Republicans fear guilt by
association with Bush
The New Jersey Star-Ledger
The campaign flier is
elegantly done. One page on fine stock paper,
multicolored on both sides, with a detailed list
of the money and projects Pennsylvania
Republican Rep. Jim Gerlach has brought to his
6th District. There's a photograph of the
handsome two-term congressman and several
hundred words outlining his record in this
elegant mailing to his constituents.
One word,
however, is conspicuously missing: Republican.
Instead, the
mailing bills Gerlach as "An Independent Voice,
Working for You." You could have fooled the
disgraced ex-House GOP majority leader Tom DeLay,
who brooked no independence among GOP troops in
his leadership days. His PAC ponied up money for
Gerlach's last campaign. But it's a reflection
of how things have changed in Republican ranks.
DeLay is under indictment for
laundering corporate contributions into GOP
campaign coffers. And more than a few Republican
House members who face difficult re-election
races are doing their darnedest these days to
distance themselves from the klutzy Bush White
House and the Republican record in
Washington.
Gerlach is
typical of these under-fire Republicans. He's a
moderate by any reading of GOP ideology, a
member of the Republican
Main Street
Partnership, which supports embryonic stem cell
research in defiance of Bush administration
policy. The
Philadelphia suburbs that make up his
district are historically Republican -- but only
narrowly and with a growing tendency to favor
the occasional Democrat.
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry
carried Gerlach's district over President Bush.
Gerlach has failed to get more than 51 percent
of the vote in either of his election victories.
As a consequence, he ranks near the top of the
Democratic target list of Republican House
members who, the Democrats believe, can be made
to pay the price for Bush's fall from favor.
Seen in that
light, Gerlach's shyness about his Republican
lineage is not so much treachery or deception as
a recognition of reality: You could get hurt at
the polls running as a Republican with ties to
the Bush-Cheney team this year, especially in
suburban America.
The Gerlach
scenario is on view in the suburbs surrounding
big cities everywhere outside the South --
Chicago, New York,
Cleveland,
Boston,
Denver, Los Angeles.
Republican House members are struggling to put
some distance between themselves and the
beleaguered Bush.
For many, the disillusionment
with the White House began with the president's
hare-brained scheme to privatize part of Social
Security. After first applauding the proposal,
GOP House members fled like quail hunters at
word that Dick Cheney was in the woods. It
represented their first real, if subdued, break
with the president.
Bush's bungled response to the Hurricane Katrina
disaster caused more grumbling in Republican
ranks, reinforced this week with the revelation
that he was warned that the New Orleans levees
might not hold.
Cheney's hunting misadventure
didn't help; it seemed to underscore the
administration ineptitude. Now Bush has stumbled
again with his handling of the deal that would
turn over management of portions of six American
ports to a company owned by an Arab country.
Bush is taking a bum rap on
the port deal. As he notes, the
Dubai company is run by
American executives and, in any case, port
security would remain the province of the Coast
Guard and U.S. Customs. But the fact that he
didn't know about the deal until a few days ago
suggests a lazy, out-of- touch president. Worse
yet from the standpoint of Republicans running
for re-election is the suspicion that Bush and
his team have become tin-eared politically.
Even 58 percent of Republicans say they oppose
the port deal.
"How
could Karl Rove let this happen?" is the
familiar GOP complaint in
Washington.
The collapse of
the administration's standing in the country is
unusual and cause for alarm. Bush's personal
rating in the latest CBS poll is an anemic 34
percent; Cheney's is even lower, with an 18
percent rating that's virtually a demand for his
resignation. (Even Richard Nixon wasn't that low
on the eve of his resignation.)
And it's not
likely to get much better. In the months ahead,
the political spotlight will shift,
unflatteringly, to the courtroom as the
larcenous lobbyist Jack Abramoff recounts his
dealings with the Republican-run Congress and
Lewis "Scooter" Libby tells just which of his
"superiors" gave him the green light to expose
Valerie Plame as a CIA
operative. And
Iraq could yet slip
into civil war.
Jim Gerlach
probably won't be the only Republican this fall
heading for the high grass and the hills.
John Farmer is The Star-Ledger's national
political correspondent.
