California Conservative

According to Bill Kristol, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave the GOP a great Christmas gift: at least another term as the House majority party.

In Kristol’s opinion, he didn’t think that the GOP would retain control of the House, Senate and White House for another congressional term. I always thought they would because I’ve never underestimated the ability of high-ranking Dems to do something incredibly boneheaded. This time, I was proved right and Mr. Kristol, who is one of the best conservative thinkers, was wrong.

In endorsing John Murtha’s pullout and retreat plan, Pelosi gave the GOP the gift of casting the Democratic Party as the ‘Unserious About the War Party.’ It’s impossible for the average American to think that Democrats are serious about the war when their responses to the President’s strong speech are that of: (a) immediately redeploy (Murtha) or (b) deny that you wanted a timetable for withdrawal (Kerry).

A party that is that bipolar won’t be taken seriously and for good reason. People instinctively know that a ‘house divided against itself’ won’t survive long.

Oddly enough, Howard Fineman reached the same conclusion on Congress by a different course. In his article titled Trim and Tiptoe, Mr. Fineman reports of a conversation he had with Grover Norquist. Here’s a look at their conversation:

The other day I bumped into the semi-legendary Grover Norquist, the tax lobbyist and conservative activist who is bosom buddies with Karl Rove. Norquist was, not surprisingly, imperturbably optimistic about the GOP’s prospects in ’06. “This year was a perfect storm of factors that hurt us: Katrina, the war, Harriet Miers, gasoline prices,” he told me. “The good news for us is that the election is NEXT year.”

I think there’s a stronger, more compelling reason why 2006 should be another good year for the GOP: We’re still involved in a war and people, when they start focusing on the issues, still will think that the Democrats are either unserious or too divided.

It isn’t that I want to discount Norquist’s reasons. They’re the result of solid thinking. It’s just that I think there’s a method to Mr. Rove’s campaign year strategy and that is to put the war front and center all fall long. With the White House having the big bulhorn, it has a way of nationalizing those issues it speaks out the most about.

In the end, I suspect that the image of Jack Murtha, John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi fighting President Bush and Condi Rice for who’s in charge of foreign policy isn’t a winner for Democrats.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 6:26 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Elections, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Military, Pelosi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.