Blowback: It’s like HARRIET MIERS ON STEROIDS (Clift-Newsweek)

[kpete]

Blowback


Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 3:01 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2006

Feb. 24, 2006 - He must have thought last week was bad fending off Dick Cheney’s quailgate. Who would have thought that this week Mr. War President would be preoccupied putting out a firestorm in the base of his party on national security. It is quite a moment.

The controversy over letting a company owned by an Arab government control the management of six American ports is one of those rare issues that put Bush at odds in an emotional and visceral way with his conservative base. It’s like Harriet Miers on steroids with right-wing talk radio aflame and grassroots activists radiating outrage.

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This is blowback for the way the Bush administration exploited Homeland Security in the ’02 midterm elections, Wittmann says. Democrats got morphed into Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in campaign ads for pushing labor protections for Homeland Security bureaucrats, which the Bushies characterized as putting special interests over national security interests. “That’s the way Democrats will use this in ’06,” says Wittmann. Any downside for Democrats? “This is a freebie,” he says. “It’s one of the rare moments where God smiles on Democrats.”

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Bush’s presidency is beginning to look Carteresque—except Jimmy Carter was at the end of his term in 1980, the year when everything went wrong for him. Bush has three years left in office. Somebody has to get him to retool. Maybe his father? This loyalty thing is getting old.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11546540/site/newsweek/

[Quakerfriend]

1. Very nice.

And,btw, 21 ports.