The Hindu : A shot in the arm?

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Friday, Jul 25, 2003

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A shot in the arm?

By Richard W. Stevenson

White House advisers say the development marks an important turn of fortune that will help Mr. Bush frame the political debate for the rest of the summer and into the fall on terms more favourable to him.

WITH THE death of Saddam Hussein's sons on Tuesday in Iraq, a bad political month for the U.S. President, George W. Bush, got palpably better. Suddenly the big summer story was no longer whether Mr. Bush had misled the nation in his State of the Union address. The prospect that American troops in Iraq might face prolonged guerrilla warfare seemed diminished. The Democratic presidential field had to temper and qualify its increasingly aggressive attacks on the White House's post-war foreign and military policies.

Speaking in the Rose Garden on Wednesday morning, Mr. Bush devoted only a few sentences to the death of Odai and Qusai, saying "more than ever, all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back."

But privately, White House advisers say the development marks an important turn of fortune that will help Mr. Bush frame the political debate for the rest of the summer and into the fall on terms more favourable to him.

"He's not going to do a victory death dance — that's not appropriate for the President," said one Republican who works closely on strategy with the White House. "But the death of the Hussein brothers has a tactical political meaning because it changes the subject from the 16 words in the State of the Union," he said, referring to Mr. Bush's use of what the White House later acknowledged was unreliable evidence suggesting that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons. The Democrats said Mr. Bush would not easily wipe away the questions about his credibility, or escape doubts among some voters about whether his economic and foreign policy was succeeding.

And there is lingering concern within the President's party. Only a few days ago, Republican strategists, including some with close ties to the administration, were acknowledging that Mr. Bush was going through his worst stretch in political terms since the early months of his presidency. The rise in the unemployment rate and the surge in the Federal budget deficit undermined his assurances that his tax cuts would nurse the economy back to robust health.

The steady, if relatively small, loss of American life in Iraq and the acknowledgment by the American commander in the region that the U.S. forces there faced a classic guerrilla campaign conjured up all kinds of unwelcome associations. And the White House's fumbling efforts to explain how possibly flawed intelligence about Iraq's nuclear programme got into the State of the Union speech had shown Mr. Bush's top aides to be uncharacteristically willing to indulge in finger pointing. "This is one of the worst weeks Bush has had because everyone is challenging, Republicans and Democrats, the credibility and integrity of the White House," a prominent Republican said late last week. But the mood among the Republicans changed once the military officials confirmed that they had found and killed Saddam Hussein's sons.

In a sign that the White House is still on the political offensive, Mr. Bush will travel on Thursday to Pennsylvania and Michigan, two States that he lost to Al Gore in 2000. In Pennsylvania, he will visit the Government printing plant sending tax rebate checks of up to $400 per child to 25 million middle-income families.

The President faces plenty of issues on the economy. The Democrats are geared to attack him on Thursday for not doing more to force his party to extend the $ 400 credit to 6.5 million low-income families left out of the original legislation. Moreover, it is not clear whether the questions about Mr. Bush's credibility raised by the problems with the State of the Union address will continue to dog the White House. But his case on that score got a boost on Tuesday night from his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton told "Larry King Live" on CNN that "everybody makes mistakes when they are President" and that it was "incontestable that on the day I left office there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons" in Iraq. Mr. Clinton might have been signalling to his party's presidential candidates that fighting Mr. Bush on his handling of the war is a losing proposition.

But sensing that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable on his handling of the post-war situation in Iraq and on related issues such as his willingness to pay for beefed-up security at home, Democratic strategists said that the presidential candidates were likely to keep up their attacks on the President's foreign policy. The reasoning, they said, is that if they can neutralise or diminish Mr. Bush's current advantage on national security issues, they can move the election to the economy and the White House's record of presiding over millions of job losses.

The Republicans said their polling showed that Mr. Bush's approval ratings for his handling of the war remained extremely strong and that he had suffered little damage to his reputation as a straight shooter from the State of the Union address. — New York Times

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