Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill are bracing for losses of 25 House seats or more. But party operatives say Rove is predicting that, at worst, Republicans will lose only 8 to 10 seats—shy of the 15-seat threshold that would cede control to Democrats for the first time since the 1994 elections and probably hobble the balance of Bush’s second term.
In the Senate, Rove and associates believe, a Democratic victory would require the opposition to “run the table,” as one official put it, to pick up the necessary six seats—a prospect the White House seems to regard as nearly inconceivable.
The Mark Foley page scandal and its fallout have many Republicans panicked, but Rove professes to be taking it in stride. “The data we are seeing from individual races and the national polls would tend to indicate that people can divorce Foley’s personal action from the party,” he said in a brief interview Thursday.
The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities, in part to squelch any loss of nerve among his legions. Come January, he said last week, “We’ll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate.”
The question is whether this is a case of justified confidence—based on Bush’s and Rove’s electoral record and knowledge of the money, technology and other assets at their command—or of self-delusion. Even many Republicans suspect the latter. Three GOP strategists with close ties to the White House flatly predicted the loss of the House, though they would not do so on the record for fear of offending senior Bush aides.
We’ll find out if Bush and Rove are right - and if Rove lives up to his reputation as a political genius - come November 7th, but I’ve been wondering to myself if all this political doom and gloom for Republicans isn’t just a bunch of hype.
Certainly Republicans are in trouble, and I fully expect that they’ll lose some seats in this election, but is it going to be as bad as the media makes out? I doubt it.
The media loves to hype things. They take a story with a grain of truth in it and, for the sake of sensational eye-grabbing headlines, blow it completely out of proportion. Remember the coverage of hurricane Katrina? It was undoubtedly true that millions of people had been displaced from their homes. It was also true that there was some violence and looting taking place, yet the way the media presented the story to the public one would have thought that New Orleans was a war zone with thousands getting gun downed in the streets and gang rapes taking place in the Superdome. Not much of that turned out to be true, but that didn’t matter much to the journalists covering the story. Having gotten their sensational headlines out of the situation, they simply shrugged their shoulders and moved onto the next story.
I think the same may be true of the media’s election coverage. I think they’ve taken something that has a grain of truth in it - the idea that Republicans are going to lose some seats in November - and extrapolated from that a complete GOP implosion that will put Democrats back in charge of both houses of Congress. A lot of people are buying into that extrapolation because, being a cynical society, we always like to believe the worst. And that cynicism will probably cause a lot of voters to either switch their allegiance or stay home on election day making the media’s hype somewhat self-fulfilling, but when the votes are counted up I’d be very surprised if the results were anywhere near as bad as what we’re being led to believe they will be.