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From Howard Fineman at Newsweek...

Rove's Revamp
With ratings down and the midterms coming up, the GOP adopts a new tack: Call it the 'apocalypse strategy.'


By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Updated: 4:03 p.m. ET May 10, 2006

May 10, 2006 - This fall’s election season is going to make the past three look like episodes of “Barney.”

The conventional notion here is that Democrats want to “nationalize” the 2006 elections—dwelling on broad themes (that is, the failures of the Bush administration)—while the Republicans will try to “localize” them as individual contests that have nothing to do with, ahem, the goings-on in the capital.

That was before the GOP situation got so desperate. The way I read the recent moves of Karl Rove & Co., they are preparing to wage war the only way open to them: not by touting George Bush, Lord knows, but by waging a national campaign to paint a nightmarish picture of what a Democratic Congress would look like, and to portray that possibility, in turn, as prelude to the even more nightmarish scenario: the return of a Democrat (Hillary) to the White House.

Rather than defend Bush, Rove will seek to rally the Republicans’ conservative grass roots by painting Democrats as the party of tax increases, gay marriage, secularism and military weakness. That’s where the national message money is going to be spent.

The numbers explain the strategy
The president has a job-approval rating of 31 percent in the latest comprehensive poll by The New York Times and CBS. His “favorable” rating, a more general measure of attitudes, is only 29 percent—barely above the levels enjoyed, if that is the word, by Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Bush can’t hope to raise that number significantly by this November—no matter how many seniors sign up for the Medicare prescription-drug plan or how many Sunnis join the new Iraqi government.

So the White House will try to survive by driving down the ratings of the other side. Right now, an impressive 55 percent of voters say they have a favorable view of the Democrats, one of the party’s best ratings in years. But the favorables of leading national Democrats are weak: 34 percent for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton; 26 percent for Sen. John Kerry; 28 percent for former vice president Al Gore. The bottom line: as long as the Democrats remain a generic, faceless alternative, they win; Rove’s aim is to paint his version of their portrait.

You can see him busy with the brushes at his easel now, even as he waits to see whether special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is going to indict him for false testimony.

Take the new GOP deal on taxes. It would, among other things, extend by two years the Bush era’s reductions in taxes on capital gains and dividends. The claim is that doing so will sustain overall economic growth (which has been pretty impressive, even though Bush gets no credit for it). But the real political target is somewhat narrower: the estimated 60 million Americans who own stock.

Bush and the GOP talk earnestly about their vision of an “ownership society.” And maybe it’s true that they want everybody to be part of it. In the meantime, however, they will focus on trying to secure the support, or at least the acquiescence, of voters with portfolios. They aren’t the stereotypical country-club Republicans of old, by the way; they include tens of millions of middle-class Americans—ancestral Democrats—who nevertheless don’t want Congress to do anything that would depress the value of their 401(k)s.

The idea is to get Democrats to vote against the tax-cut bill—ANY tax-cut bill. Let the op-ed pages rail about the deficit and the debt; the White House survivalists won’t care if they can find a way to accuse the Democrats of “wanting to raise taxes.”

The political apocalypse strategy
Then there is the attention being paid—and it’s just starting—to obscure Democratic characters such as Rep. John Conyers of Michigan. As of now, only political junkies know that Conyers, an African-American and old-school liberal from Detroit, would become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Democrats regain control of the House. Few know that Conyers has expressed interest in holding hearings on the impeachment of the president.

But before this election season is over, Republican and conservative voters are going to know a lot about Conyers. To hear the GOP tell it, the impeachment of the president will be the No. 1 priority if Conyers gets his say, which of course Rep. Nancy Pelosi will be only too happy to give him. The aim will be to rally the GOP base with talk of a political apocalypse.

The issue of gay marriage will play a part. So far this year, at least seven states will have on their ballots measures to ban same-sex marriage: Alabama, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin. There are citizen-led campaigns seeking to add the issue to ballots in Arizona, Colorado and Illinois.

But GOP strategists eventually are going to want to “nationalize” this topic, too, by bringing up in Congress again in the draft of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I know that Dick Cheney isn’t for it, and neither is his daughter, Mary, whose new book “Now It’s My Turn” was released this week. Bush in the past has claimed that he won’t make lobbying for the measure a high priority, but he doesn’t have to. The aim is to bring it up for votes in Congress.

