Pork projects, scandals doomed GOP’s majority in Congress, say White House officials

Rising from his chair to massage his leg, aching from deep vein thrombosis, Cheney did not try to sugarcoat the reasons for the GOP’s defeat.

“You had this perception, I think, among some of our Republican supporters that the Congress had gotten profligate in spending and had lost its way,” he said.

For example, congressional Republicans tried to allocate $320 million for a bridge to an Alaskan island with a population of 50. The “bridge to nowhere” came to symbolize a Republican Party that was “untethered from its roots in fiscal conservatism,” said White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.

Although Bush often rails against earmarks, Bolten defended them. “On an issue like earmarks, the truth of the matter is that, as a budget matter, they’re insignificant,” he told The Examiner in his West Wing office. “If you total up all of the earmarks in the entire budget, you know, it’s a percent or so of entire spending. And most earmarks are actually perfectly OK. In other words, they’re not wasteful spending; they’re not the bridge to nowhere.

“And so as a budget matter, you’re not making a major policy mistake by winking at them,” he explained. “As a political matter, you may be. And you dispirit a lot of people who care most about the party’s roots. And you give them the misimpression that because you winked at the bridge to nowhere, you don’t care about spending.

“So it may be that in the end, historians may say that was an error. If it was, I think it was more of a political error than a substantive error.”

Bolten said skittish Republicans, especially in the House, believed they could save their seats in the 2006 election by bringing home pork-barrel spending to their districts. But in the process, they may have hurt their party nationally.

“The leadership was more interested in making sure that a member had a project or an earmark or something like that to take back home, which I think individually may be wise, but collectively may have constituted a major error,” he added. “We were supportive of the leadership. And I think we correctly valued our relationship with the leadership more highly than we did purity on any individual earmark.”

Ken Mehlman, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said excessive spending and a flurry of scandals combined to dissolve the glue that had held the GOP’s narrow majority together for years.

“Without reform, conservatism is a minority philosophy,” Mehlman said. “With reform, it can become a majority philosophy.

“Think about it: What separates Reagan and Goldwater is that Reagan is seen as a reformer and is therefore able to win lots of swing voters,” he added. “The reason that the Contract With America was such an important document was that it combined conservatism and reform.”

The GOP was also hurt badly by scandals ranging from a sex scandal involving Rep. Mark Foley of Florida to a media uproar over Sen. George Allen’s use of the word “macaca.” Although Allen’s narrow loss to challenger James Webb officially tipped full control of Congress to the Democrats, White House aides insist they do not hold a grudge against Allen for blowing his big lead.

“Our reputation is so much to the contrary that people find it hard to believe, but this is not an angry White House,” Bolten said. “And it comes from the president. He is not an angry guy. He’s an aggressive guy, but whatever is past is past. He doesn’t look back, he doesn’t point fingers.

“And we say that stuff and people think, ‘Oh yeah, you got your talking points and you drink the Kool-Aid.’ It’s actually true. He may think somebody’s just a total idiot who screwed up unbelievably badly, but he’s not really focused on it and he’s not even really going to take it out on that person.”

But plenty of congressional Republicans took it out on the White House for waiting until after the elections to announce Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. The anger was so widespread that it forced Bolten to abandon his post-election plans to travel with the president to Vietnam.

“I stayed behind to basically take incoming from Republicans. I had four or five lunches down in the mess and the Ward Room and basically just let people ventilate,” Bolten said. “I think some members were looking for something or somebody to blame and this sort of crystallized it. You know, ‘The White House just didn’t get it about how unpopular the war and Rumsfeld were. And then they let him go the day after the election. How could they do that?’ ”

Bolten added: “The first thing out of anyone’s mouth is, ‘What were you thinking? Why did you let Rumsfeld go the day after the election? If you had done this a month before the election, it would have helped me enormously.’

“It would have looked like the cheesiest political maneuver on the planet and would have undermined something that the president cherishes, which is the confidence of the military, up and down the line. He cherishes that, and it’s something that I forget about often, but he always reminds us as he’s working on a speech draft. He says, ‘I’m talking to not just the American people here, but I’m talking to Iraqis, I’m talking to our enemies, and most importantly, I’m talking to our troops when I give a speech. If anybody’s listening to what I say about the war in Iraq, it’s got to be them.’ ”

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