Partisan rhetoric even in wartime sets Bush apart

President Bush and Republicans in many of the nation’s key races are presenting divergent, even contradictory, visions of how Washington should operate after next week’s election.

Around the country, GOP incumbents and challengers alike are running against the relentless partisan conflict that defined the final years of Bill Clinton’s presidency and have colored virtually every day of Bush’s.

From House members such as Christopher Shays in Connecticut to Sens. Jim Talent in Missouri and Mike DeWine in Ohio and Senate challengers in Maryland, New Jersey and Tennessee, Republicans almost everywhere are presenting themselves as flexible and independent problem solvers who will reach across party lines to build consensus on difficult issues.

Bush is moving in the opposite direction. As he often does when he’s under political pressure, he’s accentuating the disagreements between the parties and presenting the differences in the starkest possible terms. He’s displayed that instinct most clearly in the highly charged way he has framed the debate over Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Bush now routinely labels Democrats “the party of cut-and-run.” At a recent Republican fundraiser, Bush went much further. “The Democrat Party ... has evolved from one that was confident in its capacity to help deal with the problems of the world to one that ... has an approach of doubt and defeat,” he declared.

Bush has absorbed his share of body blows from Democrats criticizing his management of the war. But tagging his rivals as the party of “defeat” is nonetheless extraordinary language for a commander in chief to use in a political campaign.

Other wartime presidents have been much more reluctant to argue that only their party was committed to success. Consider the way President Johnson approached the 1966 elections as the Vietnam War was escalating. To begin with, Johnson spent most of that October away from the campaign, on a 17-day tour of Asia that included Vietnam.

Then, at a news conference just before election day, Johnson dismissed the idea that congressional losses for the Democratic Party would affect either the thinking of the North Vietnamese or America’s support for the troops in the field. If Republicans gained seats, he continued, “They may talk, and argue, and fight, and criticize, and play politics from time to time, but when they call the vote on supporting the men ... in the Senate it will be 83 to 2 and in the House it will be 410-5.”

In 1942, the first election after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was even more emphatic about separating war and politics. Roosevelt spent much of that fall visiting defense facilities on a tour during which he barred press coverage and insisted on being accompanied by Republican as well as Democratic local officials. When the chairman of the Democratic National Committee suggested that a GOP takeover of the House would be bad for the country, Roosevelt publicly rebuked him.

Even President Nixon displayed more restraint during the 1970 midterm election. Nixon barnstormed the country asking voters to elect members of Congress who would support his war policy. But he took pains to avoid claiming that only his party wanted to win. “This is not a partisan issue,” Nixon declared that October at a rally for a Texas Republican Senate candidate named George H.W. Bush.

Can that Bush’s son succeed with his more polarizing strategy? It depends on how success is defined. His sharp attacks on Democrats could rally the conservative base enough to maintain a slim Senate majority by holding GOP seats in enough right-leaning states, such as Missouri and Tennessee. Though it seems much less likely, it might even help the GOP hold enough Republican-leaning House seats to eke out a tiny majority in that chamber.

But even if Bush succeeds, such a result still will measure how much he has retreated from his hopes of building a broad majority coalition. From Connecticut to Colorado, he is facing enormous resistance this fall from voters outside his bedrock base of conservatives and Republicans. In polls, he now looks less like the president of all the people than the champion of a single faction.

In the latest Gallup poll, just 28% of independents and 24% of moderates approved of Bush’s job performance. His support among Democrats and liberals registered in the single digits. In Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg polls last week of four states Bush carried in 2004 -- Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia -- only majorities of Republicans and conservatives said the country should continue on the course he’s set out. In each case less than one-third of independents, and less than one-fifth of moderates, agreed. Don’t even ask what Democrats and liberals think.

Even if Republicans hold one or both congressional chambers, future presidential candidates in both parties are likely to question a political strategy that generates so much division. Matthew Dowd, the senior strategist for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, says the smart candidates for 2008 will learn more from the politicians this year pursuing common ground.

Example A may be California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom Dowd is advising. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is heading for a convincing victory in the biggest blue state of all by offering a hybrid left-right agenda that bridges the ideological differences Bush routinely inflames. Schwarzenegger “is going to win primarily because of his leadership style over the last year: bipartisan, consensus, let’s not look at things as an ideology,” Dowd predicts. “It should send a signal to anybody running in ’08.”

More immediately, the response to Schwarzenegger and the other candidates promising reconciliation should tell Bush and lawmakers in both parties that after November’s vote, America wants them to put aside their own war long enough to find a new direction in Iraq and more consensus on stubborn problems at home.

ronald.brownstein@latimes.com

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Sunday. See current and past Brownstein columns at www.latimes.com/brownstein.