President Bush and Republicans in many of the nation's key races are presenting divergent, even contradictory, visions of how Washington should operate after next week's election.
Around the country, GOP incumbents and challengers alike are running against the relentless partisan conflict that defined the final years of Bill Clinton's presidency and have colored virtually every day of Bush's.
From House members such as Christopher Shays in Connecticut to Sens. Jim Talent in Missouri and Mike DeWine in Ohio and Senate challengers in Maryland, New Jersey and Tennessee, Republicans almost everywhere are presenting themselves as flexible and independent problem solvers who will reach across party lines to build consensus on difficult issues.
Bush is moving in the opposite direction. As he often does when he's under political pressure, he's accentuating the disagreements between the parties and presenting the differences in the starkest possible terms. He's displayed that instinct most clearly in the highly charged way he has framed the debate over Iraq and the war on terrorism.
Bush now routinely labels Democrats "the party of cut-and-run." At a recent Republican fundraiser, Bush went much further. "The Democrat Party ... has evolved from one that was confident in its capacity to help deal with the problems of the world to one that ... has an approach of doubt and defeat," he declared.
Bush has absorbed his share of body blows from Democrats criticizing his management of the war. But tagging his rivals as the party of "defeat" is nonetheless extraordinary language for a commander in chief to use in a political campaign.
Other wartime presidents have been much more reluctant to argue that only their party was committed to success. Consider the way President Johnson approached the 1966 elections as the Vietnam War was escalating. To begin with, Johnson spent most of that October away from the campaign, on a 17-day tour of Asia that included Vietnam.
Then, at a news conference just before election day, Johnson dismissed the idea that congressional losses for the Democratic Party would affect either the thinking of the North Vietnamese or America's support for the troops in the field. If Republicans gained seats, he continued, "They may talk, and argue, and fight, and criticize, and play politics from time to time, but when they call the vote on supporting the men ... in the Senate it will be 83 to 2 and in the House it will be 410-5."
