Democrats played into GOP hands

This is the last of three reports based on the new book “Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry and the Bush Haters” (Regan Books) by Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent for The Washington Times.

Exactly one week before the midterm elections of 2002, White House political strategist Karl Rove received an urgent phone call from his colleague, political director Ken Mehlman.

“Are you watching TV?” Mr. Mehlman asked incredulously.

“No,” Mr. Rove replied. “Should I be?”

At Mr. Mehlman’s urging, Mr. Rove turned on coverage of the memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone, the liberal Minnesota Democrat killed in a plane crash four days earlier. Billed as a somber remembrance, the event instead degenerated into a stridently partisan political rally.

“It’s like watching a slow-moving car wreck,” Mr. Rove said in a lengthy interview with The Washington Times. “And then they reran it on C-SPAN, and I watched it from start to finish again. The whole thing was unseemly.”

The event would have national ramifications in the midterm congressional elections that, according to historical trends, Republicans were supposed to lose by wide margins. But they ended up winning dramatically, thanks to what Mr. Rove called a series of missteps by Democrats that began the previous summer.

Those missteps, which could well be repeated before the presidential election next fall, were rooted in Democratic demands that Mr. Bush “make his case” for war against Iraq. That made it politically acceptable for the president to talk up national security — his strong suit — right before voters went to the polls.

“We were doing exactly what they wanted us to do,” Mr. Rove explained. “The fact of the matter was, we were taking them at their word.”

Indeed, Mr. Bush called the Democrats’ bluff by delivering a major speech on Iraq to the United Nations on Sept. 12.

“I had a twofold purpose going to the United Nations,” Mr. Bush said in one of a series of interviews in the Oval Office. “One was to begin to make the case. But the other was to say to the United Nations: We want you to be effective.”

But there also were political dividends to the president’s focus on Iraq. By asking the United Nations to pass a resolution against Saddam Hussein within “weeks, not months” — and then asking for a similar resolution from Congress — Mr. Bush effectively guaranteed that national security would dominate the headlines through Election Day.

“It’s like playing a very bad gin rummy game where you play the wrong card every time,” said Mr. Rove, who attributed the Democrats’ losing strategy to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. “It’s like he was constantly thinking: What can I feed Bush? What can I discard that would be helpful?

“Every card he played, he played to our advantage,” Mr. Rove recalled. “And we sat there going: Why is he doing this?”

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