Degrees of separation
GOP presidential candidates distance themselves from Bush
By CRAIG GILBERT
cgilbert@journalsentinel.com
Posted: April 15, 2007

Washington, D.C. - Interviewed two weeks ago on ABC, '08 hopeful Tommy Thompson was asked how a "President Thompson" might differ from a "President Bush."

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Buy a link here"Oh, tremendously," Thompson replied, eager to distance himself from the president he served for four years as health secretary.

As they vie for their party's nomination, Republican candidates are grappling with the weight of an unpopular president. Although most are loath to criticize Bush too directly, they are far from embracing him either.

"It's quite a balancing act," said Stuart Rothenberg, a non-partisan election analyst in Washington, D.C.

"If you're the Republican candidate, you don't want to get into the position of explaining and defending the president," Rothenberg said. "In a strange way, the Republican candidates kind of want to treat the president as the elephant who's not in the room. . . . The problem is the media and the Democrats are going to keep saying, 'There's an elephant standing behind you.' "

One example of that occurred this month in Iowa, when GOP contender Mitt Romney held a news conference touting a new campaign ad in which he vowed to rein in federal spending in Washington.

"I know how to veto. I like vetoes!" proclaimed Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

That seemed an implicit rebuke of Bush, who has never vetoed a spending bill (to the dismay of many fiscal conservatives).

Despite the explicit anti-Washington tenor of his campaign, Romney refused to criticize Bush personally on the issue. Asked what responsibility Bush bears for federal spending, Romney declined to say.

"I can't begin to assess the responsibility for the fact that over the last couple of years, we've spent a good deal of money," he said.

Asked how he would govern differently from Bush, Romney demurred again.

"I'm not going to try and contrast myself with the leader of our party. He has his own style, his own approach, and he's a man of great character and courage, and I salute him," Romney said. "I have my own views about how I would manage (Congress)."

Political scientist Peverill Squire of the University of Iowa says Romney's reticence is understandable, given that Bush still commands the support of many GOP voters and given the value Squire says Republicans traditionally have placed on loyalty to their leaders.

"At the same time, (Bush) is a very unpopular president, and he's losing support even within his own party. And you have to be able to demonstrate, even to Republican voters, that you have something to offer other than four more years of Bush and Cheney," Squire said. "For the Republicans, this really is a delicate issue."

By and large, the GOP candidates have been supportive of Bush on the war, as are most rank-and-file Republicans. But many have distanced themselves from the president's policies on spending and immigration, and what some view as a kind of "big government" brand of Republicanism.

Talking to reporters this year, former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee said, "Frankly, this administration has not been friendly to the role and proper place of states, in this balance of federal-state relationship."

Huckabee said that Washington under Republican rule had encroached on the authority of states in numerous areas, citing Medicaid reform, Real ID (a recent federal mandate on driver's licenses), regulatory and tax policy, and what he called the "usurpation of the National Guard."

Huckabee said: "All of those issues are as if Alexander Hamilton crawled right out of the grave and came back to somehow change the whole idea of federalism, and that's been so long a Republican benchmark. . . . Many Republicans would love for us to go back to the idea that the federal government is not there to create an overly powerful centralized federal authority and loan out power to the states as it sees fit."

New direction wanted

Other dark horse candidates have criticized Bush explicitly over issues such as immigration, where the president's support for a new temporary worker program and a path to legal status for undocumented workers is unpopular with many in his party.

Former Wisconsin governor Thompson says he would offer a dramatically different approach on Iraq (decentralizing the country and asking the Iraqi Parliament to vote up or down on the U.S. presence).

Thompson spent four years in Bush's cabinet, where he was publicly loyal to the president but appeared to chafe at times under White House direction.

He was asked in a recent interview whether he thought GOP primary voters will look for a Republican candidate in the mold of Bush or something different.

"The vast majority is looking for a new direction for the Republican Party," he said. "They're very concerned about the deficit, very concerned about a lack of engagement on health care and very tired of the war."

The perceived front-runners - Romney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain - have been more cautious in their comments about the president. McCain's relationship with Bush is the most complicated, with a history of past clashes over myriad issues now overshadowed by McCain's impassioned and sometimes lonely support for the Iraq war.

But these Republicans are far less effusive in praising Bush than they were before his approval ratings tumbled. Often, the GOP contenders simply talk around the subject.

That was the case when five actual or potential candidates made private appearances in March in Palm Beach, Fla., before members and donors of the Club for Growth, a high-profile group dedicated to cutting taxes, spending and regulation.

"Bush's name didn't come up, except when someone asked Rudy (Giuliani) about judges," said David Keating, executive director of the organization, which has been highly critical of the administration over federal spending.

"That's not surprising. Politicians like to associate themselves with things that are popular," Keating said.

Something similar occurred a month earlier at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a huge gathering of activists and movement leaders in Washington, D.C., where candidate after candidate invoked the name of Ronald Reagan, with barely a mention of the current White House occupant.

Bush's role at convention

In a recent column, election analyst Rothenberg wondered how the party will incorporate Bush into its 2008 convention in the Twin Cities, should his popular standing remain low.

"Does anybody really believe that Republicans will be able to put together a convention that ignores the president of the United States?" Rothenberg said. "Can his presence do anything but aid a Democratic argument for change?"

Prominent social conservative Gary Bauer, who ran for president in 2000, says Bush has been a good president for social conservatives and still commands their support, especially on the war. But he suggests that record has been clouded by the expansion of federal spending on his watch.

"I don't think people are looking for a continuation of the Bush era," Bauer said of grass-roots conservatives. "I think they're looking for somebody that resembles more clearly what they remember the Reagan era to be."

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