Edgewise

Bush-Clarke: Seventh-Inning Stretch

David Kolodney

At first sight, a Newsweek poll suggests that the counter-attack against Richard Clarke has been surprisingly effective:

Half those surveyed in the poll after Clarke's testimony Wednesday said they thought he was acting for political and personal reasons, while a quarter said they feel he's acting as a dedicated public servant.

...while Bush himself has been surprisingly impervious.

While 65 percent said Clarke's testimony has not affected their views of Bush, 17 percent said it made them view him less favorably and 10 percent said more favorably.

However, the way that arithmetic works out, the 17% is really quite a lot. Almost all of the 10% “More Favorably” may be assumed to come from Bush voters, while to 17% “Less Favorably” would include a substantial number drawn from his current support.

However, public views supporting President Bush's handling of terrorism have dipped from 65 percent to 57 percent in the last month, according to the Newsweek poll.

Nevertheless, the crucial question is which of two messages will end up as the net "take-away" of Clarke's critique.

The weak one is that Bush didn't care enough about terror: It's mushy, vague, "who can know?", etc.

Two-thirds said the Clinton administration did not take the threat of terror seriously enough, while six in 10 said the Bush administration has taken the threat as seriously as it should.

The message that needs to come through is that the Iraq war displaced terror as the main concern. That's not very mushy. There is no doubt in people's minds that Bush did focus on Iraq; we did go to war. Even Fox News has been magnifying that. So then it turns on whether the war helped harmed our security against terror. (Even the CIA, in a under-reported study that could be resurrected, said it increased the risks.)

For Bush it is crucial that that question should not be effectively posed in the first place; it is not a good question for people to even be considering. It is immediately plausible that the war was an obsessive-compulsive blunder. And if it is a blunder, it is a colossal blunder.

So in every article I read, I look for the second critique. I find in about 60% overall. I am just hoping that it starts to tip over to become the central point