Strength and faith wins votes
Beyond that amendment is the more general GOP theme of faith in the public square. To highlight that issue, the White House will use judicial nominations. That’s one reason why Bush is now pushing the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh. Faith matters—namely, that he is a conservative Roman Catholic.

A Rove Reliable on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the strategy clear at the confirmation hearing: Kavanaugh, he said, is the type of judge who will oppose “hostility to all things religious in American life.” Read: Democrats.

Finally, there is the war on terrorism and military strength—the only two areas in the New York Times/CBS poll where voters say they trust the GOP more than the Democrats.

Bush and Rove are daring the Democrats to turn the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden as head of the CIA into a fight over the president’s secret eavesdropping program. That’s a fight they think they can win politically, by turning a legitimate constitutional issue into another Us vs. Them morality play.

It’s worked before.

Today's Boston Globe

SCOT LEHIGH
Our monarch, above the law

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist | May 2, 2006

HAS GEORGE W. Bush come to believe he's king?

That's the question that springs to mind upon reading Charlie Savage's
front-page report in Sunday's Globe detailing the president's sotto
voce assertion that he can disregard laws if he thinks they impinge on
his constitutional powers.

That novel claim resides in the ''signing statements" the
administration issues outlining its legal interpretation of laws the
president has signed -- interpretations that often run contrary to the
statute's clear intent.

As Savage reports, Bush has registered hundreds of those reservations,
adding them to statutes on subjects ranging from military rules and
regulations to affirmative action language to congressionally mandated
reporting requirements to protections Congress has passed for
whistle-blowers to legal assurances against political meddling in
government-funded research.

Bush's position reduces to this: The president needn't execute the laws
as they are written and passed, but rather, has the right to implement
-- or ignore -- them as he sees fit. (Were it not for our pesky written
Constitution, perhaps George II could take his cue from Charles I,
dismiss Congress, and rule -- ah, govern -- without any legislative
interference whatsoever.)

Even members of the president's own party have balked at that claim.

After Republican Senator John McCain succeeded in passing a ban on the
torture of detainees in US custody, forcing it upon an unwilling White
House, the president's signing statement made it clear he thought he
could disregard the law if he deemed it necessary. That brought a
pointed rebuke from McCain and fellow Republican Senator John Warner.

Other presidents have periodically appended signing statements to
legislation, setting the objectionable precedent that Bush has followed
here. But as Savage reports, this president has taken it to a new
level, issuing such statements on more than 750 laws, or on more than
10 percent of the bills he has signed.

Rendering Bush's assertion more worrisome is this reality: Because so
much of what this administration does is shrouded in secrecy, it's hard
to know which laws are being followed and which are being ignored.

That makes it difficult for matters to ripen into a court challenge,
notes Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate. ''He is setting it up so that
the people hurt by what this administration is doing are unable to get
to court, because it is secret," Silverglate says.

We certainly do know that this president is ready to ignore even
established laws if he finds them too cumbersome. Although the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prohibits warrantless
eavesdropping on Americans, Bush has authorized such snooping. In
trying to justify that, the administration has claimed that Congress's
post-Sept. 11 resolution authorizing force against terrorists somehow
imparted the authority for warrantless wiretapping.

That's farfetched, and members of the president's own party have said
as much.

Congressional figures of both parties have signaled a willingness to
consider the president's concerns with a wiretap-approval process that
is already all but pro forma.

The White House, however, has displayed little interest in meaningful
compromise.

Bush has a recourse if he doesn't agree with a newly passed law, of
course: He can veto it. (So far he hasn't exercised that prerogative
even once.)

But the president shouldn't be allowed to quietly disregard or
reinterpret provisions of a law he dislikes, for in doing so, he is not
protecting his own authority, but rather usurping the legitimate power
of Congress. Further, his assumption that it is within his purview to
decide whether a law is constitutional treads on ground that is the
clear province of the Supreme Court.

Thus far, the Republican congressional leadership has been dismayingly
compliant. But one Republican unwilling to let Bush interpret the law
as he sees fit is Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee.

Specter, who is pushing legislation to have the closed-door FISA court
rule on the constitutionality of Bush's wiretapping program, noted last
week that he had filed -- but would not seek an immediate vote on -- an
amendment to block funding for any domestic eavesdropping until the
administration provides Congress with much more information.

It speaks volumes about the attitude of this White House that a member
of the president's own party would have to make such a move to protect
bedrock constitutional principles.

Yet it will probably take something much more dramatic than Specter's
tentative threat to remind George W. Bush that he's president, and not
king.