Staying on Message -- Nixon's Message

Let's give credit where credit is due: Nobody knows how to take the worst political hand imaginable -- responsibility for a failing war -- and turn it to their own advantage like the Republicans. That was the defining political accomplishment of Richard Nixon in Vietnam. It may yet be the defining political achievement of George W. Bush in Iraq.

Nixon, of course, had an easier time of it. When he took office in 1969, he inherited a war that his Democratic predecessors had made and that had long since descended into a blood-drenched, stalemated disaster. He could have opted to end the war early in his term, particularly since neither he nor his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed it was winnable. But by continuing the conflict, and even expanding it into Cambodia, he enraged the 40 percent of the nation that wanted us out of Vietnam. Millions of demonstrators took to the streets; some of the student movement embraced a wacky, self-marginalizing anti-Americanism; and mainstream Democrats grew steadily more antiwar.

And by nurturing such deep divisions in the body politic, Nixon created the very kind of political landscape on which he was a master at maneuvering. Just 10 months into his presidency, Nixon was championing what he termed the "silent majority" of his countrymen against the protesting hordes. Democrats railed against the war in Vietnam; Nixon railed against the demonstrators and Democrats, whom he gleefully conflated, at home. It was an asymmetric conflict, and Nixon won it going away, defeating George McGovern in 1972 by more than 20 percentage points.

Today Republicans in general and Karl Rove in particular have resurrected the Nixon game plan. They are not mounting a point-by-point defense of the administration's plan for Iraq, not least because the administration doesn't really have a plan for Iraq. When Senate Democrats brought two resolutions to the floor last week, each calling for a change in our policy, the Republicans defeated them both, but they pointedly failed to introduce a resolution of their own affirming the administration's conduct of the war. That, they understood, would have been a loser in the court of public opinion. Instead, they walked a tightrope: not really defending the war per se but attacking the Democrats for seeking to end it. This was Nixonism of the highest order.

But Bush Republicans face a tougher challenge than their Nixonian forebears. There aren't really demonstrators in the streets. No one is being rude or disorderly. Most congressional Democrats advocate nothing more than a phased redeployment of our troops, though polling shows the public is split on the more radical alternative of setting a hard deadline for withdrawal.

In the face of such raging moderation, the Republicans have nonetheless opened a two-pronged attack on the Democrats. First, they argue, the Dems are defeatists, calling for a withdrawal of our forces that would dishonor the men and women in the military who've given their lives in the course of the war. But the selectivity with which Republicans invoke this equation of withdrawal with dishonor undermines the equation altogether. After all, who among them argues that Ronald Reagan's withdrawal of our forces from Lebanon, or Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam, disgraced our dead?

The more serious, and innovative, Republican claim isn't that Democrats are defeatists, however; it's that the Democrats are ditherers. "I believe [the Democrats'] real challenge is that they have no common unified position on Iraq as a party," Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole said recently. "Whether we are right or wrong on our side of the aisle, we do have a common position."

Repeatedly, Republicans have accused the Democrats of having what the president termed an "interesting internal debate" on the war. The implication is that the Democrats are all talk (or, worse, all thought) but no action, and in a post-Sept. 11 world, what really matters is resolve. That the president's war of choice has created a disaster in Iraq so profound that no course of action is likely to result in a safe, livable nation, then, may perversely work in the president's favor. Of course, the Democrats are conflicted about what to do in Iraq. They think about it (at least, some of them do) and can't totally agree on how best to mitigate the catastrophe.

The Democrats think too much, say the Republicans; such men are dangerous. Vote for us; we're dumb but tough. This may not be a surefire prescription for electoral success, but given the hole the Republicans have dug themselves into, I think Nixon would be proud.

meyersonh@washpost.com