The White House is quietly expressing relief that the newly empowered Democratic Senate has failed its first major test — passage of a resolution criticizing President Bush’s Iraq policy.
But now that the resolution is moving to the House, where passage might be easier next week, administration officials are redoubling their efforts to avoid an embarrassing rebuke by opposition lawmakers.
Meanwhile, Bush aides are taking a measure of satisfaction from watching Senate Democrats lick their wounds after failing to pass a nonbinding resolution expressing disapproval of the president’s surge of 21,500 troops into Iraq.
“I think they got down the field a ways and obviously didn’t have a plan B and are in the process, I would imagine, of going back to the drawing board and figuring out what they want to do,” a senior administration official said of Senate Democrats.
The frustration was evident Wednesday in the words of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who lamented that Republicans derailed the resolution even though Americans “expect Congress to be an effective restraint on the president.”
“Senate Republicans are concerned with protecting the president from a rebuke when we all should be concerned with protecting the tens of thousands of American soldiers who are now scheduled to be dropped into the cauldron of civil war,” Kennedy said on the Senate floor.
The White House heaped praise on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Whip Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., for holding the Republican caucus together.
“That’s an important demonstration of cohesiveness and the ability of the Republican leadership there to advocate a point of view,” the administration official said.
Bush aides emphasized that although the administration welcomes all points of view on Iraq, it did not want Congress to send the wrong message to U.S. troops or insurgents by passing a resolution that conveyed ambivalence over the mission. So the White House worked behind the scenes, encouraging lawmakers to draft competing measures that would siphon off support.
“We definitely advocated the president’s views and the president’s beliefs,” one official said.
The White House said it plans to continue efforts with lawmakers in the House, where the resolution is expected to be debated next week.
