Bush is winning most battles

Mort Kondracke:

President Bush’s approval ratings are still in the low 30s, but White House aides insist that he’s now on policy offense across the board.

From Iraq to SCHIP to the budget, energy policy, trade, terrorist surveillance, the mortgage crisis and even prescription drug costs and student test scores, top Bush aides say that events are turning in his direction — and that they are trying to get the word out more effectively.

Indeed, there is some truth in what they say. For sure, developments in Iraq have taken a distinctly favorable turn, opening up the possibility that Bush could claim success for his policies by the end of his term.

Legislatively, Democrats have all but declared defeat in their effort to stop the war. At a luncheon with reporters last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted that “when we said we would end the war, we never said that we had the veto pen or the signature pen. ... I don’t disagree with the public evaluation that we have not done well in ending this war.”

With Republicans sticking by him, Bush has won the running room to pursue his policies at least until next March — and probably through 2008.

On the ground, Gen. David Petraeus’ “surge” strategy seems to be working, with Sunni Arabs decisively turning against al-Qaida and Shiites beginning to reject the Mahdi Army militia of Muktada al-Sadr.

U.S. casualty levels are down to their lowest levels since 2003, Iraqi security force deaths are at their lowest level ever, and civilian deaths in September were down 77 percent below the level of last year.

“Democrats are stuck in the negative” on the war, a White House aide said in a session with columnists last week. “They are without a positive narrative,” although he said — this was last Friday — that the media had yet to catch up with favorable developments.

But the administration’s “good news is no news” problem eased significantly this week when two of Bush’s harshest journalistic critics — Tom Ricks and Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post — wrote a front-page story headlined, “Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled.”

That Democrats are still “stuck in the negative” was demonstrated by the fact that their frontrunning presidential candidate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), is still quoting the ill-timed charge of Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, a former U.S. commander in Iraq, that the war is an “unending nightmare.”

If the war proves not to be an unending nightmare, after all, it would certainly be a boon for Bush — and would raise the question of whether Democrats can ever be relied upon to pursue a foreign policy endeavor if the going gets difficult.

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The fact is that the Democrats can not be trusted with national security because too many of them want us to lose the war. Too many of them have the absolutely nutty idea that President Bush was somehow responsible for the 9-11 attacks despite bin Laden's confession. The Democrats have managed to inject an unreality into the debate on the war and the Bush Presidency that is going to be difficult to overcome, but it is important to keep peppering the public with the truth. That is the only way to demonstrate how misguided the Democrats are and also demonstrate the evils of liberalism.