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GOP Feels Sting of Candidates’ Rejection

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Times Staff Writers

For months, North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven had received the red carpet treatment in the nation’s capital: President Bush invited the popular Republican to spend the night at the White House, gave him a ride on Air Force One, arranged prime seats at the inauguration and dispatched his political guru, Karl Rove, to meet with him.

It was all part of a high-profile campaign to persuade Hoeven to run against Sen. Kent Conrad, a Democrat up for reelection in 2006 in a strongly pro-Bush, conservative state.

But at a time when Bush and Rove have been buffeted on a number of fronts, Hoeven added to their woes by declining to run.

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His decision is a symptom of a broader problem bedeviling the vaunted Bush-Rove political machine as it gears up for the 2006 midterm elections. A confluence of problems that are driving down Bush’s public approval ratings -- high gas prices, ongoing violence in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the ethics problems hounding Rove and GOP congressional leaders -- is also making it harder to persuade Republicans to seek Senate seats in 2006, strategists say.

Promising candidates in states as disparate as Florida, West Virginia and Nebraska have spurned pleas from the White House and party officials. The latest came last week, when Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) decided not to run for the Senate against the longtime Democratic incumbent, Robert C. Byrd, despite an intense drive to recruit her.

“The wind is not at our back, it’s in our face,” said Glen Bolger, a GOP pollster. “If you’re a candidate making an assessment about challenging an incumbent, having wind in your face is clearly a negative factor in the decision.”

The string of rejections comes as some conservative leaders have been deeply demoralized by Bush’s nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court. That has added to GOP fears that two key elements of Rove’s plan for expanding the Republican majority -- recruiting strong candidates and mobilizing the party base -- could be unraveling.

That anxiety heightened amid new speculation that Rove could face criminal charges from an investigation into who disclosed the identity of a CIA operative to journalists in mid-2003.

The political landscape appears far different from the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, when Bush was riding high, Democrats were on the defensive and a request from Rove to a potential candidate was likely to produce a brisk “You bet!”

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In 2002, Bush dined with then-Rep. John Thune (R-S.D.) and persuaded him to drop a near-certain gubernatorial bid for a long-shot challenge to Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.). Thune lost that race, but last November unseated then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat.

Also in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney personally cleared the GOP field in Minnesota for Norm Coleman by urging another leading Republican not to challenge in the party’s Senate primary. Coleman went on to win the general election.

In 2004, the White House handpicked Mel Martinez for an open Senate seat in Florida, helping him win a contested GOP primary in hopes that the presence of a Cuban American on the ticket would help boost Latino turnout for Bush’s reelection. Rove’s pull was so strong that Martinez backtracked from an earlier pronouncement that he wanted to run for governor in 2006 and that he was not interested in the Senate.

Now, political analysts see a White House that is more distracted and less effective at mobilizing the party’s best candidates.

“It’s not a great environment [for Republicans], and I think that has hurt” recruitment efforts, said Jennifer Duffy, who follows Senate campaigns for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Brian Nick, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, acknowledged some disappointment in the party’s recruitment efforts, but pointed to bright spots in the likely field of GOP candidates.

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He cited Lt. Gov. Michael Steele of Maryland, who is expected to run for an open Senate seat with strong encouragement from the White House and Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Party leaders say the candidacy of Steele, who is African American, would lend a high profile to efforts by Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to woo black voters to the GOP -- an effort that has been strained this year by the federal government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

Also, party strategists say that the Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey -- the son of popular former Gov. Tom Kean -- is outpolling the two leading Democratic candidates. And Mike McGavick, chief executive of Safeco Insurance in Washington state, appears close to heeding party requests that he challenge Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).

Mehlman, who last month joined McGavick at a Seattle Mariners baseball game as part of wooing the business executive into the race, said in an interview that he was “realistic” about the GOP prospects in 2006 and that history was on the Democrats’ side -- in the sixth year of a two-term presidency, the president’s party usually suffers losses in the midterm election.

But he also predicted Republicans would retain their House and Senate majorities.

The stakes in the Senate elections are especially high for Bush as he struggles to advance his second-term agenda. Though the House has been able to deliver much of what Bush wants, the Senate is often a stumbling block because, with 55 seats, Republicans are short of the 60-vote threshold needed to prevent Democrats from stalling bills or nominees with a filibuster.

Although the elections are more than a year away, this is a crucial time for the parties to begin lining up candidates and fundraising. But not only is the White House having trouble with candidate recruitment, it has failed to deter some of the candidates it does not want to run.

In Rhode Island, where moderate GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee is up for reelection in a heavily Democratic state, party officials tried to dissuade a local mayor, Stephen Laffey, from challenging him in the Republican primary. But Laffey rebuffed pleas from Dole, Mehlman and White House political director Sara Taylor.

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In Florida, White House officials had hoped to entice state House Speaker Allan Bense, a businessman, into the race to challenge Democrat Bill Nelson. He declined.

The White House officials tried to dissuade from the race Rep. Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of state who became famous during the 2000 presidential election recount. The concern among the officials is that she remains too controversial to win in such a divided state. Harris, who acceded to similar White House worries in 2004, ignored them this time and is nearly certain to be the GOP nominee.

In Nebraska, the White House contributed to GOP problems in finding a candidate to challenge Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat, in that heavily Republican state. Nebraska political analysts say that Gov. Mike Johanns would have been the strongest candidate against Nelson. But Bush took him out of play by choosing him to be secretary of Agriculture in December.

Rove and Cheney later encouraged David Karnes, a lawyer who was an appointed senator from Nebraska from 1998 to 2001. But Karnes, grieving the recent death of his wife, declined. That leaves the party with a three-way primary fight.

The latest GOP disappointment was Capito’s decision not to challenge Byrd, the Senate’s most senior member. To encourage Capito, Dole met with her several times. Bush appeared with her in West Virginia on the Fourth of July. Rove talked to her two or three times as she struggled with the decision.

“To say we threw everything and the kitchen sink at her would be an understatement,” said one GOP official, who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing the White House’s recruitment efforts.

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But it was not enough to lure Capito out of her comfortable House seat and into a campaign that would surely have been a costly, bitter match attracting national attention.

Capito said her decision wasn’t affected by Bush’s low public approval ratings, but she acknowledged that the president might not be as much of an asset if she had made a Senate run as he was for her in the past.

“In 2002, when I ran for my second term, the president came in and gave me a 5 [percentage] point bump up in the polls,” Capito said. “Whether he has the ability to bump someone up at this point is a valid question.”

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