G.O.P. Lawmakers Voice Their Unease
By CARL HULSE
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Members of the White House communications team invited their Capitol Hill counterparts down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the other day to see how Republican morale was holding up in Congress. The answer: Not so well.
Under fierce attack on children’s health insurance, beset by politically inconvenient retirements and uncertain if another scandal lurks around the corner, Congressional Republicans are feeling a bit under siege as even one of their former leaders predicts 2008 could be a Democratic year.
“We are not happy, no doubt about it,” said one of the senior Republican Congressional aides who attended the Oct. 5 meeting at the White House and would talk about the internal session only without being identified by name.
The twist is that the issue Republicans had feared most in the fall, the war in Iraq, has played out legislatively in their favor for the moment. In concert with the White House, Congressional Republicans say they were able to execute a strategy built around the testimony of General David H. Petraeus that allowed them to forestall Democratic calls for troop withdrawals and hold the party together on the war at a crucial turn.
But Republicans say they have lacked a similar cohesive plan to counter the Democratic assault over the children’s health insurance program that will be the subject of a veto override vote in the House on Thursday. President Bush’s veto of an expansion of that program and the strategic failure have exposed vulnerable Republicans to a backlash and allowed the party to be painted as uncaring.
As a result, Republicans have been scrambling for a health care response at a time when they had hoped to be pounding Democrats over excessive spending and re-establishing their image as the party of fiscal restraint.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Members of the White House communications team invited their Capitol Hill counterparts down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the other day to see how Republican morale was holding up in Congress. The answer: Not so well.
Under fierce attack on children’s health insurance, beset by politically inconvenient retirements and uncertain if another scandal lurks around the corner, Congressional Republicans are feeling a bit under siege as even one of their former leaders predicts 2008 could be a Democratic year.
“We are not happy, no doubt about it,” said one of the senior Republican Congressional aides who attended the Oct. 5 meeting at the White House and would talk about the internal session only without being identified by name.
The twist is that the issue Republicans had feared most in the fall, the war in Iraq, has played out legislatively in their favor for the moment. In concert with the White House, Congressional Republicans say they were able to execute a strategy built around the testimony of General David H. Petraeus that allowed them to forestall Democratic calls for troop withdrawals and hold the party together on the war at a crucial turn.
But Republicans say they have lacked a similar cohesive plan to counter the Democratic assault over the children’s health insurance program that will be the subject of a veto override vote in the House on Thursday. President Bush’s veto of an expansion of that program and the strategic failure have exposed vulnerable Republicans to a backlash and allowed the party to be painted as uncaring.
As a result, Republicans have been scrambling for a health care response at a time when they had hoped to be pounding Democrats over excessive spending and re-establishing their image as the party of fiscal restraint.
(Continued here.)
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