Separation Anxiety
The early glimmerings of presidential separation anxiety, 2008-style, were on display at an event here last week with Mitt Romney, the not-yet-announced but oh-so-obviously-running governor of Massachusetts. When it comes to President Bush, Romney seems to have chosen distance over embrace, clarity over subtlety.
Running to replace a retiring president of the same party inevitably entails a fine calibration of competing interests: embracing the departing administration vs. establishing independence; hewing to the policies of the incumbent vs. charting a different course; pleasing the loyal base vs. alienating the up-for-grabs voter.
When the retiring president is unpopular, achieving the proper political balance can be an even more precarious undertaking.
Speaking at a gathering sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor -- it was lunch, but Romney not only didn't eat a bite, he also didn't sit down, the better to address the crowded room -- the governor opened with a lengthy disquisition on his operating style.
He was relentlessly analytical, Romney kept saying; he liked -- nay, he demanded -- to be challenged by his aides: "I don't want to hear just one side of the argument." Forget the Harvard Business School CEO-style delegator; meet the Harvard Business School case-studier.
Though he blandly demurred when asked whether he was contrasting himself with Bush, the governor might as well have hung a sign over his head pointing to the White House several blocks away and reading, "I'm Not Like Him." No one would have slam-dunked me on weapons of mass destruction.
Likewise, on matters of substance -- Iraq, the Medicare prescription drug bill -- Romney wasn't shy about distinguishing himself from Bush. Indeed, he edged about as close as he could to saying that the administration had messed up and that President Romney would have done better.
So far in the run-up to the 2008 campaign, the chatter about how to separate the candidate from the president has focused on the Democratic side: How will Hillary Clinton, if she runs, remove herself from, or wrap herself in, the aura of Bill?
But as Romney's comments show, it will be at least as fascinating to watch Republican candidates dancing with Bush -- clasped uneasily at arm's length, wary about getting too close but also careful not to let go entirely. Because while his poll numbers may be dismal overall, Bush retains, by an overwhelming margin, the loyalty of conservative Republicans -- that is, the Republicans who turn out in primaries.
Eight years ago the twin challenges faced by Vice President Al Gore were to reap the benefits of Clintonism without being loaded down with Clinton's baggage and to establish his autonomy from an administration in which he had served for eight years.
In the 2008 election, none of the not-yet-candidates faces the conundrum of a sitting vice president required to finesse his relationship with the incumbent. Yet Republicans in 2008 have to grapple with the fact of a similarly polarizing -- but far less popular -- president of their own party. They confront a restless electorate, even to some extent a restless base -- one that still supports Bush but that has been holding its nose over some Bush policies (the Medicare drug bill, deficit spending) and has been waiting to exhale.
The test for these candidates will be to sell themselves as a sort of new, improved version of the GOP brand -- without alienating those who are satisfied with the current model. Voters, or so the candidates hope, may not be prepared to try an entirely new type of laundry detergent, but they do seem ready for something more than a little different.
And so, there was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, on NBC's "Meet the Press" last weekend -- looking like he was counting the days until he could stop being shackled to the president and going so far as to say that, in hindsight, Bush should have put more troops on the ground in Iraq at the outset. Virginia Sen. George Allen distanced himself from the president over Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. Of all the 2008 possibilities, Arizona Sen. John McCain (R-Iconoclast) may have the most latitude when it comes to Bush: He can run on Being John McCain.
It's possible that Bush's political woes will evaporate, or at least lessen, as the presidential election gets closer. How Republican presidential candidates will position themselves vis-à-vis the president will depend in large part on the party's performance this November and on things such as the state of the economy, the course of the war, a possible terrorist strike.
For now, though, the closest analogue to 2008 could be a half-century ago, when another unpopular president waging a controversial war was leaving the White House without a vice president running to succeed him. Historian David McCullough writes in his biography of Harry Truman about how the Democratic nominee in 1952, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, was "frantic to distance himself from Truman."
So far, at least, the 2008 candidates aren't showing anything like that kind of alarm. But they're clearly starting to calculate the optimal degrees of separation from the president they hope to succeed.
