for a seat currently held by the GOP. And in Georgia, Raphael Warnock continues to run comfortably ahead of Herschel Walker even before the frequently tongue-tied former football great reluctantly faces the highly eloquent incumbent Democrat in debates.
There is no way to know, much less factor in, late-breaking real-world developments that might affect the trajectory of these and other midterm contests, whether it’s unexpected economic news, a change of direction in the Russia-Ukraine war, or an official 2024 candidacy announcement by Trump that reminds Democrats that the wolf is still at the door. Typically, voting preferences form well before Election Day, and early voting will begin in September in some states. At present, FiveThirtyEight gives Republicans an 80 percent probability of controlling the House next year and Democrats a 59 percent chance of holding the Senate. These numbers are better for Democrats than those we saw in June and July, and that’s grounds for gratitude.