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Published: 05.28.2007

Raasch: Congress goes home to sour, angry constituents
CHUCK RAASCH

WASHINGTON - If Sen. Lindsey Graham's experience is an indicator, members of Congress returning home for the Memorial Day recess are in for rude greetings.
Graham, a popular South Carolina Republican with a reputation for seeking bipartisan solutions, was booed this month at his own state convention for his role in putting together a compromise immigration reform bill.
"It got people upset," Graham said, in what may be the understatement of these political times.
Congress heads home with national polls showing Americans as sour as any time since Watergate, and with a confluence of two emotional and seemingly intractable issues dominating the debate: Iraq and immigration.
Liberals are angry with Democrats in Congress for being unable to stop the war in Iraq.
Conservatives are mad at President Bush and Republican allies for proposing an immigration plan that would allow millions of people here illegally a pathway to citizenship.
Add to that a prolonged presidential campaign, which already has spawned controversial votes and statements that will almost certainly play out throughout 2008, and you have all the ingredients for revolt.
A new poll released this month for The Hotline, a political Web site, showed only 18 percent of Americans felt the country was on the right track, and only 32 percent approved of Bush's job performance. Republican consultant Ed Rollins, who worked in the Nixon White House, said the negative feelings toward Republicans reminded him of the "closing days of Watergate."
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster not aligned with any presidential candidate, said he's seen similar sour numbers only three times in recent American history: after the first Gulf War, when economic woes toppled the senior George Bush; during the Iran hostage crisis of the late 1970s, which was also beset with economic worries and cost Jimmy Carter the White House in 1980; and during Watergate, which led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon.
But today's anger is on multiple fronts.
"I can't think of another time when there were two issues that so discombobulated the bases of the two parties," Ayres said.
He said his polling shows a "plurality" of Republicans in favor of "something close to what the president is talking about" on immigration reform.
But, he said, "The very conservative elements are very intense and very noisy. It's as though you are talking about taking guns away from gun owners."
Democrats, he said, "are just as split" over Iraq. "There are a great many Democrats who are worried about the consequences of (immediate) withdrawal," Ayres said. "They want to get out (of Iraq), but so do Republicans."
The anti-congressional fervor has been building.
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who helped forge the immigration compromise with liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said he has "learned some new words from some of my constituents." Rep. James Saxton, R-N.J., said the first 102 calls he received about the immigration proposal were against it.
"If I was a Republican sitting on the Hill today and I saw these immigration numbers, I would not be willing to walk the plank for this White House," Rollins said. "As people get home in the next few weeks, they are going to find a lot of people very unhappy with this issue."
The Iraq debate has dominated Democratic presidential politics, culminating in Thursday's vote on war funding. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., were among 14 "no" votes on a new emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, votes that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called "the equivalent of waving a white flag to al Qaida."
Clinton and Obama had been under pressure from rival John Edwards, who voted to authorize the Iraq war but has become a leading critic of it, as well as a vocal and active anti-war base, led by the liberal organization MoveOn.org. As it became apparent this week that Democrats did not have the votes to attach withdrawal deadlines to any war-funding bill, the criticism from the left intensified, with some bloggers and commentators bitterly criticizing the Democratic majority in Congress for failing to deliver on what critics claim was an anti-war mandate in the November elections.
Among the harshest condemnations of Democrats on the war came from liberal MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann, who said "the Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans." He called continued funding of the "war of lies" a "shameful and bipartisan betrayal."

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/opinion/52853.php