Pandering to the other side

(Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

The February 13 debate in South Carolina provided a clarifying moment for this year's GOP presidential race. Donald Trump claimed that the administration of George W. Bush had engaged in a massive conspiracy to mislead the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "They lied," Trump thundered. "They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none." This was not a one-off flub.

Donald Trump's "Bush lied" performance in the last debate lost him a lot of potential supporters. One of those is Jonathan Last, who writes,

(1) Success in the 2016 Republican party no longer requires candidates to support the Iraq war, specifically, or the Bush 43 Freedom Agenda generally, as a price of entry. There is plenty of room for candidates who think that the Iraq war was a mistake. Or a poor judgment call. Or even a fifty-fifty proposition that ended badly.

(Conversely, there’s also plenty of room for candidates who defend the Iraq war and argue that, for all his faults, Bush had the situation basically under control by 2008-and that it was President Obama who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.)

But what you can’t do is take the MoveOn.org, Code Pink, Michael Moore, maximalist position that President Bush knowingly “lied” to the world in order to foment the war.

(2) Why not? Well, for one thing, the charge is incorrect.

(3) For another, it suggests you’re unhinged. Look: As far as national security goes, it would actually be comforting to think that Bush “lied” America into war. It would suggest that we have a massively competent intelligence agency capable of conducting an enormous operation, in broad daylight, with total and impermeable compartmentalization and secrecy. It would mean that our CIA was run by a bunch of hyper-competent Jason Bourne clones.

As it is, the truth is much more worrisome: That we had two massive intelligence failures-the 9/11 attacks and Iraq WMDs-within a year of one another. And this was either or the result of a not-Jason-Bourne levels of competence, or the practical limits of what intelligence can know. Neither of those options is especially comforting in contemplating our future.

So people who buy into “Bush lied” aren’t even worst-case-scenario pessimists. They’re partisan zealots and conspiracy-theorist cranks.

(4) Now, every political movement has partisan zealots and conspiracy-theorist cranks. And sometimes a politician has to pander to them. But on Saturday, Trump was pandering to the guys on the other side.

...(5) If this was an isolated incident, maybe Trump could move past it. But the problem is that “Bush lied” fits with a pattern: Support of Planned Parenthood;eager acceptance of Obergefell;a “great relationship” with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.Now he’s being applauded by Code Pink?

...(6)The people on talk radio who’ve been playing footsy with Trump don’t have the luxury of keeping quiet. They’re going to have to figure out how to square this circle pretty quickly.

Nine months ago, if you had asked Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Jerry Falwell Jr., or Ann Coulter whether they would endorse a figure who takes the Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of Iraq ("Bush lied, people died"), one suspects they all would have recoiled at the prospect. Yet in the hours after Trump insisted that George W. Bush intentionally lied the country into war, not one of the major figures who have endorsed him was willing to contradict his claim.

...One needn't be an admirer of George W. Bush, or a believer in his freedom agenda, or even a supporter of the Iraq war to understand how pernicious this is. Whatever your views on the wisdom of Iraq, no serious person believes that Bush masterminded a massive fraud, with the help of his cabinet and the entire national security apparatus; that his "lies" then managed to fool the governments and intelligence agencies of a dozen allies; and that, somehow, none of the evidence of this scheme ever managed to leak into the open.

Trump's insistence at last Saturday's debate that George W. Bush "lied" to America in order to foment the Iraq war was important because it confirms the two big Republican fears about Trump: that he isn't actually conservative, but that he is a conspiracy-minded crank. It also places Trump in direct opposition to a figure most Republicans like very much. (To take just one example, in Quinnipiac's last poll, Trump's favorability among Republicans is +31, George W. Bush's is +67.)

One of the reasons Trump has risen is that he's the only candidate in double-digits who hasn't faced significant opposition advertising. It is inconceivable that Cruz, Rubio, and their assorted Super PACs aren't carpet bombing the airwaves in South Carolina and the other SEC states with anti-Trump "Bush lied" ads. Two weeks from now, "Bush lied" ought to be the first thing that comes to Republican voters' minds' when they think about Donald J. Trump.

Any yet so far from the campaigns . . . nothing. The Cruz campaign is hitting him on judges and social issues. Rubio sometimes dings him on eminent domain. There is no mention, anywhere, of his contention that "Bush lied."

Between them, the Cruz, Rubio (and Bush) campaigns and their Super PACs have spent more than $100 million attacking each other. And now that they've been given a 500 kiloton nuclear weapon to destroy Trump, they're refusing to use it.

...the best thing for each of the rival campaigns would be to wound Trump in this moment of vulnerability. Tie Trump to "Bush lied" and Cruz and Rubio will pick up Trump supporters as they drop off. (And as Stuart Stevens never tires of reminding people, Trump is sitting on the biggest pile of votes; even his attrition rate is small, the raw number of votes you can peel away from him will be large.)

But even more importantly, hitting Trump with "Bush lied" will poison the well for him in the future, keeping Carson, Bush, and Kasich voters from flowing to him as their candidates drop out. Plaster "Bush lied" all over Trump now and it will stick with him for the rest of the campaign as a piece of permanent signage—a warning that if you sign up with Trump, you're signing up for the Code Pink view of the world, too.

Read more here, here, and here.