President Tests the Power of His Bully Pulpit

More than a year after a majority of Americans turned against his handling of the Iraq war, President Bush has launched a counteroffensive that ultimately could affect the fate of both that mission and his vision for the Middle East.

As the must-win fight of his administration, Bush’s chances for success on the public opinion front appear to hinge on one central question: Is the power of the presidential bully pulpit enough to win a fight many consider as important as any military campaign in Iraq itself?

Public opinion specialists -- among whom a debate is raging -- say the outcome is far from certain.

Some, such as Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller, say Korea, Vietnam and Iraq have proved a simple correlation: Support fades as casualties mount.

Mueller said the data showed that views had so hardened that Bush had all but lost the battle for public support in Iraq. “If not hopeless, it’s certainly very difficult to reverse this,” Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion, said in a telephone interview.

Others believe the White House campaign has a chance -- but only if voters also detect specific progress in Iraq.

“It’s events on the ground that are going to move the needle on Iraq,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, an independent opinion research group. “Nevertheless, the president can maybe turn public opinion more quickly by keeping his position out there and by making his case.”

There is broad agreement that any further loss of public support for the Iraq mission would seriously weaken Bush domestically, especially as the country moves into a midterm election year and vulnerable congressional Republicans weigh the political costs of defending an increasingly unpopular war.

On Monday, Bush will deliver the third of four major speeches before Iraqis go to the polls Thursday for the third time this year. His fourth speech will be the day before Iraqis elect a parliament for a full four-year term.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other administration figures also have weighed in with public remarks.

All hammer on the president’s bottom-line themes: that he does have a winning strategy, that Iraq is the central front in a war against terrorism, and that a premature pullout of troops would be catastrophic for America’s security.

Bush also considers Iraq crucial to administration efforts to promote democracy across the Middle East -- meaning that setbacks could be costly elsewhere.

The White House campaign is, at least partly, a response to last month’s call for a withdrawal and redeployment of American troops by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a longtime hawk on the Iraq war and himself a former Marine officer.

So far, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and a smattering of other House members have voiced support for Murtha’s position. But the defection of such a strong backer as Murtha stunned the White House because it reflected a larger disillusionment within the political center about the course of the war.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released last week underscored the president’s problem. Bush had a 5-point boost in his overall job approval rating in that survey, but the gain was credited mainly to economic improvements. He continued to draw low marks over his handling of Iraq.

A small minority in the survey supported an immediate pullout from Iraq, and 58% believed Bush should set a timetable for withdrawal. Bush has consistently resisted such a move, arguing that the departure of American forces can only come after success and not according to calendar targets.

Reflecting the views of some pollsters, White House advisors have concluded that Americans are willing to back the war if they can see progress there and believe there is a chance for genuine success.

“The key here is the likelihood of success,” said Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University political scientist, who tracks domestic public opinion on the war. In the current issue of the scholarly journal Foreign Affairs, Gelpi argues that the American public is “defeat-phobic,” not “casualty-phobic.”

“Americans don’t like wars that don’t have a plan for victory,” agreed Walter Russell Mead, a specialist on U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Accepting that logic, the White House released its 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” on the day of Bush’s first speech in this series, Nov. 30.

Gelpi -- whose research partner at Duke, Peter D. Feaver, joined the White House staff earlier this year -- argued in a telephone interview that setting and then meeting a series of targets for progress were vital to administration efforts to halt the slide in public support.

“They have lost considerable support over the last year, and could get a substantial part of it back if they can prove the mission can succeed,” Gelpi said. “Part of it is creating facts on the ground: setting benchmarks and living up to them.”

Gelpi said that in the past, the White House had maintained support despite higher U.S. casualties and escalating violence by meeting preset targets. Among those were the handover of sovereignty in June 2004 and the country’s first free elections in decades on Jan. 30.

If Thursday’s national elections in Iraq go well, any boost they bring Bush is likely to be relatively small. After two successful elections in Iraq this year, Americans have come to expect the political milestones to go as planned, analysts said.

Analysts also described a kind of “so what” effect among Americans who didn’t place especially high importance on the development of democracy in Iraq and who perceived progress on the electoral front to have little wider effect.

Nonetheless, the findings suggest that to reverse the slide in public support, Bush must set similar benchmarks for progress in areas such as security and the economy.

That could be tricky.

In his Nov. 30 speech, at the U.S. Naval Academy, the president rejected a timetable for the withdrawal of forces. Instead, he played up advances in the readiness of Iraqi security forces.

The risk for Bush is that talking up the quality of Iraqi forces could trigger added pressure for a pullout and heighten expectations for success. Many Iraq specialists believe the quality of Iraqi forces still remains below that described by the administration.

Similarly, on economics, Bush sketched an upbeat picture of improved activity in his speech Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. But a statistical index maintained by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington showed Iraq’s oil production -- the country’s economic lifeblood -- lower than a year ago, at about 80% of prewar levels. Another key indicator, electricity generation, also remained below pre-invasion levels and just over half the postwar target set by U.S. authorities to be reached in June 2004.

“What he can do is counter the image that Iraq is nothing but violence, but I don’t think he can convince the American people that conditions there are fundamentally good,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, the scholar who maintains the Brookings Institution index.

But perhaps Bush’s biggest problem, according to public opinion specialists, is the growing public perception that the decision to invade Iraq was fundamentally wrong. The New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that a majority believed the president deliberately misled the public in making the case to invade Iraq nearly three years ago.

Observers say that even those who believe Bush can win back support by showing progress in Iraq admit that the public assessment of the initial decision to go to war is pivotal.

“This judgment is hardening,” said Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at two liberal-leaning policy groups and the author of the online column Public Opinion Watch. “I don’t see how they are going to turn this around by setting benchmarks on the security front.”