Rally 'round the flagging leader

In a turn of events bound to make liberals and Wisconsinites alike feel not just dirty but positively filthy, conservatives have apparently begun jumping all over Russ Feingold's proposal to censure President Bush for unwarranted NSA wiretapping, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal editorial page all singing his praises for supposedly playing right into their "agenda." As reported by the New York Times:

With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.

"Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all."

OK, first of all, if Republicans are so afraid the president's policies have ruined all the traditional appeals to conservative voters, why would they then try to mobilize voters to protect that very same president, whose latest approval rating, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup, is 36 percent? (Just for contrast, 38 percent of respondents said they think the war in Iraq is going well.)

Why not distance themselves from Bush's policies and talk about returning to fiscal conservativism and whatnot? (But how cool is the news released today that there's $30,000 worth of national debt for each man, woman and child in this country? I would love to see a breakdown of who actually got most of the benefits from all that spending.)

Besides, the censuring party doesn't emerge particularly refreshed when the public thinks they're in the wrong. Polls found support for impeaching President Clinton to be in the 30s as it was happening. Post-impeachment, Clinton's approval rating hit its career high of 73 percent, and the fraction of Americans reporting a favorable view of the Republican Party dropped to less than a third, according to CNN.

A Zogby International poll conducted in January found that 52 percent of Americans (including 23 percent of Republicans) surveyed agreed that "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment."

Indeed, regardless of all the moralizing and rationalizing the anti-Clinton contingent still indulges in, the fact remains lying about sex with a chubby intern remains decidedly lower on most people's hierarchies of censure-worthy executive offenses than breaking domestic spying laws (or, hell, taking the country wrongly to war).

If the Republicans really think they can win elections by rallying around Dubya and painting Democrats as unpatriotic for failing to do likewise, I certainly hope it comes back to bite them. (The same goes for any Democrats who still think post-2004 that they can go with the "a vote for any of us is a vote against Bush, so vote for us" strategy.)

But I suppose, either way, it's much more difficult to try and clean up your president's mess than either scold him for making it or defend his right to make it worse.