Rove’s 2006 spin cycle

‘REPUBLICANS HAVE a post-9/11 view of the world and Democrats have a pre-9/11 view of the world,” asserted White House senior strategist Karl Rove in a recent speech. Rove is widely seen to be signaling the main GOP theme for the 2006 elections.

This is no surprise because Republicans have been saying this since roughly five minutes after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. As former White House speechwriter David Frum wrote in “The Right Man,” his hagiography of George W. Bush, after Sept. 11 “there was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda: Win the war -- then we’ll see.”

Meanwhile, conservatives have ceaselessly accused Democrats of clinging to their petty pre-9/11 concerns.

The odd thing about this complaint is that it fails even the most cursory examination.

Did Bush alter, much less abandon, his domestic agenda after 9/11? Hardly. He crusaded for more tax cuts, enacted a huge Medicare bill, relentlessly promoted Social Security privatization and so forth. That is odd behavior for a man who understood at the core of his soul that his country faced an existential threat. You didn’t see Winston Churchill in 1940 barnstorming the country demanding tax cuts.

So how exactly was Bush transformed by 9/11 in a way Democrats were not? Rove listed three ways in his speech. One is the Patriot Act. “Republicans want to renew the Patriot Act, and Democrat leaders take special delight in proclaiming they’ve killed it,” Rove said. Rove is referring to a controversy over the efforts by Democrats, and some Republicans, to modify some of the more overreaching elements of the Patriot Act while keeping in place its core.

Rove’s account is actually close to the opposite of the truth. Democrats have proposed extending the law temporarily -- beyond the five-week compromise hastily agreed to before the holidays -- until the two sides can work out their disagreements. Bush has opposed an extension, so that he can say the act was killed altogether by Democrats. Apparently the law is a vital tool in our national defense, but not so vital that it can’t be suspended in order to give the GOP a campaign issue.

Rove also mentioned the controversy over wiretapping. “President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they’re calling and why,” Rove asserted. “Some important Democrats clearly disagree.”

This is of course preposterous. No important Democrats have objected to wiretapping Al Qaeda. They have simply insisted that the administration obtain a warrant to do so. (The law that Bush has ignored provides a speedy method for doing so, and if Bush thinks it’s not speedy enough, he could seek to change the law rather than simply declare himself above it.)

Then there is the war in Iraq. Rove implies (falsely) that Democrats favor immediate withdrawal, warning that “the tyrants in the Middle East would laugh at our failed resolve and tighten their repressive grip. We would hand Iraq over to enemies who have pledged to attack us again and again and again as they did on Sept. 11.”

I supported the war and oppose withdrawal. But look closely at Rove’s rationale. He’s saying that defeat in Iraq would reduce our ability to threaten military force elsewhere and put radical Islamists in charge of a large, oil-rich state. He’s right. But to some degree those things are likely to happen even if we win. Everybody in the world knows that, after Iraq, the U.S. capacity to wage war will be diminished.

And the people we’re supporting in Iraq are themselves radical Islamic theocrats who favor a close alliance with Iran. Iran, you may recall, is the radical Islamic terrorist-supporting state that’s working toward a nuclear bomb. Iraq was a mess before 9/11, but at least it was controlled by a secular tyrant. It’s one thing to say we must try to salvage Iraq from total disaster, but given that Bush’s actions caused this potential disaster, it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his leadership.

The best Democratic critique is not that Bush overreacted to 9/11 but that he mis-reacted. He allowed Osama bin Laden to escape our clutches in Afghanistan, has neglected homeland security and mismanaged the Iraq war. There’s a reason Republicans ignore this critique. In fact, it’s why they tend to gloss over specifics entirely and concentrate instead on Bush’s post-9/11 state of mind, claiming that he “gets it.” We are meant to recall gauzy images of Bush standing on a pile of rubble at the World Trade Center and judge him on his intentions rather than his concrete actions, which have mostly been a failure.