The White House yesterday fought back against Sen. John McCain’s assertion that the administration wrongly led the nation into thinking the Iraq war would be easy, even as a new poll suggests that for the first time since it began a majority of Americans don’t think the war is part of the fight against terrorism.
“It is difficult, and the president has said it is going to be difficult from the beginning,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, who called it “puzzling to me” that Mr. McCain’s comments were gaining attention because, she said, he had made similar criticisms before.
Mr. McCain, who has been a staunch defender of the war, said while campaigning in Ohio for Sen. Mike DeWine that the public had been “led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach,” and listed the claims of top administration officials that indicated an easier war.
“I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required,” Mr. McCain said. “Stuff happens, mission accomplished, last throes, a few dead-enders. I’m just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be.”
Though she said she hadn’t seen Mr. McCain’s comments directly, Mrs. Perino rattled off three different occasions when Mr. Bush said the fight would be hard, including at the beginning of the war on March 19, 2003, again two months later even after he he had stood beneath a “mission accomplished” banner, and then most recently during a press conference Monday.
Despite challenging his comments, the White House was careful to praise the senator, indicating just how powerful a political figure Mr. McCain is.
“He is a senator who is not shy about sharing his views. That’s one of the reasons he is such a unique figure in American politics, and also one of the most popular,” Mrs. Perino said.
A McCain spokesman yesterday said the senator was out of the country traveling and didn’t have anything more to add.
Mr. McCain has become a yardstick that Democratic challengers are using to attack Republicans. That is natural in Arizona, Mr. McCain’s home state, but yesterday Rep. Sherrod Brown, the Democratic member of Congress who is running to unseat Mr. DeWine, pointedly noted that Mr. DeWine did not agree with Mr. McCain.
“Instead of echoing McCain’s remarks, DeWine yesterday again failed to criticize the administration’s handling of the war or to call for an exit strategy,” Mr. Brown’s campaign said in a statement.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee tried to steer the conversation back to the political campaign, pointing out that Mr. McCain had strongly endorsed Mr. DeWine and said they share “basically the same” voting record, while Mr. Brown’s voting record is “drastically different.”
President Bush on Monday put Iraq squarely at the top of this year’s political campaigns, saying the two parties had profound differences in how they would handle the war.
Mr. Bush has argued that Iraq is a major part of the war on terror, but a CBS-New York Times poll released yesterday found that 51 percent of Americans now say the conflict in Iraq is “separate from the war on terrorism,” a jump of 10 percentage points since June. Still, the same poll found Mr. Bush also scored his highest marks in more than a year on his handling of the war on terror, with 55 percent approving.
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