NYT: In Wake of News, a Plan: Uniting Party and President

In Wake of News, a Plan: Uniting Party and President

By JIM RUTENBERG | Published: August 13, 2006

CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 12 — One week ago, President Bush and his political aides were facing the most daunting election-year landscape of his presidency.

Their party was splintered over Mr. Bush’s proposed immigration overhaul and uncertain about the political effect of violence in Iraq. Even with the White House working to bring Republicans together behind the president’s agenda, several candidates were making public shows of establishing their distance from him and his sagging approval ratings.

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

By the time the president’s top political strategists met at his ranch on Friday for an annual summer fund-raiser, the events had given them an opportunity to pull together the Republican Party as it headed toward the home stretch of the campaign, rallying once more around Mr. Bush’s signature issue, the fight against terrorism.

The entire effort was swiftly coordinated by the Republican National Committee and the White House, using the same political machinery that carried them to victory in 2004. It began in the days before the anticipated loss of Mr. Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, to Ned Lamont, a vocal war critic whose victory Republicans used to paint Democrats as “Defeatocrats.”

That word originated in a White House memorandum by Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, suggesting ways to frame the debate, that was shared with officials, including Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, and Karl Rove, the president’s top strategist.

The effort continued with the news of the British intelligence breakthrough, with the message that the plot had highlighted the stakes of a fight that the Democrats, according to Republicans, were not equipped to face.

But Democrats, seeing a political opportunity, began to focus on national security, making a vigorous case this week that the Republicans were mismanaging the war and making the country more vulnerable to attack.

“If the Republican Party thinks this is a good political issue for them, they are mistaken,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

And a top Republican strategist cautioned that the party’s candidates still faced serious challenges in states where the war and Mr. Bush were overwhelmingly unpopular.

But at the very least, news of the plot helped the White House and the Republican Party achieve something they have struggled to do all year: bring the party forcefully together with the president.

The plan came together at the same time that Mr. Bush and his top security aides, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, were being intensively briefed on the unfolding British investigation. That led Democrats to charge that the White House had actively used the plot to its political advantage.

“For people to suggest there was somehow a larger, coordinated effort between the Lieberman loss and the disruption of the terror plot is just absurd,” said Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican Party.

Administration officials said that those who had been briefed on the plot had not expected any arrests for several days, well after the initial political fallout of the Lieberman campaign would have played out.

But in several interviews, the officials said the attacks had reinforced arguments they had devised to meet Mr. Lieberman’s expected defeat.

Officials said they had identified a Lieberman loss as a potential watershed moment that could reinforce the Democrats’ antiwar message — and scare Republicans out of taking White House advice to embrace the war in Iraq and national security in general. That advice was wearing thin as the death toll in Iraq continued to climb.

At a Republican gathering in Minneapolis on Aug. 4, Duf Sundheim, chairman of the California Republican Party, said that national security had “been a great issue for the Republican Party over a long time, and there’s still a good choice between the two parties. But what changes the dynamic is the current situation in Iraq. It dissipates it.”

Still, last weekend, Republican officials said, as the Lieberman loss seemed a certainty, the Republican National Committee and the White House began working to bring the party together on a message that the Democratic Party was taking a hard turn toward the antiwar left.

The Republican talking points, reviewed by Mr. Rove and Sara Taylor, the White House political director, went out to state committees across the country, with statements like “Ned Lamont’s victory over a distinguished public servant like Joe Lieberman represents the end of a tradition of proud Democrat leaders in the mold of F.D.R., Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson and J.F.K.”

Mr. Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, led the “Defeatocrats” charge in a speech on Wednesday in Ohio, a key swing state.

In Crawford this week, Mr. Snow told reporters there were two approaches to fighting terrorism: “And in the Connecticut race, one of the approaches is to ignore the difficulties and walk away.” He added, “Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course, and that led to Sept. 11.”

As Republican officeholders echoed the talking points around the nation, Mr. Cheney set up an unusual conference call with reporters from his vacation home in Wyoming. He said Mr. Lieberman’s defeat had sent a signal to “Al Qaeda types,” who, he said, “clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said in a statement to supporters that it was “disgraceful” that Mr. Cheney’s comments had come after he had been briefed on the British investigation.

Mr. Snow said Friday: “He did not know that there was an operation that was to take place.”

Yet by Thursday afternoon Congressional Republicans had already issued a flood of e-mail messages hailing the breakup of the plot, and crediting the administration’s anti-terror effort.

Congressional officials said they were acting on their own, not on guidance from the White House. “We really knew instinctively what we wanted to say,” said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois.

Party officials said that they had no plans to issue statements about the plot until late in the day, after the Democrats had criticized the Republicans as mismanaging national security. Republicans said they expected their arguments to carry through next week — when Mr. Bush is to meet with counterterrorism and Homeland Security Department officials — and Democrats are girding for more of the same around the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But even Republicans acknowledged that the climate was unpredictable. “When something like this happens it just sort of sweeps across the political landscape and changes things,” a senior Republican official said. “The pendulum can swing very quickly on it because there are events out of your typical political control.”

Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from New York for this article, and Carl Hulse from Washington.