Backs to the wall, Bush team still sounds optimistic

Backs to the wall, Bush team still sounds optimistic
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Rutenberg
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 22, 2006



WASHINGTON The capital is filled with Republicans convinced they will lose the House and maybe the Senate. So the White House and party leaders convened a "friends and allies" teleconference to dispute what Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said he considered flawed conventional wisdom.

For 20 minutes in the session last Friday, Mehlman and the White House political director, Sara Taylor, tried to lift the gloom that had descended on the top ranks of Republican strategists with what one of the dozens of lobbyists, donors, party aides and other supporters who listened in later called "happy talk." President George W. Bush and his political strategists may be the most outwardly optimistic Republicans in Washington these days, and maybe the only ones.

They are doing their best to fend off the sense of impending doom within their party that, they fear, will become self-fulfilling prophecy Nov. 7. They are enlisting longtime allies for an effort to change the mood for the final push to Election Day and putting out the word for Republicans to keep a lid on pessimistic talk.

But those on whom the White House counts to help improve party morale at such low moments say they are having a hard time of it, when so many polls augur an ever-worsening November result and so many things have gone wrong, from the Mark Foley sex scandal to the grim news from Iraq.

"I'm trying to buck people up, but let's just say I'm hiding all the sharp objects in my office," said Rich Bond, the former Republican National Committee chairman who now runs a Republican lobbying firm.

Even Mary Matalin, the longtime Bush family aide and confidante, said, "I'm in my stoic mode now," though she said she believed the party would ultimately stave off defeat.

If anything, the president's professed certainty that a Democratic takeover of Congress this year is just "not going to happen" - as he has said many times recently - is a source of fascination among even his staunchest allies. In lobbying shops and strategy firms around town, the latest Republican parlor game is divining whether the White House rhetoric is staged or if Bush and his political team really believe what they are saying.

Behind the curtain, the mood is not so upbeat or unremittingly confident in the West Wing. Bush and his inner circle, people who know them say, are well aware of the Democratic wave suggested by polls at the moment and of the stakes in the election for the final two years of an administration already burdened with trouble, starting with the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

A sense of siege has set in, with Bush's top aides testily dismissing questions about how they would govern with a Democratic Congress, typically saying, as the president does, that they "dispute the premise" and complaining that the news media are ignoring good news for Republicans like the attainment of a record 12,000-point level by the Dow Jones industrial average.

Their own polling shows that as many as 14 House seats are likely to be lost to Democrats as of now, according to the close adviser, just one shy of the 15 seats Democrats need to gain to win control. Though White House aides said that figure was exaggerated, they acknowledged that polls had shown at least that many races with Democrats leading Republicans. But aides said in interviews that Bush and his political adviser, Karl Rove, and their team genuinely feel that they still have a chance to avert defeat because they have been down so many times before and come out on top. This is the same political team that on Election Day two years ago, saw exit polls that all but guaranteed John Kerry the presidency.

Bush has always relished political combat. He actually appears to enjoy campaigning, the more slashing the better.

"Their attitude is, 'We've got our backs against the wall but we know how to fight our way out of this,'" said Charles Black, a Republican strategist who has been in close contact with Rove and Mehlman. "They're not unrealistic, but they're optimistic that we can still win."

Through three excruciatingly close elections, Bush and his political team have pulled through with a sophisticated voter turnout operation that uses technology and minute data to find Republican voters and goad them to go to the polls with mail, phone calls or e- mail messages specifically addressing the issues upon which they focus.

Rove has told associates that the turnout machinery, through which the White House will continue to pump an unrelenting message against Democrats on taxes and terrorism, gives the Republicans an advantage of four to seven percentage points in any given race. Though Democrats call that an exaggeration, they acknowledge that they do not have a similarly effective system, and they say it certainly accounts for a couple of percentage points.

And Rove and Taylor are said by associates to have spent hours going through data on volunteer efforts, fund- raising and voter registration tallies. They have concluded that maintaining control, even if by the slimmest of margins, is still well within reach for the party in ways that polls tend not to show, according to their associates. As of last week, the White House political team was estimating a loss of 8 to 12 House seats, one outside adviser said.

"If you're Rove or if you're Mehlman, or if you're Rove and you know what Mehlman's done, you're looking at it and you say, 'Yeah, things are bad but things have been bad before,'" said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, an advocacy group that is close to Rove.

And for all of the trouble this year, Bush is said to have full confidence in Rove, Mehlman and Taylor.