Saddam Verdict Surprise?

Avoiding the President

Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei write in today's Washington Post: "In another sign of how Bush's market value has fallen, Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist said yesterday that he would skip the president's rally in Pensacola this morning. The White House put the Florida stop on Bush's election-eve schedule specifically to promote Crist, only to be embarrassed by his last-minute defection. That will make the most prominent Florida politician appearing at the event Senate candidate Rep. Katherine Harris, who appears headed for a crushing defeat and whom the Bush family has tried to avoid this fall."

End of an Era

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David E. Sanger write in the New York Times: "A sense of poignancy has set in. Jetting about the country on Air Force One, Mr. Bush has been playing hearts and gin rummy with his longtime political adviser and confidant, Karl Rove; Mr. Rove usually wins. At each stop, the men share memories of where they were two years ago, or four, reminding themselves of Texas and happier campaigns gone by.

"'Any time we're on the campaign plane, it's reminiscent of past elections,' [counselor Dan] Bartlett said, recounting the card games. But he insisted that Mr. Bush was looking ahead, not back: 'There's no cruise control into '08 for this president. He believes that two years is a long time and a lot could get done.'"

Blood and Oil

Peter Baker writes in Sunday's Washington Post: "During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his aides sternly dismissed suggestions that the war was all about oil. 'Nonsense,' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared. 'This is not about that,' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

"Now, more than 3 1/2 years later, someone else is asserting that the war is about oil -- President Bush.

"As he barnstorms across the country campaigning for Republican candidates in Tuesday's elections, Bush has been citing oil as a reason to stay in Iraq. If the United States pulled its troops out prematurely and surrendered the country to insurgents, he warns audiences, it would effectively hand over Iraq's considerable petroleum reserves to terrorists who would use it as a weapon against other countries.

"'You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources,' he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). 'And then you can imagine them saying, "We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following." And the following would be along the lines of, well, "Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision." ' . . .

"Oil is not the only reason Bush offers for staying in Iraq, but his comments on the stump represent another striking evolution of his argument on behalf of the war."

Here's Bush in Missouri on Friday: "Imagine the radicals and extremists taking over a country, and they were able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel, whatever it would be, and saying, okay, we'll reduce the price, all you've got to do is surrender. All you've got to do is abandon your alliance with Israel, and we'll lower the price. All you've got to do is retreat. And couple that with a country which doesn't like us, with a nuclear weapon, and a generation of Americans will say, what happened to them in 2006? How come they couldn't see the impending danger? What was it that clouded their vision?"

Among other things, however, Bush is dramatically exaggerating the impact of Iraq's oil production on world markets.

Writes Baker: "The world, in fact, has already seen what would happen if Iraqi oil were cut off entirely, as Bush suggests radicals might do. Iraq effectively stopped pumping oil altogether in the months immediately after the invasion. And yet the price of oil has never topped $80, much less come anywhere near the $300 or $400 a barrel Bush cited as a possible consequence of a radical Iraqi regime withholding the country's oil."

Gas Prices Watch

While it's unlikely that Bush's new oil rhetoric will gain much currency, Elizabeth Douglass of the Los Angeles Times observes that "a notable percentage of Americans believe that the recent plunge in gasoline prices has more to do with November voting than with the price of oil and other market forces, two recent polls found."