WASHINGTON – House control at stake, President Bush campaigned Sunday in endangered Republican districts across GOP-friendly middle America. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hoping to become the first female speaker, stumped for Democratic challengers in the left-leaning Northeast.
“Here’s the way I see it,” Bush told a crowd inside an auditorium in Grand Island, Neb. “If the Democrats are so good about being the party of the opposition, let’s just keep them in the opposition.” Republicans are hoping their party’s acclaimed get-out-the-vote operation can prevent a Democratic rout in a campaign marked by voter fury over the Iraq war.
Pelosi was cautiously optimistic about her party’s chances Tuesday. “We are thankful for where we are today, to be poised for success,” she said in Colchester, Conn. “But we have two Mount Everests we have to climb – they are called Monday and Tuesday.”
Her party appears increasingly confident it can ride a wave of public disenchantment with the administration’s policies to victory in the House and, possibly, the Senate.
Up for grabs are 435 House seats, 33 Senate seats, governorships in 36 states, and thousands of state legislative and local races.
In 37 states, voters will determine the fate of ballot initiatives, including whether to ban gay marriage, raise the minimum wage, endorse expanded embryonic stem-cell research and – in South Dakota – impose the country’s most stringent abortion restrictions.
Already, this is projected to be the most expensive election cycle ever, at $2.6 billion.
Iraq has dominated the campaign season, and Republicans and Democrats sparred over the war again Sunday following Saddam Hussein’s conviction on crimes against humanity. He was sentenced him to die by hanging; an appeal is planned.
“To pull out, to withdraw from this war is losing. The Democrats appear to be content with losing,” said Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who leads the Senate GOP’s campaign efforts.
Infuriated, Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the Democrat in charge of the party’s House campaign, shot back, “We want to win and we want a new direction to Iraq.”
In his sixth year in office, the president faces the likelihood of losing GOP seats in both the House and the Senate, as well as fewer GOP governors.
In polls, voters give both the president and GOP-controlled Congress low job performance ratings; they do not like the direction the country is headed; and they are particularly frustrated with the war as costs and casualties mount.
“It may not be popular with the public. It doesn’t matter, in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right,” Vice President Dick Cheney said.
Cheney told ABC News’ “This Week” that the administration would continue “full speed ahead” with its Iraq strategy.
That drew a sardonic response from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. “It’s full speed ahead over a cliff!” she told supporters at a rally Sunday in Union Vale, N.Y.
Further complicating an already difficult environment for the GOP, the public also has been turned off by allegations of corruption in Washington and political scandals dogging the GOP.
“There’s wind in our face,” acknowledged Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, the head of the Republican House campaign effort. But, he said, “I believe we have a great opportunity to hold the House by turning the vote out.”
Said Emanuel, “I’d rather be us than them.”
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