When the President decided to invade Iraq there were certain Democrats that, despite some misgivings, decided they would try to help make the project work. Senator Joe Biden, for example, dropped his plans to run for President in 2004 and hoped to use his position as ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations committee to influence policy. It was not long before Biden threw up his hands in exasperation. His advice was simply ignored. It took a little longer for Republicans to start realizing the same thing. But eventually it started happening. Sens. Gordon Smith and Chuck Hagel and Rep. Walter Jones rebelled first. Others are following. It’s still a trickle. Yet, the Alberto Gonzales fiasco is threatening to become a flood.
Telephone calls yesterday to dozens of GOP lawmakers, lobbyists, and current and former Bush administration officials found almost no support for the attorney general.
And, this time, the collapse of support isn’t limited to Capitol Hill.
“Everybody at the White House . . . all think he needs to go, but the president doesn’t,” said a Republican who consulted the Bush team yesterday. Another White House ally said Bush and Gonzales are ignoring reality: “They’re the only two people on the planet Earth who don’t see it.” A third Republican intimately familiar with sentiment inside the White House said the hope is that Gonzales will leave on his own. “At some point, he’ll figure out that it’s not a sustainable situation,” the Republican said.
The scales are falling from the eyes of even the President’s closest advisers. It appears they tried to force the President’s hand when, even before Gonzales finished testifying, chief White House aides leaked to CNN that they thought Gonzales’ testimony had been a disaster and ‘like watching the clubbing of a baby seal’. But the President didn’t listen.
To be frank, we haven’t seen a President in this much trouble since Bill Clinton had to admit that he had lied to his cabinet about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. But, in that case, the President remained popular with the electorate and effective as a policy maker. That is far from the case today. With the majority leader issuing a notice of no confidence in the President’s war strategy, the Republicans are trying to rally around the President. But their heart isn’t in it. They know Harry Reid is right. And they have no confidence in the President’s judgment on a host of issues.
We are witnessing the collapse of the Presidency. I suspect even the Republicans are shocked at the degree of rot and the level of delusional thinking coming out of the Oval Office.
What once seemed impossible, a Republican revolt against their own President, is now seeming more and more inevitable. The Gonzales affair is opening many eyes.
