March 19, 2006

Washington

THE movement to impeach President George W Bush over the war on terror began with a few tatty bumper stickers on the back of battered old Volvos and slogans such as "Bush lied, people died" on far-left websites. But as Democrat hopes rise of gaining control of Congress this autumn, dreams of impeaching Bush are no longer confined to the political fringe.

A poll last week found that voters, by 50% to 37%, would prefer the Democrats to win control of Congress. If Bush’s opponents find themselves in a position of power, the temptation to humiliate him is likely to be irresistible.

A taste of the battle to come was provided last week by Senator Russ Feingold, a popular choice for the 2008 presidential nomination among Democrat anti-war activists. He proposed a motion of censure against Bush for authorising the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans suspected of links to terrorism without a court warrant.

Feingold gave notice that the party should stop "cowering" before Bush on national security issues. "If there’s any Democrat out there who can’t say the president has no right to make up his own laws, I don’t know if that Democrat really is the right (presidential) candidate," he said.

Plenty of his Senate colleagues ducked for cover, fearful of alienating either party activists or swing voters. The eavesdropping issue is one of the few hot-button topics where Bush has public support. One leading supporter of Hillary Clinton acknowledged ruefully: "It’s hard to beat the argument, 'If Al-Qaeda is on the line, we want to be listening’."

Clinton, the party’s presidential frontrunner, hid last week from reporters who wanted to question her on the censure motion while she was attending a Democrat lunch at the Senate. Most Democrats would rather keep their options open on impeachment than pronounce one way or another.

Republicans are practically begging them to "bring it on" in the hope that the chatter will tar their opponents as loony leftists who care nothing for national security. "This is such a gift," said Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio chat show host.

For demoralised conservatives, the issue is a call to arms for the mid-term congressional elections. "Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House right now," Paul Weyrich, a top conservative organiser, warned in an e-mail newsletter to supporters.

"With impeachment on the horizon maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all," Weyrich wrote.

If few senior Democrats are calling publicly for Bush to be placed in the dock, plenty are flirting with the idea. One of them is Al Gore, the defeated 2000 presidential candidate, who is increasingly talked up as a serious anti-war contender at the next election.

Gore said recently that Bush’s "unlawful" eavesdropping was part of a larger pattern of "seeming indifference" to the American constitution, which could well be an impeachable offence.

John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee, was overheard in an Irish bar on Capitol Hill talking about how satisfying it would be to impeach Bush if Congress went Democrat. He was just having a laugh, his spokeswoman rushed to explain: "Impeachment jokes in Washington are as old as Donald Rumsfeld."

But then she turned serious: "How are the same Republicans, who tried to impeach a president over whether he misled a nation about an affair, going to pretend it does not matter if the administration intentionally misled the country into war?"

The urge to impeach is partly payback for the Bill Clinton era when Republicans dragged the president through the mud over his dalliance with the intern Monica Lewinksy.

Others are convinced there is a good case against Bush based on the 2002 Downing Street memo — revealed by The Sunday Times — in which Richard Dearlove, then head of M16, said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein. Congressman John Conyers, the senior Democrat who took part in Watergate proceedings against President Richard Nixon in 1974, has called for a committee of inquiry into the grounds for impeachment.

AfterDowningStreet.org, a web-based group, commissioned a poll last autumn showing that by 50% to 44% Americans would like Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he were found to have lied about the case for war. None of this would have much impact were it not for Bush’s dire polling figures and grave doubts about the president’s competence.

With the Senate voting last week to increase the national debt to $9 trillion, it is not only Democrats who are wondering about Bush’s ability to govern. Republicans, anxious about losing the November mid-term elections, have been calling for a cabinet reshuffle to replace some of the tired figures in Bush’s administration. The war in Iraq is increasingly regarded as a vote loser for the party. Last week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll put the president’s approval rating at 37%.

By 50% to 28% voters said they believed that the war had weakened America’s standing in the world and by 44% to 18% they believed that it had increased the threat from Iran. By 50% to 35% they said they would vote for a congressional candidate who favoured withdrawing troops from Iraq in a year.

A compilation of state-wide polls has further bad news for Bush. In mid-America’s Republican heartlands the president is almost as unpopular as he is nationally.

In Texas, his own back yard, only 41% approve of his performance. "People in Texas like George Bush and he was a popular governor," said Wayne Slater, chief political correspondent of the Dallas Morning News. "But even his biggest supporters are losing confidence in him. They say they don’t understand what Bush is doing."

Many conservatives are wondering why Karen Hughes, Bush’s top aide from his home state in two victorious elections, is wandering around the Middle East as a goodwill diplomat on a futile mission to persuade Muslims that America has got their best interests at heart, when she is needed to bolster the president at home.

The only person more unpopular than Bush right now is Dick Cheney, the vice-president, who bottomed out at 18% in a recent poll. Bush joked at a Washington dinner last week: "When Dick first heard that my approval rating was 38% he said, 'What’s your secret?’ "

Some seasoned Democrat counsellors are warning party activists that voters are rarely interested in vengeful politics. In the 1998 mid-term elections, for example, the Republicans’ often mean-spirited efforts to impeach Clinton cost them seats that they had been expected to win.

Joe Lockhart, Clinton’s White House spokesman during the Lewinsky scandal, said: "If you are looking for a message to take back to the House and the Senate or White House, there are better ways to go about it."

After the humiliating experience of her husband’s battle, Hillary Clinton almost certainly feels the same way. The most telling sign of the Democrats’ determination to get Bush is that she would rather hide than say it.